That Old House: Sears Lexington

Your Head Trucker often enjoys browsing through old house plan books over at the Internet Archive.  Here's one of my favorite plans:  the Lexington, a lovely colonial offered by Sears and Roebuck from 1927 to 1933.  Even M.P., whose architectural tastes incline to the hobbity, admires the beauty of it.

Sears Lexingtton on the cover of the 1928 Sears Modern Homes catalog.
Click to enlarge.

Sears Lexington, 1929, which was a revision of an earlier model.

Specifications and options for the 1929 model.

Sears Lexington from the 1932 catalog, showing an actual photograph of this model as built.

As everyone knows by now, I suppose, Sears, Wards, and other companies offered pre-cut materials to build houses in the first decades of the 20th century, as well as heating, plumbing, and electrical systems.  Those houses ranged from tiny cottages to almost-mansions, in all the popular styles of the era.

The Lexington was one of the high-end models; to that $4000 price tag for pre-cut lumber and materials (windows, doors, nails, paint, flooring, mouldings, etc.), add about $1500 for all utitilies and necessary options like window screens and asphalt roof shingles, as well as who knows how much for the lot to build it on and the cost of excavating a basement, plus bricks and cement (not supplied by Sears), and carpenter's wages for whatever work you didn't do yourself. 

So the total cost might have been around $8000 - equivalent to  $144,000 today, according to Measuring Worth.  This for a 36 x 26 floor plan, for a total of 1,872 square feet.  And that's just for the house, not including furniture and appliances, nor landscaping nor even a garage for your Pierce-Arrow.

But of course most people bought much less expensive homes.  The whole idea of the pre-cut, "mail-order" houses was to get a low-cost, well-built home that you could put up yourself, or, as many people did, hire a carpenter to erect it.  A great idea in its time, and makes for fascinating reading today.  If you're interested in that sort of thing, check out the Wikipedia article on "kit homes" here.

Bonus:  Thousands of Sears homes are still standing and much loved today by happy homeowners.  Here's a Lexington in Washington, D. C., that occupies its own triangular block.  The plan is reversed from that shown in the catalog, an easy change.  Some owner screened and expanded the side porch, and cleverly added a basement-level garage below.  The house appears to be well kept, but looks rather bleak in a monochrome paint scheme, stripped of its colonial shutters.  Why are modern people so afraid of color?

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Aladdin Readi-Cut Homes, 1958

The good life of the 1950s, which those happy kids would later mock and deride, and abandon for sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll - and all that has followed.  
But was it really so bad?

Your Head Trucker can hardly think of a better way to while away a rainy day - such as we are blessed to have here in Texas today - than by poring over old house plans.  I suspect that many of my truckbuddies also get off on floor plan porn, so I here present for your delectation a sampling from Aladdin Readi-Cut Homes, published in 1958. But first, a little background information.

Readi-cut houses, also known as mail-order houses or kit homes, began to be marketed shortly after the turn of the 20th century, and were popular until the advent of World War II.  Sears and Montgomery Ward were but two of many companies who offered such houses, which are not to be confused with prefabricated houses, in which many components - including whole walls, interior and exterior - are assembled in a factory and shipped to the builder, who merely has to stand them up and attach one to another.

Readi-cut houses, on the other hand, are built stick by stick and piece by piece just like any other platform-framed house, but every stud, joist, plank, and rafter is pre-cut by a giant series of buzzsaws at the factory to its precise dimensions, labeled, and numbered.  This eliminates the need for a homebuilder, or his carpenter, to buy large pieces of wood from a local lumber mill and spend the many hours needed to cut them all down into the individual pieces.  Furthermore, where pieces join, they are pre-notched so as to fit together snugly and precisely, thereby assuring strong and sturdy construction, without waste of time or materials.

The Aladdin Company, headquartered in Bay City, Michigan, was one of the most successful readi-cut home vendors.  In the roaring 1920s, at the height of the Florida land boom, the company leaders actually planned to build a whole city of their houses near Miami; unfortunately, the collapse of the boom, followed shorty after by the Great Depression, scuttled those plans.  The Depression dampened all kinds of house building nationwide, and the readi-cut companies who managed to carry on were most of them scuppered by the diversion of materials to the war effort in 1941-45.

Aladdin soldiered on, however, despite the postwar boom in tract houses built by the hundreds or thousands in new suburbs across the country, with the encouragement of new FHA and VA loans available to millions who could never have afforded new homes before.  For a nominal down payment and a low-interest mortgage, home buyers could get the keys to a cute, convenient, complete ranch-style house without ever having to swing a hammer:  an easy choice for all but the most dedicated do-it-yourselfers, I suspect.  But Aladdin and a few other companies kept turning out readi-cut plans for a dwindling market until finally calling it quits in the 1970s.

