Early Sears houses used balloon framing, so the kits were easy to assemble.

They bought lumber in huge quantities and they owned many of the lumber production facilities, so they could sell the lumber and ship it to the site cheaper than the prospective homeowner could buy it from a local lumber yard and Sears would also provide the financing to boot. No doubt, that happened, but usually it would have been less expensive for the friend to order the kit from Sears because Sears had become the world’s largest lumber retailer. Whenever I do a civic presentation on Sears homes, someone usually asks what would keep a friend of the Sears home buyer from going to the local lumber yard, buying the lumber, and building their own house using the 75 page instruction book as a guide. Most Sears stores had building counsellors who would assist you in the process of selecting your home, arranging for the financing, and arranging for the transportation and construction of the house. However, Sears also estimated how much it should cost in your area for you to hire a carpenter or contractor to assemble the house and they would include that cost in the financing if you needed for them to do so. After that, you were responsible for preparing the foundation and assembling the house. You had to arrange the transportation for the house kit from the rail yard nearest to your location to the site where the house was to be constructed. If you look carefully at the picture of the plant, you can see the railroad spur just beyond the factory. They would ship the bundle to you via a railroad boxcar. Then, the lumber mill would bundle all of the lumber for your home together along with a 75 page instruction book for assembling the house. They stenciled numbers onto the precut lumber or wrote identifying numbers or labels onto the precut lumber using grease pencils which were usually dark blue. At a plant located near Newark, NJ, Sears measured and precut the lumber for your home. During the height of the Sears home era, Sears became the world’s largest mortgage holder. The catalog stated, “We have everything you need including the money” so Sears would finance the home for you if you needed for them to do so.

The prospective homeowner would browse through the catalog and select the home that he or she wanted to order. Every year from 1908 to 1940, Sears published a catalog of houses for sale. During the 1940’s Sears did some housekeeping at its headquarters and destroyed all of the records from the Sears home sales, so there is no way to know the exact number of house kits that they sold for sure. If you research Sears homes, you will find a variety of statements about how many Sears homes were built with estimates ranging from 50,000 to over 100,000. Since Sears sold almost three times as many homes as Montgomery Ward and many times more than the smaller sellers of kit homes, this document will concentrate mostly on Sears homes. The purpose of this document is to help you to learn more about the mail order kit houses and to help you to be able to determine if you live in one of them. You may live in one of them and not even know it. Hundreds of kit homes are located in our region of the country. One of those was Harris Brothers Homes in Chicago. In addition, several smaller companies also sold house kits by mail order. From 1909 through 1932, Montgomery Ward sold over 32,000 houses through its mail order catalogs. Sold over 90,000 houses through its mail order catalogs. Do you live in a Sears or Montgomery Ward house? Was your house built from a kit that was purchased through a mail-order catalog? Are you sure? From 1909 to 1940, Sears Robuck & Co.

Sears kit homes