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January 31, 2016 8:14 AM

Though prefab houses have started to increase in popularity, the concept is certainly not a new one. Sears & Roebuck, through it's Modern Home program, sold mail order homes for over thirty years at the start of the 20th century. And though Sears was the most popular home seller at this time, other companies such as Aladdin in Bay City, Michigan also made their mark. Central Michigan University has an online archive of these home catalogs for those curious. And these Flickr albums include not only Aladdin catalogs, but also Sears Home catalogs and many others for your perusal. Finally, if you think that you might live in a Sears home or you've seen one in your neighborhood, here are a few tips for successfully spotting them (Previous Prefab Posts).
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI (38 comments total)

Not new at all - William the Conqueror took flat-packed castles with him in the invasion fleet to Britain in 1066. Not sure they were to code, though.
posted by Devonian at 8:24 AM on January 31, 2016 [5 favorites]

... my 14-year old daughter asked, "Mom, do you think there will ever be a time when you will stop looking for Sears Homes?"

Is she trying to buy one? Does this have something to do with how my brother bought a run-down two story clapboard house in rural Pennsylvania, started renovating, and discovered that the whole structure is composed of massive logs, and thus worth four times what he paid?

Or is this a trainspotting kind of thing?
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:55 AM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

Jean Shepherd has a great story about a friend of his father buying one of these houses. A telegram announces when the house, packed in numerous crates arriving on a train, will come. A whole bunch of guys sit around in high expectation drinking beer and waiting to go to the train yard. By the time the train arrives they're pretty drunk. At the train yard they start pulling the crates out of the train cars. Somebody says they wonder what's in this crate. Before anyone says anything they open it up. A toilet! Now they all start opening crates and contents start to spread around the tracks. Finally someone pulls out the manual from one of the last crates. "Starting with the contents of crate #15..." They look around at all the stuff lying on the ground amongst the now empty crates. I think someone started to cry...
posted by njohnson23 at 9:03 AM on January 31, 2016 [14 favorites]

Oh, man, my immediate neighborhood is loaded with this one distinctive style of bungalow, whether Sears or Lewis Built, I am not sure. There are three in a row on Broadway between Roy and Broadway, a fourth just to the north and two more on Prospect, just two blocks away. Everyone calls them kit houses. And having seen those, I see the same house all over Capitol Hill. They must have been all the rage, back in the day.
posted by y2karl at 9:23 AM on January 31, 2016 [3 favorites]

...on Broadway between Roy and Broadway...

Let's meetup on the corner of Broadway and Broadway.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:28 AM on January 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

I love these. It's weird that new home construction has not really progressed at all in the last century and has even regressed from ideas like this.
posted by octothorpe at 9:46 AM on January 31, 2016 [5 favorites]

There is a six story high grocery store complex being built across the street from me and the main structure of it went up really fast. Essentially built out of giant preformed concrete lego blocks that were trucked in and then craned into place.

Prefab is changing lots of things.
posted by srboisvert at 9:52 AM on January 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

Things are moving on, though - take a look at Wikihouse. One - well, more a Wikished - has been put up quite close to me in Edinburgh, and there's a great deal of thought going into the whole project - some of it quite pleasingly subversive, in terms of how it could disrupt architecture and the financial system. One of the leading lights of the project, although he takes pains to say he's just part of a team, is Alastair Parvin, who's worth keeping an eye on.
posted by Devonian at 9:57 AM on January 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

Does this have something to do with how my brother bought a run-down two story clapboard house in rural Pennsylvania, started renovating, and discovered that the whole structure is composed of massive logs, and thus worth four times what he paid?

There are a lot of those houses in PA, unless your brother bought the house my parents used to live in.
posted by lagomorphius at 10:01 AM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

Though I can't prove it now, I am sure that the first house my wife and I owned was a Sears house (the Fullerton, as depicted here). The next door neighbor, who grew up in the house next door, told us about the original owners and how that man had "built the house himself" in the 1920s.
posted by briank at 10:06 AM on January 31, 2016

Things are moving on, though - take a look at Wikihouse.

Modular building systems are like the sustainable fusion of construction. I've been reading about how they're the next big thing since the '70s but somehow all the new construction I've ever seen has been the same stick-built platform -frame houses.
posted by octothorpe at 10:17 AM on January 31, 2016 [3 favorites]

Jean Shepherd has a great story about a friend of his father buying one of these houses.

