The other day I was cruising some of those sites plugging tiny houses and the occasional blog whose proprietor daydreamed wistfully of chucking all the junk and living in one of them. At some point in the course of this junket through the Internet—I don’t remember how—I stumbled upon this amazing site in the archives of Sears. Check it out, especially the voluminous collections of photos and floor plans.
As it develops, between 1908 and the start of World War II, Sears marketed houses built from kits. You could order up the plans and precut materials, and what you got was everything you needed to put a home together, right down to the nails, delivered to your site by freight train. Apparently it wasn’t hard to put one of the things together—a single skilled carpenter could do it.
These packages were made possible by the invention of drywall, which took the place of the much more work-intensive (and beautiful…) lath-and-plaster system, and enhanced by the invention of asphalt shingles, cheap to manufacture, easy to install, and fireproof. The prices today look astonishing. The Arlington (a.k.a. Modern Home No. 145), an elegant two-story model with indoor plumbing, cost $1,294 to $2,906.
Quite a few of the houses were bungalows. Meditating on these charming little structures, it occurred to me that some of them look suspiciously like my great-grandmother’s house in Berkeley. Could it be…?
Her house was built in 1922. Nothing like it appears in the 1921–1926 set, nor in the 1927–1932 collection. But in the last group of plans, 1933–1949, lo! What should appear but the Collingwood:
The exterior didn’t look at all like that. There was no dormer, the steps leading to the front door were different, and where the front porch is, my great-grandmother’s house had a small enclosed entry hall. But the floor plan is very similar, almost the same except for a couple of details:
The railroad-car layout is identical: the two bedrooms and bathroom stacked one behind the other on the right side of the house, and the living room opening through an archway into the dining room, which sat adjacent to the kitchen with its little eating nook at the far end and the back stoop off a little service porch. If the front porch were enclosed, the fireplace on the front wall instead of the side wall, and the living room and kitchen extended out as far as the “bay” in the dining room, it would the the same, identical floor plan!
The striking thing is how small this house is: only about 890 square feet. Some were much smaller; the Hathaway, for example, looks to have been about 410 square feet, when you add both floors together.
According to Zillow, my great-grandmother’s house, still standing on Hopkins Street in Berkeley and now valued at $733,500(!), has 1,265 square feet under roof. An average double-wide trailer is 1,700 square feet.
The house never seemed small to us: in fact, we regarded it as a normal sized home. My parents, in all their 38 years of wedded bliss, never lived in a house that had more than two bedrooms. People lived in larger houses, of course. But they were for larger families, people who had four, five, six kids. When my father moved them to a two-bedroom, two-bath house in Sun City, I recall my mother wondering why anyone would want a second bathroom to have to clean.
Today’s voguish “tiny” houses would have been cramped, even back in the day when people occupied lots less space. Tumbleweed is mounting 65- to 140-square-foot “tiny houses” on trailers. I couldn’t live in a 140-square-foot shed. But I would find many of the Sears floor plans quite comfortable. For one or two people, the Collingwood could certainly fill the bill.
Given the growing enthusiasm for small dwellings with small footprints, wouldn’t you think someone at Sears would think of reviving these kit houses?