The Mail Order American Dream

March 7, 2017 12:39 PM

Kit houses, once a staple of suburbia, were complete, easy-to-assemble houses you could order from a catalog and have shipped via rail to your building site. Via the always-excellent McMansion Hell, you can learn more about the history of mail-order houses in America, and tips and tricks for identifying them in the wild.

(McMansion Hell previously)

posted by showbiz_liz (30 comments total)

I live in a tiny town in the Midwest that is full of the same Craftsman homes that filled the trendy neighborhoods in Long Beach where I lived fifteen years ago, only in much worse condition and about 1/10th the sale price.

I love them.
posted by annathea at 12:43 PM on March 7, 2017 [8 favorites]

About 25% of the houses in my neighborhood are Sears kit houses. The houses that are not kits are usually from around 1900 (like mine) with a few much newer. The local historical society gives walking tours and points out the different variations on the kits and how and why they were built that way.

I've always been fascinated with buying a house from the Sears catalog. These links are fantastic.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 1:11 PM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Building a house from a kit is harder than it looks.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 1:12 PM on March 7, 2017 [8 favorites]

I think I would definitely watch an HGTV show where ordinary schmoes tried to assemble a reproduction of one of these kit houses. Extra difficulty level: using only tools available in 1920.
posted by mhum at 1:13 PM on March 7, 2017 [20 favorites]

I grew up in a Sears Barrington. My room included the closet with the little window you see in the peak over the front door.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 1:18 PM on March 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

I think I would definitely watch an HGTV show where ordinary schmoes tried to assemble a reproduction of one of these kit houses. Extra difficulty level: using only tools available in 1920.

Oh man I need this in my life. (It might be more interesting if it were actual carpenters though - I think regular schmoe plus vintage tools would result in a big pile of wood and nothing else...)
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:24 PM on March 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

My girlfriend in my first year of college lived with three other housemates in a Lustron House. It was set on a concrete slab, was horribly hot in summer, freezing cold in winter, and the combination of the carpet and the metal walls built up some pretty nasty static electricity. Still, it was a pretty cool but of history.
posted by Ghidorah at 1:25 PM on March 7, 2017 [6 favorites]

Everything old is new again. Prefab homes are super cool right now.

That is, unless they're manufactured homes, in which case they are very much uncool. Because god forbid something be both affordable and attractive.

Unless you go IKEA.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:41 PM on March 7, 2017 [6 favorites]

Until recently I lived in a house in Nashville that I think was a kit of some sort, though I haven't figured out what. It's a lot like the Collingwood, but with the rooms laid out a little different. Probably impossible to figure out now.
posted by ghharr at 1:44 PM on March 7, 2017

I lived in a Sears house in Zanesville, OH for a few years. Think it was built around 1916.
posted by bwvol at 1:48 PM on March 7, 2017

There are a couple of books available that are reprints of old Sears kit house catalogs. I enjoyed them immensely when my husband and I were planning to build a house. Very inspirational.

The large porches so many of them had, were super appealing. We also liked that many of them are of modest size, unlike current home designs. But the single bathroom on the ground floor of a house with all the bedrooms upstairs? Or the houses with no bathrooms at all? We didn't like that so much. It's amazing how recently people were still building houses without indoor bathrooms!

Another interesting thing, is that those kit prices didn't include masonry. So when you see those tapered brick porch columns? It's a feature Sears could put on the catalog pictures of their houses, to make them look more spectacular, without raising the price they quoted. And those pillars are expensive! No wonder the modern houses in these styles, tend to have pillars wrapped in vinyl siding, instead of brick or stone.
posted by elizilla at 1:51 PM on March 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

A quirky-but-related San Francisco storyline is the earthquake shack. These were tiny houses built to house people who'd lost homes in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Over time, some people moved their shacks to permanent sites, modifying them in different ways over the years. We live in one such "type B" shack, one that's been chopped up and rehewn a number of times for a grand total of about 650 square feet of space.