Here dramatized in a PBS adaptation of Shepard's work (one of several) entitled "The Phantom of the Open Hearth":

https://youtu.be/HVCfWbSs6O0?t=794
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 10:33 AM on January 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

I hear this guy is working on a 3D printer geodesic dome house.
posted by bukvich at 10:33 AM on January 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

I live in a Victory house - my whole neighbourhood is post-war housing, and there are more patches of them all around town. It was very convenient when we wanted to put on new siding, as we could drive around and look at what other people had chosen and how it looked. They're usually about 1000 square feet, and are all pre-fab and balloon-framed. When we ripped out the closet in the back room, we discovered assembly instructions printed on the studs, which was kind of fun. When we cut out the rear wall for a back door, we discovered some of the foot-long carriage bolts that were holding the house together, which also would have been fun if we hadn't discovered them with a sawz-all.
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 10:43 AM on January 31, 2016 [10 favorites]

Oops, StickyCarpet, I meant between Roy and Aloha!
Post in haste, regret at leisure...
posted by y2karl at 11:00 AM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's interesting looking at these to see how things have changed and how they haven't. American houses have gotten bigger, obviously. We dedicate a lot more space to the kitchen, and increasingly we blur the line between kitchen, dining room, and living room.

I looked at the 1931 catalog, and saw that the closets were of derisory size (which I expected), a lot of the houses didn't have back doors, and some of the plans did not include bathrooms, which is fascinating. But I'm pretty sure I've seen some of those plans around town (or very close approximations), and most of them look pretty great.
posted by adamrice at 11:21 AM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's an older home just up the road from me that local lore says is a pre-fab home. It's a small, one-story box. The unique aspect of it is that the exterior is covered entirely with approx. 1 ft.sq. gray enameled metal tiles. It's really striking the first time you see it, because the exterior is just so different. I've never been able to find any information on other houses like it, though.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:24 PM on January 31, 2016

History of the Quonset Hut

posted by clavdivs at 12:24 PM on January 31, 2016 [3 favorites]

Having some associations with people in the local historical preservation scene, I was already somewhat familiar with these. What took me by surprise was how large and elaborate they got (cf. "The Magnolia"). People seem perfectly happy calling small, simple bungalows "mail-order" or "Sears-catalog" houses, but I'm recognizing larger and more complex examples in this post that I've never known were prefab. I wonder whether the local building-historians know they are prefab but don't say so for some reason (they must, right?), or whether there's some gap in the historical imagination that prevents even them from realizing it.

As early-20th century craftsman-style homes are getting popular and formerly "old and rundown" neighborhoods are being gentrified and reconceptualized into "historic" neighborhoods, are the people responsible for historicizing these structures worried that acknowledging their pre-fab-ness would hurt their value? Or the possibility for "historic" designation? Are they even trying to protect (or rewrite) the class status of the buildings' original owners?
posted by Krawczak at 12:25 PM on January 31, 2016

As early-20th century craftsman-style homes are getting popular and formerly "old and rundown" neighborhoods are being gentrified and reconceptualized into "historic" neighborhoods, are the people responsible for historicizing these structures worried that acknowledging their pre-fab-ness would hurt their value? Or the possibility for "historic" designation? Are they even trying to protect (or rewrite) the class status of the buildings' original owners?

I'm currently updating a neighborhood history display for the local library. One note in the display concerns a Sears kit house in the area that is only one of three still standing in town (which is actually how this whole post came about this morning).

I can't speak for other neighborhoods, but the locals I've talked to find it fascinating and certainly nothing to cover up. It's a wonderful piece of history.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:37 PM on January 31, 2016 [3 favorites]

Thorzdad: a Lustron House? There's a registry you can check to verify. I rented one in grad school; well designed but very cold in winter.
posted by nonane at 1:34 PM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

I used to pass these three Sears homes on my way to work every morning.
posted by SisterHavana at 1:38 PM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

If you grew up in a mid-size Canadian city (Ottawa in my case) you definitely recognize most of those Sears Catalog homes. I grew up in one of them, and The Glebe was built almost entirely out of them, way back when it was a suburb.
posted by mhoye at 1:42 PM on January 31, 2016

My mother grew up in a kit home, maybe a Sears home or similar, that was built by my grandfather in about the 1920s in a small southern Utah town. On google maps here.
posted by flug at 1:59 PM on January 31, 2016

