My home is a 1919 Sears Catalogue home. It was called “the Castleton” in the catalogue. Sears delivered the materials to a nearby railroad spur, and they had a local contractor dig a foundation to spec. I don’t know who put the kit together, but it is overall excellent quality. For being “mass production” the interior millwork is beautiful, especially compared to what one gets today. A magnificent combination of American labor, creativity and craftsmanship.
When you think about it, it was an extremely innovative concept for the time.
In 1919 there were fewer trees and lumber than today, especially in places like the great plains.
The plans are shown on searshomes.com. “Does not include” plaster, bricks, or cement. Where would plaster have been used, if the interior was all wood? Ceilings? I could see a nostalgia enthusiast building one of these from scratch just for the sake of it.
I think that is the saddest thing about Sears; they lost their innovation. Shopping at a Sears became no different than shopping at Walmart or Kmart even before they got with Kmart. They were so far above that. I always heard their houses were nice, my grandfather considered getting one on his ranch, but decided to build out of local rocks instead.
My dad grew up on the family ranch in the middle of no where rugged Colorado. He told us when he was a kid he would run a trap line on the ranch and send his furs to Sears on the train. When Sears got his furs they would issue him a store credit and he could order things from their catalog until he ran out of credit. That would have been in the 1920s. Think about that customer service! Sears obviously had to sell the furs to a fur buyer to get their money; that is going pretty far. They also got a lifetime loyal customer, my dad always went to Sears first for anything. My mother ordered out of the catalog all year long and very few trips were made town that we didn’t go to the Sears store.
If they had kept the innovation they had going they would have used it to constantly reach out to younger, more modern people. They managed to do that through the 60s for sure, by the end of the 70s it was as though they were just hanging in there not looking ahead.