Sears Garfield House

[Rye Miles #13621]

[Rip Snorter]

Quite the thing, ahead of its time.  Only possible because of the railroads.

[irish ike, SASS #43615]

The original founder of my company had a sister who ordered a Sears and Roebuck catalogues house. The railroad ran about a block from her house. He said the train stopped, a bunch of people showed up to offload it. The package included everything needed to build the house. All you needed were hand tools.

 

An employee bought it from him and remodeled it. It was a very nice, well built home with an efficient floor plan.

[Abilene Slim SASS 81783]

There are several scenes in the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire" that take place where a character is trying to build one. The story takes place during prohibition, and I thought it an interesting historical reference. 

[Pat Riot]

And people whine about assembling an IKEA piece of furniture. 

[Crooked River Pete, SASS 43485]

My grandfather built one in Michigan, about a 100 years ago, I was in it a lot as a kid.

[Rye Miles #13621]

In 1972 we bought a prefab house that was built in the 40’s after the war. It wasn’t a Sears house but it was brought to the property on a truck and put together in a few days from what I was told. It was a small 2 bedroom, no basement and a crawl space for an attic. Far smaller than the Garfield house shown in the OP.

[Rip Snorter]

And after the big war, another one.  https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/our-story/our-history/henry-j-kaisers-assembly-line-building-fills-need-for-postwar-ho

[Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619]

A piece of forgotten history; Sears kit houses-- and others, too.

 

Just a year or so ago one of my sons, a commercial real estate broker, was able to give us a tour of a church building he'd just sold. It was a large, Craftsman-style structure, with sanctuary, Sunday school rooms, kitchen and fellowship hall, etc. An entirely kit-built building from the 1930s. It had been used for non-church purposes for decades.

 

Nobody could find out much about its history. It was set for teardown, but it got me interested in that history of kit houses and buildings from the era.

[Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619]

These houses were very interesting and there is a fair amount of information to be found on the web. As you can see from Rye's post, they came in elaborate styles, and quite a variety.

 

You could call them pre-fabs, which they were, but the term now connotes something much simpler, such as pole buildings or what we might call double-wides and 'manufactured' homes. These were stylish multi-story homes.

 

Window into the past-- a time when Sears sold....everything.

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

8 hours ago, Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619 said:

 

Window into the past-- a time when Sears sold....everything.

and quality was understood

[Crooked River Pete, SASS 43485]

My grandfathers house, interesting note, there are no closets in that house.

[Alpo]

Lots of old houses do not have closets. That's why they invented wardrobes.