[6] Plumbing, electrical fixtures, and heating systems were options that could be ordered at additional cost; they were many families' first steps to modern HVAC systems, kitchens, and bathrooms. Call me a cynic, but I often wonder why kit houses were not stolen. Chabot notes that Sears mail-order homes sold before 1916 did not use precut lumber that was stamped with numbers to guide construction. Cities with large numbers of documented Sears Modern Homes include: The Carlinville, Illinois, concentration consists of houses bought in bulk by the Standard Oil Company in 1918 to house its mineworkers at a total cost of about US $1 million. Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes, We started looking around La Porte, Indiana, in 2015. small-town America, 1920! How did Sears Modern Homes come to be? Because the various kit home companies often copied plan elements or designs from each other, there are a number of catalog and kit models from different manufacturers that look similar or identical to models offered by Sears. to you on Flickr or Pinterest. To see a variety of models similar to the Mitchell, that were offered during the kit-house era, see this article. website, which was published from Oct 2013 to Nov 2014. In fact, the No. Complete List of Sears Homes | Aurora, IL So this blog has been radio silent for a while now! 171 examples in La Porte. Search. Precut lumber was cut to the appropriate lengths and angles based on where the framing timber would be used in the house. Species: 4,512; Preserves: 238; Sightings: 95,174 . They raised four kids in that house, Steel wrote. The nine easy signs follow: 1) Look for stamped lumber in the basement or attic. Its not like nowadays where you move, wait for your stuff to arrive, and if youre a work-at-home like me, youre pretty much unable to work while you wait for a technician to ensure you have Internet access. From 1931-1942 Sears sold about 5,000 houses altogether. [15] 1908 was the only year the schoolhouse appeared in the catalog. , there were about 88.7 million people living in the United States. The HMS data portal is a collection of models, simulations and synthetic observations of the Sun. For more information on who we are, and what we do, visit our website: All photos in these blog posts are the property of the author of this blog- link to this blog. If my house is not a kit, where did it come from? Damn, it was like. I see you posted about the origins of Hollywood three years ago! Im looking at this cute little. 175, 1911/12 catalog image for the Sears Modern Home No. Boxabl is selling shipping container homes for about $50,000 a pop and Amazon is also selling prefab tiny houses at a variety of sizes and price points. Telephone 847-697-4551. www.kithouse.org. Your comment will appear after it has been previewed and approved by the blog author. Or, perhaps we have background information about it to share with you!Judith. The new owner was a Sears House fan - even produced a short doc film about the house and how she updated it. , such as stamped lumber in the basement or attic, shipping labels on the baseboards and other millwork, or even looking up your deed and records pertaining to the actual home purchase. Square . [16], There was no single architect for the Sears designs. Architecturally, I'm really surprised by the two versions of the Cedars floor plan -- they are completely different, though only two feet were added to make the larger one. We saw that on numerous Rossville/No. If those were the top sellers, no model could catch the Argyle at that rate. of "Where are the Sears Houses?" Checklist Search provides a simple and fast way to generate a pre-formatted checklist suitable for printing. [14], In addition to houses, the 1908 Sears catalog offered a kit schoolhouse with the model name "Schoolhouse No. Sears House Seeker At one point, I realized that I needed to organize a list of online catalog resources, so I put together this blog post, which has links to catalogs not only from Daily Bungalow and AntiqueHome, but to the many catalogs uploaded on another key resource, Archive.org (have you donated lately?). Their blueprints were based on what was popular at the time and while they werent the first or only company to do mail-order houses, theyre among the most memorable because you could buy damn near anything in their 500+ page catalogs. This Sears mail-order kit home in McCandless is owned by Normajean Moser. national database of sears homes. presentation, nows your chance! But before all this, having to get your own home built was more common instead of getting on a waitlist for a HUD-subsidized tract home or buying one secondhand from the current occupant. [34], Like the Standard Addition in Carlinville, neighborhoods of Sears houses still hold a sense of identity and community. Goodwall sheet plaster was an early drywall-like product offered by Sears and may be an indication of a Sears Modern Home. Without authentication, however, we can't be 100% certain that this house was ordered from Sears, as numerous kit and non-kit companies offered a very similar model, and these kinds of stories that are passed down over time, often turn out to be mistaken (with the house actually being a model from a different kit company, or simply resembling a model offered by Sears). Not all Sears houses were mortgaged through Sears, but many were, so it's a great help for us to be able to access those records. 