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?
These are so cool. I remember that Little House in the Valley did a post on these, with a little bit of history (including their eventual demise) that you might find interesting. I remember because I included it in a weekly roundup at the time.
http://www.littlehouseinthevalley.com/homes-in-a-box-when-sears-ruled-mail-order
I’ve always liked a smaller home. When I decided to move from my 1267sf townhouse I looked for a 2/1 with 1000 sf. Couldn’t find one in the small town that I moved to. I ended up with a larger home than I left. Thanks for sharing that website!
Patti
Wow there are hundreds of these houses in my home town – not necessarily made by Sears, but by local contractors and lumberyards that were no doubt ripping off the Sears catalog. It’s important to remember that the reason people could live in these small houses, was that they spent so little time in them. Who needs a bonus room, a great room, and a finished basement, when you spend all your time doing activities in your church, community, or service club?
What I especially miss about these houses was the little telephone nook, centrally located in the hallway. No tense private conversations. No camping on the phone. You can’t even sit down, you’re in a hallway!
These are wonderful! After the storm, there were small prefab Katrina cottages available–don’t know how many were bought. A similar concept.
@ All at “Tiny Houses”: Prefabs have been around for a long time. Some of them were pretty awful; my parents and I lived in one for a couple of years. It was your basic cardboard box, though built of plywood. But it kept the rain off. My former in-laws built one on a couple acres of land in Grand Junction, Colorado — he threw it together pretty much by himself. It was no beauty, but it was serviceable and stood for thirty or forty years.
IMHO the thing that’s interesting about most of the Sears houses is that they’re pretty, at least to the eye exhausted by mile on mile of stucco over Styrofoam. Why not have a manufacturer produce these, and produce them with real style? Given a chance and a reasonable price, I’d put one of those things in the beloved Yarnell in an instant!
@ Vinny: Yes, the telephone nook! That was a sign of progress…many houses had no such special space devoted to the new technology.
Life was different then. It wasn’t that you spent little time in the house; it was that you didn’t need space for all the Stuff you owned. Yesterday I was looking online at rentals in San Francisco, realizing one bedroom was about the best I could possibly afford and then wondering…what would I do with my office? We didn’t have offices at home–in the first place, few people were white-collar workers, and those who were worked the same hours as their blue-collar brethren. People didn’t bring work home from the office, and except for the occasional Avon lady, few people worked out of their homes. We had no computers, and so we had no need for a special room to house the things. Many people had no TV, and when the things did come in, they were designed as a piece of furniture to fit in the living room. Ditto the sound equipment. And as for “home entertainment theaters”? Gimme a break.
You also didn’t need a “family room,” because the design of those houses provided adults with private space, and because children played outdoors. The dining room was a separate room. Adults lingered over dinner while the kids were sent to play in their bedroom or, if it was still light outside, to play in the yard.
If you think about it today, how many rooms do you really occupy? Rattling around this four-bedroom house, I realize that I spend time in only four of the nine rooms: the kitchen/dining room, the living room, a bedroom, and my office. And the bathroom, of course–but the bathrooms in this house qualify as closets. The rest of the rooms are receptacles for gathering dust. I could live quite comfortably in one of those two-bedroom bungalows…though a bit more closet space would be helpful. It’s as though we wear the clothing of our lives too large.
I love tiny homes, and am fascinated by the Sears Kit homes. A while back, a wrote an article about them. You can still find them standing today, but it’s hard to verify if they’re actual Sears kit homes. They were very popular in Indiana (as I recall) and up around the Great Lakes region. Amazon.com sells a book about the Sears Kit homes that includes plans. If Sears wanted to make a comeback, they could revisit this whole kit home idea. I’d bet it would bring them back from the dead!
I too love old house – they have so much charm and character, especially as compared with most newer homes (unless you are prepared to drop double the going rate per square foot!). I am a little confuse @ your comment on the size of the Hathaway. The link shows both floors being 18’x26′, which would be 468 sq ft per floor, times 2 floors, equals 936 sq feet of living space. Am I missing something?
Thanks for the link to the Sears houses website – very cool!
@ Lis: Prob’ly all you’re missing is English-major math, which bears no relation to any known reality. 😉