From 1908 to 1942, you could buy houses through Sears catalogs. Sears sold about 70,000 of them throughout the US and Canada, and you could pick from 370 different styles. The cheapest models were about $360 (in early 1900’s dollars).
Although Sears houses haven’t been sold for well over 80 years, some people in modern times still build homes based on the old Sears plans, since they used fairly standard materials and many models were designed to be easily constructed by the homeowner.
Here is an ad for a large, 10 room model which sold for $6500, and an actual example of one,
There were a lot of the smaller bungalow models of these in a neighborhood I used to live in. Still looking good after 100 years. Not bad for a flatpack house on a truck!
Indeed!
The info I saw didn’t provide a date for the $360 house, but if I arbitrarily pick 1915, that’s only about $12K in 2026 dollars. Granted that did not include the labor to construct the house, which had to be supplied by the homeowner or contracted for. The average US household income was about $700 per year in 1915, so even adding in the labor costs, it’s still not bad in terms of hours worked to pay off a home.
$6500 in the 1930s is $130,000 today. I would love to buy a 10 bedroom house for $130,000.
Just stop eating avocado toast and you’ll get it in no time!
Is that Kevin’s house?
I lived in a Sears home from 1920. We had a 100th birthday for it. It was surprisingly good condition. Neighborhood was rough and we ended up selling and moving about 3 years ago.
We had a 100th birthday for it.
I love it!
I haven’t dug into it, but apparently there are web sites which try to catalog all the ones that still exist. But it’s difficult to figure out, because of look-alikes that used the same or similar plans, but without actually being Sears houses.
Is there anywhere that’s digitizing and providing the actual plan sets?
Good question. When researching the post I found a bunch of sites that provide floor plans and dimensions, but haven’t stumbled into construction plans.
Here’s an internet archive link I still had open in my browser showing the floor plans for a bunch of them. It’s 119 pages of floor plans! 1908 catalog.
https://archive.org/details/modernhomes00sear/page/22/mode/thumb
Did a little more digging. I couldn’t get this link to load, but wikipedia says it contains “blueprints for the Alahambra and Fairy models”. Maybe you’ll have better luck with the site than I did.