1232 / No. Sears's use of "balloon style" framing systems did not require a team of skilled carpenters, as did previous methods. We've found examples from the Wardway, Gordon-Van Tine, Harris Homes, and Ray H. Bennett companies. Ive visited New Orleans several times and love the style of the buildings there. Run by experienced researcher Cindy Catanzaro (with a little help from yours truly). homes for rent in laplace 70068. national database of sears homes. Its as sturdy as a house as Ive ever seen. 159. national database of sears homes - dowdcreative.com It's highly improbable that any model could hit the 1,700 mark. Sears has opened the doors to its vast archival collection and invited the public to peek inside. Natural Resources DataBase - NRDB Here are a few: Andrew just today noticed this brick house with the Sears curlicue decorative iron strapping (only offered by Sears, and the only style of iron strapping ever offered by Sears). [38][39], One well-known replica of a Sears house is at the "Farm at Prophetstown" museum in Battle Ground, Indiana, which features a replica of a Hillrose model. Related: Floating Chairs and Texas McMansions | McMansions vs Really Big Houses | Strange Mansion in Carmel, Indiana | What is a Mansion. Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940, though sales through local sales offices continued into 1942. Dover, Chateau, and Lexington models are particularly plentiful there! When we find a mortgage record, we're just given a buyer's name, and a legal description of a property. Park, MD. According to Betcone, the two models that were the top sellers for Sears in 1930 totaled just over 100 houses a year. Sears is estimated to have sold about 70,000 of their home building kits from 1908-1940 and its currently estimated that. Andrew Mutch ran across that same article in the American Lumberman, and posted in our group, asking if anyone was interested in looking for some of the old models that might be around. Newport Beach home dangling on edge after cliff collapses Chabot can help people identify if their home was built from a Sears kit if they provide her with an address of the property through the House Seekers website, which also has links to catalogs produced by the company and other sellers. Images are available Sears Houses In the U.S. We found and listed about three houses, I think but didn't really focus on La Porte much more than that day in 2015. In 1908, Sears issued its first specialty catalog for houses, Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans, featuring 44 house styles ranging in price from US $360$2,890. But Matthew has a way of pulling everything together and spitting out a coherent comparative analysis with visuals that helps us see what we hadn't noticed previously. , something that piqued my interest was the idea that you could buy literal houses from the catalog. 1227 Disston St, Oxford Circle neighborhood of Philadelphia. The two-story schoolhouse was priced at $11,500 and its design included six classrooms, a library, an auditorium, and a superintendent's office. Were most Sears Houses built by the owners? Sears also offered a plasterboard product similar to modern drywall as an alternative to the plaster and lath wall-building techniques which required skilled carpenters and plasterers. . This phrase is trademarked and cannot be used without permission of Ricky Bobby, Inc. I think that one of our researchers, Lara Solonickne. 168/Matoka, 301 Weller Avenue, La Porte, Indiana probable Sears Modern Home No. Historic house: Built in 1911, this Sears home sits on a large, corner lot in a historic district, surrounded by antebellum homes. One of the biggest questions that researchers have been wanting to answer is: What is the Top-Selling Sears House of All Time? Shipped by railroad boxcar, and then usually trucked to a home site, the average Sears Modern Home kit had about 25 tons of materials, with more than 30,000 parts. Through those two resources, we can see not only kit-house catalogs, but also lumber-yard plan books, which offered house plans to those who were building their homes, in the 19-teens through 1930s, in the traditional method, of