Well, now that Prof. Manley has done his educational duty with this history lesson, on to a selection of the 1958 plans; the full catalog is available to view or download at the marvelous Internet Archive, a true Aladdin's Cave of all sorts of quaint and curious lore on every subject imaginable.  Click any image to view in the lightbox; or right-click to open super-large in a new window.

Continued after the jump . . .

That Old House: GVT Douglas

The bungalow is not a native of Dixie, but its wide eaves and porch, copied from its Indian origins, are right at home in the sunny South.  I can so easily imagine this scene populated with kids and dogs playing in the yard beneath the shade trees, the grown-ups relaxing on the porch in rockers and a swing, iced tea and lemonade at hand, and from the idealized landscape beyond, a distant train whistle sounding through the sultry serenity of a summer Sunday afternoon.

Beginning what may become a regular feature, or not, on the Blue Truck with a little bit about one of my favorite topics, namely, old house plans.  I haven't often posted about this sort of thing because I know it is not a topic of great interest to most modern people.  But perhaps at least some of my truckbuddies will find it diverting.

Mainly because I just don't feel up to it today, I will spare you all the background lecture on the origins and development of mail-order houses and jump straight to a favorite of mine:  the Gordon-Van Tine bungalow called the Douglas, which was offered in their catalog from at least 1921 through 1936.

At 32 feet wide and 36 feet deep, with four bedrooms and bath, it was quite roomy for the time.  It's also interesting to note the little improvements made by 1936 that reduced wasted hallway space and made the front elevation extremely handsome, to my mind.  Scroll down and see what you think.

The 1921 version of the Douglas, with its typical bungalow details set off by dark siding and white trim.  Click to enlarge.

The earlier catalogs, and the later ones, had price lists in the front or back of the book; this catalog issued in the fall of 1929 listed the price on the same page as the house illustration.  Notice that there seems to be a special sales push on, with "freight paid" - I wonder if this catalog was put out in response to the Crash, and whether it boosted sales.  

For comparison, according to the excellent and very handy measuringworth.com, $2645 in 1929 was worth $37,100 in 2017 dollars.  This edition also gives many more details of all the standard and optional material and finish choices.  Paint, trim, moldings, door and window hardware, in fact everything necessary to build a habitable house, including everything but masonry and plaster, was included.  For example, you had to arrange in the usual way with a local contractor to dig and pour a cement foundation and basement walls; likewise for exterior stucco or brick veneer, or interior plasterwork.  Of course, none of that was included in the GVT price, either.

Every last stick of wood was cut precisely by giant machines, and bundled up neatly together with windows, doors, and roofing - even all the needed nails, screws, nuts, bolts, paint, and varnish - loaded at the factory in a forty-foot boxcar, and delivered to the nearest depot with a team track.  You paid the freight, but even so, you saved a bundle over buying uncut materials from your local lumber yard.  You then had to unload everything and haul it to the land you also had bought, where you could build it yourself, stick by pre-cut stick according to blueprints and directions - as many did - or you could hire a carpenter, or perhaps your brother-in-law, to do the job for you.  

And lest you think all this was a risky thing to do, many thousands of such homes are still standing and still solid as a rock, all across the country.  The advantage was the low cost of pre-cut materials, the savings in wasted time and materials over cutting each piece from raw lumber (without power tools!), and whatever sweat equity you chose to put into the finished project.  It seems that by buying a pre-cut home, most people saved about a third of the cost of a house built the regular way.

Just for fun, for the 1929 version above, I added up the price of options such as window screens, slate shingles, plumbing, electrical wiring, light fixtures, the recommended kitchen case, window shades, and a pipe furnace, to be housed downstairs in the basement:  all those basic necessities brought the price tag up to $3259.19, or in 2017 dollars, $45,700.

(For comparison, after consulting multiple official sources, I gather that the average wage for factory, construction, and railroad workers, along with public school teachers, was in the neighborhood of $1500-1600 a year in 1929 - equivalent to about $21,000 now, or about $10 an hour in our money.  Not much to raise a family on, but remember that they didn't have cable TV, air conditioning, internet, or credit cards then.)

