Following is a list of Sears Homes enthusiasts who have agreed Sears' first kit houses sold for $650 to $2,500, or approximately $16,500 to $63,700 in today's dollars. If you have any authenticating source for us, we'd love to hear about it (you can email me directly at SearsHouseSeeker@gmail.com). You can see that La Porte, Indiana is mentioned as one of the "built at" locations: We found four examples of what we believe to be the model No. CNDDB Maps and Data. New models were introduced every year, and some only stuck around for a couple years. 110 (, 1524 2nd Street, La Porte, Indiana earliest version of the Sears No. presentation, nows your chance! 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. If any of you have ever been interested in coming to see me do a kit home However, we are pretty much limited to counties which have online accessible historic records, and to counties which we are able to physically visit to search in person this means that there are some counties out there with lots of undiscovered Sears houses, because we can't get to the records. Thousands of developments in cities, suburbs, and exurbs have sprung up since with a seemingly endless amount of homes that were built between World War II and today. I have seen articles throughout the years about Sears homes in the Pittsburgh area, she wrote after reading the Trib story. Other Sears houses were found dotting other areas of La Porte, but the biggest concentration of the early models, probably all from 1912, were in that Lakeview area. Checklist Search provides a simple and fast way to generate a pre-formatted checklist suitable for printing. She searched the Sears Home archive until she found a catalog with a photo and description of her home. If you don't know what that means, look at these two examples, and note where the orange arrow points that little extra strip of roofing that makes a sort of closed triangle. Rebecca lives in Elgin, Illinois, and undertook a huge research project, to find, and document, kit houses in that town. Because the Modern Homes division sales records were destroyed, there is no way to definitively verify the number of Sears houses that still exist. This site is a tribute to the original Sears Houses in Cincinnati Sears Houses In the U.S. Please contact me if you would like a free Natural Resources DataBase - NRDB Our research team especially loves searching Pennsylvania for Sears houses because there are so many there, Chabot said. 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. This is a complete list of Sears houses in Aurora (and two in Montgomery that were originally in Aurora). Instead, shipping labels were affixed to the backside of trim that identified properties. Between 1908 and 1940, Sears Roebuck and Co. published specialty catalogs offering house plans and building materials. I think teardowns are the reason that Argyles are not positioned higher in our national database of Sears homes (the Argyle comes in at number 20). Sears Modern Homes built in the 1930s may have a small circled "SR" cast into the bathtub in the lower corner (furthest from the tub spout and near the floor) and on the underside of the kitchen or bathroom sink. The first mail order for a Sears house was filled that year. Once delivered, many of these houses were assembled by the new homeowner, relatives, friends and neighbors, in a fashion similar to the traditional barn-raisings of farming families. Despite this large number, Sears houses are still, actually, rare, and only make up about 2% of the houses built in their era. In a second blog post, I'll show the several probable kit houses that we've found in LaPorte, Indiana, from other companies. Would you mind messaging me with an address, so that we can add your Sears house to our (private) national database? Here is one at 17 Hill Street, Villa Park. The multi-million-dollar home has been red-tagged while two other I now live in St. Louis, Missouri, and am sometimes asked if there are any Sears houses here. We found and listed about three houses, I think but didn't really focus on La Porte much more than that day in 2015. They kept up with it, of course, but it sure has good bones. Thanks for your interest! Newport Beach home dangling on edge after cliff collapses But it was a different story when Sears began selling house building kits in 1908. In 1916, Sears began shipping pre-cut lumber in its mail-order kit homes that contained stamped numbers used to match pieces during construction. national database of sears homes - assuredtriumph.com I don't feel comfortable making that assumption. The Top-Selling Sears Kit House - Sears Homes From 1931-1942 Sears sold about 5,000 houses altogether. Sears would be listed as the architect, and because they often gave out mortgages, you can find out if the previous owner(s) had a Sears mortgage or not. However, many houses described as Sears Homes are not true Sears Homes, being either the product of another kit home manufacturer or not a kit home at all. Stevenson, Katherine Cole, and Jandl, H. Ward, (1995), Davis, Michael W.R. and Schweitzer, Robert (1990), This page was last edited on 4 March 2023, at 21:18. As some areas begin to see population booms, such as the tech triangle region of Raleigh, Durham, and Cary as more companies and tech talent make exodus from California and New York based on what I hear from taxi drivers and my university contacts in the region at games conferences every year? Sears Modern Homes - Home | Facebook Depending on where you live, the thought of just building a small or medium sized house can sound totally bizarre or perhaps totally doable if youve got miles and miles of wide open space to work with. We have three on our list in Glenside -- one on Cedar, one on Tyson, and one on Edge Hill Rd. [37] Similiar references are made to boyhood homes of Richard Nixon and Warren Buffett. The