Sears Modern Homes
Sears Modern Homes were houses sold primarily through mail order catalog by Sears, Roebuck and Co., an American retailer.
From 1908 to 1942, Sears sold more than 70,000 of these houses in North America. Sears Modern Homes were purchased primarily by customers in East Coast and Midwest states but have been located as far south as Florida, as far west as California, and as far north as Alaska and Canada. No complete record of their locations was left by Sears when they closed the Modern Homes program but current-day researchers are compiling a database of those that have been found so far and the list continues to grow.
Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line's 34-year history. Most included the latest comforts and conveniences available to house buyers in the early part of the twentieth century, such as central heating, indoor plumbing, telephone, and electricity.
Primarily shipped via railroad boxcars, these kits included most of the materials needed to build a house. 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. Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to assemble the houses. In some cases, Sears provided construction services to assemble the homes. Some builders and companies purchased houses directly from Sears to build as model homes, speculative homes, or homes for customers or employees. Although most shipments came by rail, newspaper advertisements in the late 1920s and early 1930s showed Sears offering truck delivery to buyers living within a radius of their Newark, New Jersey, plant and their Norwood, Ohio, Sash & Door company.
Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940 with sales through local sales offices continuing into 1942. Years later, the sales records related to home sales were destroyed during a corporate house cleaning. As only a small percentage of these homes were documented when built, finding these houses today often requires detailed research to properly identify them. 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. Determining which company manufactured a particular catalog and kit home may require additional research to determine the origin of that home.
History
1908–1940
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 excess inventory languished in warehouses. Kushel is credited with suggesting to Richard Sears that the company assemble kits of all the parts needed and sell entire houses through mail order. That year, the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, offered the first kit homes through mail order.In 1908, Sears issued its first specialty catalog for houses, Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans, featuring 44 house styles ranging in price from US $360 to $2,890. The first mail order for a Sears house was filled that year. As its mail-order catalogs were already sent to millions of homes, Sears had a distinct advantage over other kit-home competitors.
As sales grew, Sears expanded its production, shipping, and sales offices to locations across the country. To provide the materials for the Modern Homes division, Sears operated a lumber mill in Cairo, Illinois. In 1912, Sears purchased the Norwood Sash and Door Company in Norwood, Ohio, and, in 1926, opened a large lumber yard in Port Newark, New Jersey. The ability to mass-produce the materials used in Sears homes reduced manufacturing costs and consequently the kits' price tags.
Precut framing lumber pieces, 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 lumber would be used in the house, and letter/number codes were stamped on the pre-cut lumber pieces, coordinating with labels found on the blueprints for the house. Before 1916, the home builder had to cut their Sears-supplied lumber to appropriate lengths. These pre-1916 houses are generally considered catalog houses, not kit houses. Pre-cut lumber reduced construction time by up to 40%, according to Sears.
The houses were designed with "balloon style" framing that eliminated the need for a team of skilled carpenters, reducing cost and construction time for the buyer. This system used precut lumber of mostly standard sizes for framing. Balloon-framing systems rely only on nails to make connections between joints, whereas previous methods used heavier members and pegs. The method's name reflected that the structure was light and could be lifted away like a balloon. Early balloon structures were very basic, to enable home buyers to assemble them independently and also because designers had yet to see the implications the method held.
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. 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. During the Modern Homes program, large quantities of asphalt shingles became available. Asphalt shingles were cheap to manufacture and ship, and easy and inexpensive to install. 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. This product offered the advantages of low price, ease of installation, and added fire protection. Local building requirements sometimes dictated that certain elements of the house construction be done professionally and varied depending on where the house was constructed.
Economic aspects
Sears began offering financing plans around 1912. Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. Sales peaked in 1929, just before the Great Depression. While financing through Sears helped many homeowners purchase homes, a number of those purchasers defaulted during the ensuing Great Depression. The company was forced to liquidate $11 million in defaulted debt. The mortgage program was also a public relations disaster, as many of the families Sears foreclosed upon refused to do further business with the company.Sears stopped offering mortgages at the end of 1933. In 1935, some newspaper reports stated that Sears had "discontinued" the "modern homes department". However, there's no evidence that Sears actually stopped selling homes and it continued to issue a new "Modern Homes" catalog throughout the 1930s. Home sales slowly recovered as the United States emerged from the Great Depression.
After 1940
The last "Modern Homes" catalog was issued in 1940. 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. Advertisements for Sears Modern Homes appeared through May 1942. Many of these post 1940 homes were based on models from the 1940 and earlier Sears catalogs but not all were, leading to debate over whether these homes qualify as "Sears Modern Homes". Because these homes were constructed using pre-cut lumber and plans provided by Sears, these homes can be considered to be "Sears Modern Homes". Many of these homes were built in Sears planned "Home Club Plan" developments in New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.Models
Sears offered roughly 370 models over the 32 years it sold houses by catalog, with an average of 80 to 100 models in each catalog. The models offered in each catalog varied each year, with some models remaining over long periods, and others appearing in only a few catalogs. In the early years, the models were identified with numbers. In 1918, Sears began assigning names to the various models. Some models were offered with variations, the most common of those being expanded floor plans and additional finished living spaces. Sears houses could also be ordered with reversed floor plans. While the vast majority of models were for single-family house designs, Sears offered some duplex house designs and even a few larger multiple-family buildings.The most popular models appeared in the catalog for multiple years. Other models only appeared for one year. No built examples have been found of some of the least popular models. Some models were offered in both wood siding and with different names attributed to the same or almost identical home plan. Some of the most popular models were:
- Crescent
- Dover
- Willard
In addition to houses, the 1908 Sears catalog offered a kit schoolhouse with the model name "Schoolhouse No. 5008". The two-story schoolhouse was priced at $11,500 and its design included six classrooms, a library, an auditorium, and a superintendent's office. 1908 was the only year the schoolhouse appeared in the catalog. It is unknown whether any were purchased or built.
There was no single architect for the Sears designs. Many of the famous designs were commandeered from other sources and/or purchased from architects but given just enough change to be advertised as their own. Later on in the Modern Homes timeline, Sears had in-office designers but titled them as "experts" rather than actual architects.