Here's a picture of a Gordon-Van Tine kitchen from the 1931 catalog:  rather quaint to our modern eyes, but cozy and colorful:

At left, note the fashionable plaster arch and breakfast nook; the ice box just where it should be in the entryway from the back stoop, so the iceman doesn't have to track through the kitchen, dripping icewater and leaving muddy bootprints on the nice modern linoleum; at center the Gordon-Van Tine kitchen cabinets, with built-in flour and sugar bins; the handy kitchen stool under the sink, itself logically placed under a window - imagine that - so Mother could enjoy a view and a bit of breeze while scrubbing away.  You could choose from one of several color schemes:  this one has jade green cabinets, ivory panels, and vermilion trim.  GVT thought of everything and supplied everything, or tried to.

And here's a picture of the living room of one of their grander models, showcasing the high-end, extra-charge oak flooring:

And now for the piece de resistance:

The 1936 Douglas, with a much better use of hall space and a redesigned set of kitchen cabinets that will accommodate your swell new electric refrigerator.

Along with the perfect symmetry of the windows, it's the long, graceful arch across the front porch that makes this house so lovely - and of course the little details make all the difference.  Just look how much more elegant it appears with white siding, and, I would strongly urge, red shingles for the roof, to harmonize with the red brick pillars.  Very tasty, as they used to say.

Bungalows, meaning small, low-to-the-ground houses with wide eaves and often Craftsman-style details, were all the rage in the first decades of the 20th century, up till World War II.  There were many, many bungalows of this sort in the older sections of the city where I grew up - as a kid, I just thought of them as ancient, outmoded dwellings - now I understand why and how they were built as they were.  The interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s are the most interesting to me - first of all, because by that time most new houses had indoor plumbing and electricity, so you get a better sense of how people managed the ordinary needs of daily life.  The floor plans and roof lines in many cases seem more sensible then, too, compared to what came before the First World War.

And for another thing, my own grandparents' house, in which I lived for part of my childhood, was arranged very similar to the prevalent bungalow plan, though it was just a simple three-room shotgun house when they moved to town and bought it in 1925.  Over the years, however, they added on a room at a time down one side of the house, until they had a five-room house with two bathrooms; in later years, once all the children were grown and gone, they rented out the "new" side as an apartment, turning the back porch on that side into a mini-kitchen.

I don't have a picture of my grandparents' house to share with you all, but it was much simpler than most catalog houses - something like this rather plain model, with a bigger kitchen and an enclosed back porch, but without closets or basement:

Hard to believe now that people could live and raise three children - not to mention take in from time to time assorted friends and relations who needed a place to stay - and do it fairly happily in such a small house.  But they did, and though early on they got electric lights and indoor plumbing, they always lived very simply, as they had on the farm, and were to all appearances perfectly content with their little abode.  They lived simply, dressed simply, ate simply, went to bed with the proverbial chickens at night, and rose with the dawn.  And they both lived past 90.  There's a lot to be said for simplicity of life - as many a poet and philosopher has told us.

It's only since I have become a senior citizen myself that I have come to realize, truly, how incomprehensible the frenetic modern world of the 1960s and later must have seemed to them, children of the thrifty, hard-working, down-home and upright Victorian era.  And I am glad they did not live to see this present world.  But there I must leave you all to make your own reflections on human progress.

Assorted News and Views

Well I've read some things today that I thought about sharing with you fellas, but for some reason I just don't have the oomph to work any of them up into a blog post.  It come up a storm this afternoon about 4:30 and we got a good little shower of rain.  But it got so dark outside it made me feel like time to go back in the chicken house and roost for the night.  So I'll just post the links here and let y'all read the ones that pique your interest; they're all quite fascinating, for various reasons.

Mother of Transgender Toddler Gets a Lesson in Love

When the author's fourth daughter insisted as a toddler that she was really a boy, it took years to figure out that he was really right.

The Crime Committed in France, by France

The speech given by President François Hollande to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup on July 16 and 17, 1942, when the French police arrested 13,152 Jewish men, women, and children from Paris and its suburbs, and confined them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle stadium in Paris. They were later deported to German concentration camps.

The Last Book Sale

For years, your Head Trucker has been meaning to get up to Archer City and wander through renowned author (Hud, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, even the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, etc.) Larry McMurtry's book store, but now it's too late:  after fifty-five years, he's selling out and closing down.

 Earhart's Anti-Freckle Creme Jar Possibly Found

A small cosmetic jar found on a remote island in the Pacific offers new clues in the Amelia Earhart mystery.  [Be sure to click on the "More Photos" link.]

Destroyed.  For No Good Reason.

Kit home author and researcher Rosemary Thornton laments the wanton destruction of a unique and lovely Montgomery Ward home built by an aspiring Ohio homeowner in 1932.  Be sure to click the links to her previous posts on this topic too.