Greenview/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, Sears Wasnt an Innovator, but They Knew Quality and Efficiency. Chuck Holtzen has joined up with Lara to do research in Illinois, and has been helpful in adding a number of authenticated houses to our list. Fast forward to this past summer --early August of 2022. Rockstar, Consistent Trees, and Baryon Mass data from the Generation 3 and Generation 6 VELA Simulations. Identifying Sears Homes has become a pastime among history enthusiasts because of their sturdy structure, the do-it-yourself nature of construction, and the popular architectural design concepts. Andrew is our number-cruncher, and his blog, I joined the team shortly after Lara, Cindy and Andrew began, in earnest, to log the homes that they were finding. Jud Yoho may also have been the designer behind the popular Sears model called the Hollywood. [16], There was no single architect for the Sears designs. Molly Harbst of Munhall sent along photos of her beautifully preserved Sears homes a 1920 model called The Crescent after reading the article. Dover, Chateau, and Lexington models are particularly plentiful there! The windows, the kitchen and the bathroom were updated over the years, but it is still very much the house it was when it was built.. My father knew the local builder (Mr. Humphreys) who put the house together. Los Angeles Modern Stilt Home Featured in Heat (Listed for $1.599 Million), International House Flipper Alex Camacho Makes $80k Profit on One House Flip, Bugsy Siegel Murder Mansion in Beverly Hills Flats (Listed for $17 Million), Zsa Zsa Gabors Pink Palm Springs Palace (Listed for $3.8 Million), 35 Kitchen Breakfast Bars The Latest In Casual Kitchen Dining. Sears Modern Homes are something we totally need to bring back from the past for this. national database of sears homescalgary police organizational chart. One of the early Sears House researchers that our group still relies on for her expertise in the D.C. housing market, is D.C. realtor Catarina Bannier (Bannier & Sandalow). In other cases, the home followed the general design of a Sears house without being an exact duplicate. To drum up business, Sears issued a press release to newspapers across the United States. [8] By 1934, Sears had stopped offering mortgages. Rosemary Thornton Like this page to learn about homes purchased as kits through mail order catalogs. Call me a cynic, but I often wonder why kit houses were not stolen. ", "Bill of Materials for Sears Modern Home", "Two Italian Families and their Neighboring Sears Houses", "New Homes in Cranford for $4,000!Biggest development evolved in Sunny Acres", "Yes, Virginia, Sears Homes Were Built After 1940", "The Top Four Most Popular Sears Homes--Have You Seen These? It wasnt until she was in her 20s that Chabot learned about the homes history. If yours is not one of those, please let us know :) We are confident about all three being Sears houses, but have not been able to authenticate any of them (with mortgage or deed records, blueprints, shipping labels, letters from Sears, or marked lumber). While seeing a bunch of Sears homes jammed together in a cookie cutter suburb wasnt a very common sight in the 1930s and 40s, they still got knocked together like IKEA furniture compared to building a home from scratch. Sears Lewiston: A Sears Model Home in New Jersey Authenticated Sears Lewiston 261 N. Jackson St., North Plainfield, NJ 1929 This great-looking Sears Lewiston was built in 1929, and used as a model home for Sears after it was built by Anthony P. Raffaniello, and his wife, Helena. The last Sears Modern Homes catalog was issued in 1940. Park, MD. Parts for the homes, which were sold between 1908 and 1940, were delivered to the nearest rail station. The kit was greatly modified by Lane's ambitious designs. We loosely refer to ourselves by the name. Those are ridiculously difficult to pin down. Thanks to the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, the NRDB will continue to be updated and available at least through 2023, and in some form, beyond that. From that, we have to try to connect all of that to an existing street address. , there were about 88.7 million people living in the United States. He published the design as #466 in his 1912 "Craftsman Bungalows" catalog. Sears houses could also be ordered with reversed floor plans. The ability to mass-produce the materials used in Sears homes reduced manufacturing costs, which allowed Sears to pass along the savings in lower prices for customers. And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. Sometimes researchers get lucky and find facts and figures in old company newsletters, personal papers of Sears managers and executives, historical newspapers, and archival interviews conducted with people who worked in the department in the 1930's and 1940's. Sears Modern Homes were sold between 1908 and 1942. 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. Prefab homes arent exactly an exotic concept nowadays. 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. Additionally, at this point in the Sears Modern Homes program, the homes were sold/packaged only with standard-length wood, so none of the framing lumber would have been pre-cut (and, therefore, there would be no alpha-numeric stamps on the wood pieces in the house). And it led me to dig a little deeper into the history of my community.. If home is where the heart is, then those living in houses built from Sears mail-order kits may have fallen head-over-heels. The CNDDB is comprised of two data components: Text information and spatial information. I know of several other models in McCandless. Either way, these houses offered variety and quality even if they werent necessarily innovative. Sears Houses in Elgin, Illinois (Rebecca L. Hunter), BOOK:Houses By Mail -- published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, BOOK: History and Field Guide to Wardway Homes, Rosemary Thornton's Sears Modern Homes website (use to search for models), Beatrice Lask Thesis: Summary list (Cincinnati Sears Homes). Sales slowly recovered as the United States emerged from the Great Depression until 1940. Spatial information is available through GIS downloads or can be viewed in the BIOS Viewer. 