Home Sweet Home

There is a small town twenty miles north of us.  We pass through this town many times and have friends that live there.  There is a good little spot that we like to stop at and buy boudin and boudin balls.  There's one other thing that I learned about this town that I wanted to pass by and check out.  It just so happened that I had an appointment for work in this town and was able to drive by this site.

Know what it is?

Do you remember the Sears & Roebuck catalogs that would come by mail?  I remember the Sears Wish Book that would come out and we'd go through it with a marks-a-lot and circle what we wanted for Christmas.  It was exciting.  Sears was like Amazon before there was Amazon.  The reason I'm telling you this is that Sears didn't only sell toys and clothes from their catalog...

The home in the photo above is a Sears & Roebuck Mail-Order home. Now, I felt a little creepy taking photos of someone's home like this, so I made it quick. I didn't want them to come out and "pepper my tailgate" with some buck shot.

I did a little research on these homes.  This website right here had an informative write-up of these homes.

From the article:

"From 1908 to 1940, the Sears Modern Homes Program offered complete mail-order houses to the would-be homeowner — what would come to be called “kit homes.” Customers could select from dozens of different models in Sears Modern Homes Catalog, order blueprints, send in a check, and a few weeks later everything they needed would arrive in a train car, its door secured with a small red wax seal (just like the seal on the back of a letter)."

This home sits about a half mile from the train tracks that run east and west, so the homeowner didn't have far to carry his building materials.

"This seal was to be broken on arrival by the new owner, who would open up their boxcar to find over 10,000 pieces of framing lumber, 20,000 cedar shakes, and almost everything else needed to build the home — all the doors, even the doorknobs."

I laughed when I read that, thinking of the times I've put a swing set or something together and it had missing parts or extra parts leftover once I was done.  Can you imagine all the parts (including door knobs) with a house?

"Sears promised that, working without a carpenter and only rudimentary skills, a person could finish their Sears mail-order home in less than 90 days."

My skills are far less than rudimentary.  I would hate to see the house that I would build!

But look at the Sears mail order home in the two photos above.  It looks GREAT!  Even after all these years.  It has character and charm.  In looking at some of the blueprints in the article I linked above, I think I found which kit they bought.  It looks a lot like the home at the bottom right of the brochure below:

Can you imagine?  Ordering your home from a catalog, having it come in on a train, and then putting it together on your lot yourself?  It's a quality home that's still standing today!  Home Sweet Home, for sure!