I mention this because situations like this can complicate the process McMansion Hell runs through for spotting kit houses. Our house was built in 1906, but it was moved to its current lot in 1910. As a consequence, the city data shows the house was built in 1910. This is a problem with form interpretation, nothing else (there's no special box to tick that says, nope, sorry, just moving a house to this lot). Houses still get moved around, so keep that in mind!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 2:44 PM on March 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

My ex-husband lived in a Sears kit house for several years and by his description it was not a particularly well-built house compared to the surrounding non-kit houses of a similar vintage.
posted by drlith at 2:56 PM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

I am pretty sure my house is from a kit (there one a few miles away that seems to be the same house without the second floor extension pack,) but I can never find any pics of kit homes that have eyelid dormers like mine.
posted by Duffington at 3:25 PM on March 7, 2017

Well this is just fascinating. Thanks for posting it. Also, loving the "I live/grew up in a kit house" stories!
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:35 PM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

showbiz_liz: "(It might be more interesting if it were actual carpenters though - I think regular schmoe plus vintage tools would result in a big pile of wood and nothing else...)"

This is true. But also this is one of my main points of fascination with these old kit houses -- namely, that back then it looked like it really was just average schmoes not professional carpenters assembling them. Granted, it'd probably be schmoes with the higher level of do-it-yourselfedness who would be ambitious enough to assemble their own house. So maybe it'd be like a Great British Bake-Off but for home DIYers. If I were a reality TV show producer, I think I should be writing up a pitch for this right now (and maybe drop the vintage tools angle except possibly for one special episode).
posted by mhum at 4:41 PM on March 7, 2017

Walt and Roy Disney lived next door to each other for a while in Sears kit houses that they built and customized themselves. I always imagined my sister and I would do something similar someday.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:39 PM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Canada too had mail order homes. Alladin's catalogue is pretty impressive and even the venerable T. Eaton Company* did a brisk business in houses.


*For the you'uns out thar, Eatons was a rather large national department store chain operating in Canada until 1999
posted by Zedcaster at 5:49 PM on March 7, 2017

Then there was that one episode of Bret Maverick where all the neighbors came together to raise Bret's mail-order barn kit, and when they got it all put together it turned out to be a church. But he kept the livestock in it anyway.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:24 PM on March 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

Since this is the McMansion Hell thread right now, I'll mention that the blog's author Kate Wagner made a recent appearance in a video on one of Dan Bell's channels, which are equal parts urban exploration, Dead Mall A E S T H E T I C vaporwave, crappy motel shaming, and general retail kitsch. The video Kate shows up in is of the last type, at a Giant Supermarket that looks like it hasn't has a remodel since the late 70s. If that's not your thing, Kate specifically shows up in the floral department at the 1:42 mark, and then again at 6:44 to have an absolute freakout over a display of Crystal Pepsi.
posted by radwolf76 at 10:24 PM on March 7, 2017

Before we married, my husband lived in a Sears kit house. We found the house, the Conway, in one of the reprinted catalogs. That house was solid.
posted by elizilla at 5:25 AM on March 8, 2017

I grew up in a Deck House (now Acorn Deck House) which were sort of kit / prefab homes with a very modern 70s design aesthetic. They were apparently still kit-homey enough for my parents to put it together with some help from the family.

If you're downstairs, you can tell where anyone is, upstairs, to within a few feet (which was very helpful for furtive teenage makeout sessions) because the place creaks like an old man's joints. The chimney is a massive abomination in the center of the structure, blocking the light and cutting off the space. The downstairs is a warren of not-so-functional spaces with a slight mold problem. And I once bet my mom $100 dollars that there was actual fiberglass insulation between the roof and the wooden ceiling, which I lost. The whole roof is "insulated" with, like, an inch-and-a-half of brittle foam. The structure just radiates heat in the winter and traps it in the summer. A total garbage-tier house.

But, damn, looking at some of the pictures of Deck House homes and their interiors is giving me a serious case of deja vu.
posted by jpolchlopek at 7:53 AM on March 8, 2017

I was scrolling through the pictures in the McMansion Hell article, got to the one labeled Five Rooms Neat Porch, and went "Hey, that's Grandma's house!"