hiring a contractor, and buying the building resources locally. built in New Jersey could look just like the same one ordered in Texas and built there, but it wasnt designed to look exactly like the other homes on the block. BMO Celebrates Kickoff of the 2023 Soccer Season at 'BMO Stadium' in Sure, your Wabash or Verona model built in New Jersey could look just like the same one ordered in Texas and built there, but it wasnt designed to look exactly like the other homes on the block. Rosemary Thornton They werent all the 3-bedroom Craftsman ranch style you see throughout Los Angeles or the compact Levittowners in Pennsylvania and Long Island to the east: the Atlanta and Chateau models were probably the great-grandaddy of the modern McMansion, with the Malden model being its odd little cousin that sits in the potato salad at the family reunion, what with the odd arrangement of dormer windows although they arent fake. We are a team of about 10 researchers who work together to hunt around the U.S. for Sears kit houses built during the era of the Sears Modern Homes program (1908-1942). All these years later it is still a fortress.. Images are available In the early years, the models were identified with numbers. We just can't say, because we can't access those records. As sales grew, Sears expanded its production, shipping, and sales offices to locations across the U.S. To provide the materials needed for the Modern Homes division, Sears operated a lumber mill in Cairo, Illinois. Between 1908 and 1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold nearly 75,000 kit homes through its Modern Homes program, which featured 447 styles of houses, ranging from large multistory dwellings to tiny summer cottages with an optional outhouse. took off, many builders started offering everything from ready-made prehab homes to foundations and blueprints. Car culture hadnt yet arrived, but trains and trolleys began extending to these greener areas that were still pretty empty so you could visit or work in the city. The Rossville/No. Honor Bilt homes used the best quality materials that Sears could source and they were designed with what was then state of the art heating, plumbing, and electricity. Although it is sometimes claimed that no Sears kit homes were built after 1940, Sears continued to offer pre-cut kit homes through 1941 and into early 1942. Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line's 34-year history. Sears is estimated to have sold about 70,000 of their home building kits from 1908-1940 and it's currently estimated that about 70% of the original Sears homes built from kits are still standing today. Action in the Community Through Service Homeless Shelter. Also, homes in southern Ohio may have financing documents through the "Norwood Sash and Door Company" of Norwood, Ohio. According to Betcone, the two models that were the top sellers for Sears in 1930 totaled just over 100 houses a year. 2) Look for shipping labels. After all, future generations became more transient out of circumstance or in light of the digital nomad movement and taking advantage of technology in general, more mobile by choice. However, these stamps were not used on lumber shipped before 1916, when Sears first started offering pre-cut lumber. Whitehouse. In it, they included excerpts from an interview with David S. Betcone, who was the chief architect for Sears at the time. This is just the top of the blog page you'll find dozens of links to online catalogs here, a link to the excellent Pinterest resource made for us by Sears-house owner Dale Haynes, and a list of hard-copy book resources that are both interesting and informative. excited about this find and I really hope it is one: a Sears No. They came in all sizes and price points before buying a ready-made house or building kit of your choosing became relegated to the tiny house movement if you dont have the resources to buy a plot of land and build from there. In this case, the problem was that we couldn't see the left side of these models, just by looking at the catalog and the floor plans. 3 in U.S. with, at today's count, 1,963 Sears homes. 159 examples that have a closed pediment in the gable (and a porch style difference). houses that share a name also share either a number, a floor plan or had Photo from Realtor site. She said she also didnt know it was a mail-order house when she bought it 14 years ago. 171 often has a full front porch that ends up extending all the way to the left side of the house. national database of sears homes. In areas where the land is already mostly developed and zoned, its not that simple. The next housing boom came after World War II so that veterans could have affordable housing for their families and suburbs could accommodate the massive amount of white flight taking place.