These archives don't go back quite far enough - we lived in a Sears house built in 1900 until last month. Was hoping to find it in the the links but the earliest shown seem to be about 1908. Few other houses in our old neighborhood that were clearly from the same pattern - identical moulding and windows, very similar floor-plans. Our house had been added to on 4 separate occasions and at one time had a wrap-around double-decker porch which was long gone by the time we bought it although the house came with a photo of it in its full splendor.
posted by leslies at 4:11 PM on January 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

Rebecca Hunter has identified and photographed over 200 Sears houses in Elgin, Illinois (photos at Illinois Digital Archives start on page 12). There’s a bound copy of the report and photos at the public library.
posted by bentley at 4:13 PM on January 31, 2016

I live in an early 80's prefab ranch, but do not know anything about where it came from. There are a few others in the area, all ranches, all about 1000 square foot. Anyone got a lead on what company might have been selling those in New England in 1982?
posted by vrakatar at 7:32 PM on January 31, 2016

I spent a good bit of my childhood on a modified Boise Cascade prefab number. It ... did not have the charm of the Sears homes.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 7:40 PM on January 31, 2016

"Some Roman forts were even pre-fabricated. The continuous construction of forts and stockade, led to the development of pre-fabricated materials and standard parts. Timbers were cut to specific sizes. Grooves were pre-cut ready for fast construction and the blacksmiths produced iron nails in all different shapes and sizes. The prefabricated Roman forts allowed the Romans to erect their bases with unbelievable speed. "
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:15 PM on January 31, 2016

There can, unfortunately, be downsides.
posted by kickingtheground at 8:24 PM on January 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

My parents' first house was a Sears kit home in Eugene, OR. They've never loved a house so much since.
posted by town of cats at 9:11 PM on January 31, 2016

The modern equivalent might be a SIPs house. Structural Insulated Panels. The panels are like big foam core, which are made to measure and fit together without any cutting onsite. A couple of relatively unskilled people can erect the house in a weekend. The resulting house is stronger than a frame house, so square you don't have to shim the windows and doors, and very energy efficient. I know someone who built a house like this and it's amazing.
posted by elizilla at 6:46 AM on February 1, 2016

In my first year of college, my girlfriend lived off campus with friends in a Lustron House. It was indeed cold in the winter, and was like a giant static electricity generator. Fun for a bit, not as much fun for cuddling.

Just recently, around the corner from us, a housing development was assembled from modular chunks of house. Every day, assorted trucks would arrive with jigsaw puzzle pieces of house, and they would be slapped together by the end of the day. For the area, they were profoundly not cheap, enough so that prices weren't publicly posted, and we're only disclosed to people who went on buyers tours. On the plus side, you could see that the walls were actually insulated, which is something of a rarity/novelty in the greater Tokyo area.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:47 AM on February 1, 2016

Some Roman forts were even pre-fabricated. The continuous construction of forts and stockade, led to the development of pre-fabricated materials and standard parts.

roman soldiers home on leave, moved to frustrated tears because their families have asked them to put together the bookshelves that have just arrived from DOMVS but of course someone's lost the tiny allen wrench
posted by poffin boffin at 9:04 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Carlinville, IL, home of Blackburn College and a potential candidate for Illinois' capital in the 19th century, has 152 (out of 156) Sears homes located in a neighborhood just north of the college. It's the largest collection of Sears kit homes in the US.
posted by stannate at 9:08 AM on February 1, 2016

As I recall the story, as the Popular Culture program at Bowling Green State University in Ohio grew (and began a strong publishing program with journals and books), the University moved them into a house located across the street from the University. It was later determined that the house was actually a Sears catalog home. What a great example of synchronicity.

Until a few years ago when the University administrators decided to destroy the house .
posted by jkosmicki at 7:36 AM on February 2, 2016

Well, my bad: After talking to an architect owner of one of these, I come to find that 735, 743, 745 and 749 Broadway Avenue East as well as 812 and 816 East Prospect Street are not kit houses but rather variations on a design locally popular in the early Nineteen Aughties.

On a side note, until two years ago, 735 was a spook house, owned by an old man residing in a rest home, that was hidden view by a tree and a stand of feral California laurels. I only noticed a year before they were cut down, that it, too, was a variation on the theme.

And, oh, man, the big leaf maple in front of 745 is one of the most beautiful parking strip trees anywhere in town. Gorgeous, moss covered, with roots gnarled a foot above the pavement, it is a wonder.
posted by y2karl at 8:04 AM on February 2, 2016

And, for a fact, number 5 of the pictures for 743 affords a fair view of said tree.
posted by y2karl at 8:21 AM on February 2, 2016