So I headed over to Google Street View and found my Grandma's house, the house my dad grew up in, in small-town Indiana. It's been 30 years or more since I was there, but sure enough, it was very similar to the one pictured -- just has a slightly different porch. My dad always talked about how his dad (who died before I was born) built it himself, in the evenings after work for as long as the light held, and on weekends.

These days we're sold the tiny-house bill-of-goods, which is laughably untenable but forcefully attractive because it's at least semi-attainable. Back then it was actually feasible to order a house out of a catalog and put it together yourself. A HOUSE. AN ACTUAL FREAKING TWO-STORY HOUSE.

We've gone backwards on this one, I think.

This is a neat post. Thanks for the links.
posted by mudpuppie at 9:43 AM on March 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

The last house we put a bid on before we gave up was a late-1950s modest ranch with a full basement. The owner had owned it since 1964. We put in a bid, were vastly outbid, and that was that. When the seller bought it (I now forget the exact price he told me but I looked this up...), it was 1.5x the median annual salary for Portland, Oregon, from that time. When it sold last summer, it went for 6x the current median annual salary. That owner was elderly, in his 80s at least, he hadn't done a lick of work on his home for probably 20 years. It needed a new roof, needed all surfaces re-done. Landscaping was overgrown, basement was a warren of strange rooms and water damage. 6x the median salary. I drove by the other day and noted the multiple plumbing trucks parked out front.

I think that's the promise of tiny homes and kit homes. The nostalgia is for what was seemingly reachable, even though at the time it was probably a great sacrifice and no one could imagine it being harder.
posted by amanda at 12:18 PM on March 8, 2017

It is worth noting that mail order housing dates back to the victorian era where blue prints and decorative elements would be ordered from catalogues. Mass produced decorative elements are quite definitive of the style. Near where i work there are many victorian houses worth more than a million dollars a piece. I often amuse myself by thinking that when they where built all that ornament must have looked like an imitation of wealth. Now they are quite unattainable.
posted by subtle_squid at 4:19 PM on March 8, 2017

Some of the people building these houses probably had at some point previously resided in a sod house. Even the crappiest put together kit would have been a pretty big step up.
posted by Mitheral at 10:41 PM on March 8, 2017

Around here, kit houses were frequently built by people in the building trades already, or by skilled laborers who could trade work with friends in the building trades.

Many cities began outlawing them with increasingly restrictive building codes that frowned on self-built homes ... when African-American factory workers with building trades expertise could buy a house by mail and put it up on a lot and not necessarily have to deal with local banks and their redlining ways.

Which is why today in many cities you STILL have to have all rooms a minimum of 70 square feet and the kitchen a separate room, it's an outgrowth of "fair" and "modern" and "safe" building and zoning codes intended to keep undesirable poor people, and especially poor black people, from owning homes. Once mass production made home ownership cheap and attainable, the solution was to vastly scale up how big a house had to be until it was cost-prohibitive again.

Even if tiny houses aren't your bag, the tiny house movement has been successful in getting some of these more nonsensical square footage requirements removed from the most recent model building codes (which local governments implement or not as they choose), so people can have more flexibility about "rooms" and square footage and maybe you can build a house with a kitchenette instead of a full kitchen, or a "bedroom" that's basically a bunkroom because you're divorced and your kids are there on weekends and it's nice for them to have a space but they don't need a traditional 8x10 bedroom ...
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:23 AM on March 9, 2017

Like a mobile home, but cuter. Like a tiny house, but with an actual basement (usually). What's not to love? Cheap, cute, and tornado-resistant.

I would love to see these come back in any substantial numbers, but the house itself isn't usually the problem in HCOLA areas, it's the price of land. The 19th/early 20th century Sears homes in my area go for millions, but it's because those previously working-class areas are now in hot real estate districts, not because they're inherently adorable (though they are).

That said, ah, I have relatives in trades who would help me, all I need is a quarter acre and I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
posted by epanalepsis at 9:59 AM on March 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

Man, those Lustron homes would look right at home in Sanctuary Hills, in Fallout 4.
posted by xedrik at 12:34 PM on March 9, 2017

This playhouse kit has one of my favorite Amazon customer reviews. Worth scrolling down for.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:45 AM on March 11, 2017