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But its competitors were gaining ground, and by 1991 Sears had lost its crown as the nation’s top-selling retailer to Walmart. After years of declining sales, Sears would finally close its Modern Homes department in 1940. A few other kit home manufacturers — ones that hadn’t sold mortgages — survived, but the Sears kit home boom was over. Then came World War II, and with it, the next modern housing boom, featuring the rise of the suburbs and the prefab home — the kinds of homes we know today. Montgomery Ward also sold pre-cut house materials and plans from 1909 to 1932.
Selling the Concept of Dream Homes
Sears, once America's largest retailer, was just one company that sold homes this way. Now that its parent company has filed for bankruptcy, owners of some of those homes are lamenting the end of the Sears era. The Magnolia home was one of the largest offered through the Sears catalog. Some enthusiasts estimate that about 70 percent of Sears houses are still standing today. Every house in the catalog had a name befitting its architectural aspirations. So if you always dreamed of living in a California mission-style home, but couldn’t actually move to California, you might consider purchasing Sears’ Alhambra model.
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Among the catalog giant’s astounding range of offerings were house kits, which the company began marking in 1908. The kits came in 447 different designs, from the grand “Magnolia” ($5,140 to $5,972) to the more humble, but popular “Winona” ($744 to $1,998). Sears advertised the kits with the promise that “We will furnish all the material to build this [house design]. All the parts arrived (usually by train) precut and ready to assemble. In 1906, Frank W. Kushel, a Sears manager, was given responsibility for the catalog company's unwieldy, unprofitable building-materials department. Sales were down, and there was excess inventory languishing in warehouses.
Sears house kits become a big seller.
The mortgage program was also a PR disaster, as many of the families Sears foreclosed upon refused to do further business with the company. 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. Precut framing timbers, an innovation pioneered by Aladdin, were first offered by Sears in 1916. Precut lumber was cut to the appropriate lengths and angles based on where the framing timber would be used in the house.
Sears kit homes: Modern prefab housing at dawn of 20th century - USA TODAY
Sears kit homes: Modern prefab housing at dawn of 20th century.
Posted: Sat, 03 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Sears prefabricated almost all of these homes in giant mills situated across the country. The lumber came pre-cut, kind of like a giant Ikea set, along with an instruction booklet. This seal was to be broken on arrival by the new owner, who would open up their boxcar to find over 10,000 pieces of framing lumber, 20,000 cedar shakes, and almost everything else needed to build the home — all the doors, even the doorknobs. At one point in history, you could get just about anything courtesy of the Sears catalog—even a home, as Popular Mechanics reports.
I Unknowingly Bought A Sears Kit Home — Here's What I Learned and Discovered Inside It - Apartment Therapy
I Unknowingly Bought A Sears Kit Home — Here's What I Learned and Discovered Inside It.
Posted: Tue, 21 Jun 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Around the turn of the 20th century, sales grew swiftly for Sears, and with the opening of its new Chicago mail-order plant in 1906, which sprawled more than three million square feet, the company owned the world’s largest business building. Two years later, the firm introduced its famous mail-order home kits, whole houses that arrived in parts—from the nails to the lumber to the staircases—via railroad. By providing instructions, mass-produced materials and, by 1911, financing, Sears transformed the housing market, making the American dream possible for more than 100,000 buyers.
• Two flourishing Warner Robins mall anchoring stores and a Perry satellite store as a young married adult. “There are experts out there who are willing to come to people’s homes,” Addleman says. The decades-long rise of Sears, Roebuck & Co. to the country’s largest retailer, and its recent collapse into bankruptcy, reflects more than a shift in American consumer preferences. Rebecca Hunter, author of Putting Sears Homes on the Map, grew up shopping at Sears stores.
Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. 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. 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.
Homes
While browsing the Imagebank, you may see many houses that partially or evenclosely resemble a house that you own or have seen. Look closely, because thefloor plan may be reversed, a dormer may have been added, or the original buyermay have chosen brick instead of wood siding. Plumbing may look like it wasadded after construction, or storm windows may appear on the house but not inthe catalog’s illustration.
These core buildings occupy an area bounded on the north by West Arthington Street, the west by Central Park Avenue, the east by Spaulding Avenue, and the south by West Fillmore Street. Benefiting from Rural Free Delivery, America’s burgeoning westward expansion and an era when background checks didn’t exist, Sears sold guns, in the mail, to anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth now as we see malls with giant Sears anchor stores closing in virtually every city in the USA. Addleman says she’s looked at homes in the Field Club neighborhood and didn’t find any that matched known models of Sears homes.
It housed water tanks for firefighting on the upper levels, as well as offices and secretarial training facilities. It also housed the early broadcast facilities for WLS-AM.[4] In 2015, it was refurbished and reopened to the public as the "John D. and Alexandra C. Nichols Tower". It now houses non-profit groups and offices, including a classroom on the 12th floor for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
And — amazingly, for the time — they could even order homes via catalog. Even in the depths of the Great Depression in 1931, Sears’ catalog, retail and factory profits totaled more than $12 million, or more than $201 million in 2018 dollars. That year marked the first year retail sales outstripped catalog sales. In 1932, the company opened its famous flagship store on State and Van Buren Streets in the Loop district of Chicago. By 1907, Sears and Roebuck were selling the then equivalent of $1.3 billion of merchandise to American families every year.
"You would order everything from your light fixtures, to your lamp, [the wall covering], kitchen cabinets, the whole thing, whether you get a garage or not. And then it just shipped to you," preservationist Eric Dobson told NPR's Allison Keyes in 2014. Richard Sears, who wrote almost all of the catalog’s copy himself until his retirement in 1908, held to the motto “We Can’t Afford to Lose a Customer,” making sure that Sears stayed competitive in terms of price and value. When in 1908 Sears began its Modern Homes program, the company was in a brilliant position to reach interested people. And the same four-pound catalog that made home purchases possible also contained all necessary furnishments, from living room furniture to bathroom towels. 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. Many of these homes were built in Sears planned “Home Club Plan” developments in New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
This system uses precut timberof mostly standard 2_4s and 2_8s for framing. Precut timber, fitted pieces, andthe convenience of having everything, including the nails, shipped by railroaddirectly to the customer added greatly to the popularity of this framing style. Sears was instead a very ablefollower of popular home designs but with the added advantage of modifyinghouses and hardware according to buyer tastes. Individuals could even designtheir own homes and submit the blueprints to Sears, which would then ship offthe appropriate precut and fitted materials, putting the home owner in fullcreative control. Modern Home customers had the freedom to build their own dreamhouses, and Sears helped realize these dreams through quality custom design andfavorable financing. In fact, by the end of the 1930s, the number of Sears retail stores had nearly doubled, and in 1945 the company topped the $1 billion mark in sales for the first time.
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