It became quite a thing and their sales took off." That lumber itself was manufactured ready to build your house. "But then after 1916 it got really manufactured. "Before 1916 it was still just raw lumber in lengths and you had to cut it on site and build it," Catanzaro says. started selling house blueprints, followed soon after by the building materials for those specific plans, too. "Once I found all the ones in Springfield and Clark County, I started branching out to other counties locally and eventually found out that Cincinnati has this huge pocket," she says. catalog online, and realized the house across the street and another around the corner were also kit homes. She bought a vintage Sears, Roebuck and Co. That's my mom's house.' "Ĭatanzaro says that discovery inspired her to research her home's history. She's looking through the houses, and she's like 'Oh, there's a cute little house' and she's like, 'Oh wait. They had a lot of information about the Sears modern homes, and they had little illustrations. "She was on the internet looking for small houses to build for her Sims and she ended up on the Sears and Roebuck website. Her daughter accidentally uncovered the home's history while playing the online game, The Sims. Lorinda Niemi of Fairfax wants to know about Sears kit homes and which neighborhoods have them.Ĭindy Catanzaro of Springfield, Ohio lived in a Sears kit home. This week, WVXU's Bill Rinehart looks at build-it-yourself homes and the impact they had on the region. #SEARS KIT HOMES SERIES#National and regional competitors in the catalog and kit home market included Aladdin, Bennett, Gordon-Van Tine, Harris Brothers, Lewis, Pacific Ready Cut Homes, Sterling and Montgomery Ward (Wardway) Homes.Our OKI Wanna Know series tries to answer your questions about the Cincinnati area. Determining which company manufactured a particular catalog and kit home may require additional research to determine the origin of that home. Because the various kit home companies often copied plan elements or designs from each other, there are a number of catalog and kit models from different manufacturers that look similar or identical to models offered by Sears. As only a small percentage of these homes were documented when built, finding these houses today often requires detailed research to properly identify them. A few years later, all sales records were destroyed during a corporate house cleaning. Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940. Some builders and companies purchased homes directly from Sears to build as model homes, speculative homes or homes for customers or employees. In some cases, Sears provided construction services to assemble the homes. Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to assemble the houses. 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. Primarily shipped via railroad boxcars, these kits included most of the materials needed to build a house. Central heating, indoor plumbing, and electricity were all new developments in house design that “Modern Homes” incorporated, although not all of the houses were designed with these conveniences. Sears Modern Homes offered the latest technology available to house buyers in the early part of the twentieth century. A handful of Sears homes have been identified in Canada. While sold primarily to East Coast and Midwest states, Sears homes have been located as far south as Florida and as far west as California. Sears homes can be found across the continental United States.
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