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. [17] Later on in the Modern Homes timeline, Sears had in-office designers but titled them as "experts" rather than actual architects.[17]. That's why we love seeking them out! [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. Here is a year-by-year list of houses as they were advertised in the Sears Modern Homes catalogs. Please browse through and enjoy the 1,000+ posts and 5,000+ photos! Advertisements for Sears Modern Homes appeared through May 1942. A Gilded Mansion in Newport Beach, CA (Unreal), Fallen Titan that is Sears department stores. Another gabled ell farmhouse that we found quite a few of in La Porte, is the No. Because these homes were constructed using pre-cut lumber and plans provided by Sears, these homes can be considered to be "Sears Modern Homes". 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?). We thought it might be of interest to those readers to point out some more of the history of Sears houses in the greater Pittsburgh area, said Chabot, whose family still owns a Sears Silverdale model home in Northampton, Mass., that was built by her great-grandparents in 1911. 171 examples in La Porte. Thats cheaper than many tiny houses and with space to actually breathe and have more than one person live with you without wanting to kill each other. Our national database of Sears houses in the U.S. has over 13,600 homes on it, and, after Ohio and Illinois, Pennsylvania is #3 in U.S. states with, at today's count, 1,963 Sears homes found. Weve got so much fucking housing just sitting there that NO ONE should be condemned to homelessness. Photo from Realtor site. Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940, though sales through local sales offices continued into 1942. Carrying on with Same Name, Different House topic we find that some of the Authorities shoot, wound carjacking suspect who fired at officers But what if you want something bigger than a tiny house, but not as gargantuan as the average American single family home? BMO, LAFC, and Angel City FC leaders were joined by special guests Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Mia Hamm for the . This system used precut timber of mostly standard sizes (2"x4" and 2"x8") for framing. [14], In addition to houses, the 1908 Sears catalog offered a kit schoolhouse with the model name "Schoolhouse No. catalogs for all central and satellite halos down to 10^06 MSun. There are two examples of this model, in La Porte. Sears mail-order homes prove plentiful in Western Pennsylvania I thought it was very interesting when I learned that you could also buy a house from their catalogs.. "The Sears Homes of Illinois" has more than 200 color photos of the most popular designs that Sears offered and can be very helpful in identifying Sears Homes. by . One final note about our list: as I've mentioned, our list includes, for the most part, homes that we have located, ourselves, but also those that we have learned about from other people. Many of these homes were built in Sears planned "Home Club Plan" developments in New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.[9][10][11]. My home reminds me of that type of architecture.. You had the flexibility to swap out certain elements without causing the whole thing to collapse like one of those Instagrammable burgers thats way too tall. BMO Celebrates Kickoff of the 2023 Soccer Season at 'BMO Stadium' in Historic house: Built in 1911, this Sears home sits on a large, corner lot in a historic district, surrounded by antebellum homes. Sadly, surviving Argyles do tend to be heavily altered there are probably lots more hiding in plain sight. From 1908 to 1940, the Sears Modern Homes Program offered complete mail-order houses to the would-be homeowner what would come to be called "kit homes." Customers could select from dozens of different models in Sears Modern Homes Catalog, order blueprints, send in a check, and a few weeks later everything they needed would arrive in a train car, its door secured with a small red wax . In fact, the No. We have not surveyed all areas of the country equally. I think that we had only a handful of houses already on the list a few. Photo from Lake County Assessor. Due to reviews by homeowners then and now, it would appear that Sears Modern Homes are just as appreciated now as they were then. 7 Charming Sears Catalog Homes You Can Buy Today 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. There are many very close lookalikes to this model, so we aren't always confident that they are from Sears, when we spy them in the wild, but this house has Sears curlicues on the hinge end of the decorative iron strapping. We could make the assumption that the model we have located the most was, in fact, the top seller. It's also possible that some local builder just put together a similar design, to compete with the Sears houses being built in town, but, some of these examples are on blocks of streets that are lined with Sears houses from this early spec offering by Sears. Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes. Remember when Sears sold houses? See some of Ann Arbor's kit homes - mlive I'm sure it was Matthew who cleared up for me that the No. Without facts and sales records, we can make an educated guess. Sears Is Crumbling, but These 9 Sears Catalog Homes Stand Tall You can clearly see a major difference on this side of the houses. 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. 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.