House Plans: Three Compact Ranches

As I said in a previous post, I've reached my fill line on war news, so I've been trying to think of more pleasant things to blog about.  One of my longtime hobbies was drawing plans for my dream house, which I started doing when I was about 21.  Nearly half a century later, I still have never finished the plans, mainly because there is no perfect plan.  Try as you might, you can never get everything you want to come together just right in a single plan; all you can do is come close enough.

I suppose it's the same with all our dreams and fancies here in this mortal life - you can never get all you want the way you want it.  You have to settle for the possible, and be grateful that it's close enough.

(Just between us, I really don't believe the propaganda all these slick, shallow, "empowered" people spew out on TV night and day about their wonderful lives.  They may have lots of dough in their pockets, by hook or by crook - but they still put their pants on one leg at a time.  They are not exempt from the human condition.)

Along with drawing my own house plans, I've studied many printed plans.  For years I used to buy those house plan magazines they sell at the grocery store.  One company that I always thought had the best plans was Home Planners, Inc.  I'm not sure they are still in business, though you can still find many of their plans for sale on various internet sites.  I like to look back through their 1950s and 1960s ranch style plans, which were "new and modern" when I was growing up.  They still seem so to me.

And I still like them very much.  Usually, the basic footprint is a simple rectangle - easy and inexpensive to build.  (The more corners, the more building costs.)  Having lived in several such houses over the years, I can testify that they are very comfortable and convenient to live in, if the floor plan is sensible, as it usually is.  They might not appeal to everyone, but they suit me to a T:  a quarter-acre lot of St. Augustine grass, a red-brick ranch with white trim, and someone compatible to share it with were always my idea of earthly happiness.  But I'm old-fashioned.

So I'm going to post some favorite Home Planners designs for a while, and you can let me know if you like them, too.  First up are three compact plans from 1959 and 1963 - just right for a young family, or a couple of gay guys who prefer a peaceful home life to crawling the bars.  But that came later.

BTW, it goes without saying that the exteriors could be anything you want - brick, stucco, wood, shingles, etc.  And you could easily add a front or back porch, or reverse the plans to suit your building site.  Some people are snapping them up now and remodeling them out of all recognition; but I prefer the simplicity of the original designs in most cases.  

1.  Home Planners 1959 - Design G759 

3 bedrooms, 2 baths - 38' x 28' - 1075 sq. ft.

Click to enlarge.

This is plenty roomy for two quiet people, and perhaps a small child or two, even though at 1075 square feet it almost qualifies as a "tiny house" by today's standards.  The carport was quite a popular thing across the sunny South in the 1950s and 1960s.  Many houses very similar to this were built, and if you had one, you were doing well in life:  neither rich nor poor, but comfortably up to date.

I consider this a prime example of the simple, affordable ranch-style house, which came in many variations, larger and smaller.  Millions of people bought these houses on low-interest, low-down-payment FHA and VA loans.  Where I grew up, the price for this compact 3-bedroom, 2-bath house, depending on location, lot size, and options, probably would have been between $12,500 and $15,000 in 1960, or $110,000 to $130,000 today.  I vaguely recall that some smaller houses were sold for less than $10,000 in this period.

For comparison, you could get a Chevrolet sedan or a Buick station wagon for under $2500 then ($22,000 now).  And in the lower South and Texas, I recall that gas was around 22c a gallon (about $1,92 today).

Why do I say this is a good house design?  Let me point out some of the ingenious features of the layout.  

• For one thing, it has two bathrooms - a rarity until the late 1950s.  Part of the reason is that until about 1956, FHA lending rules required every bathroom to have an outside window - when they started allowing interior bathrooms without windows, designers could more easily fit two into a small plan.  I used to own a house with a very similar floor plan, with a skylight over the hall bathroom.

• The master bedroom is 13 x 11 - I can tell you from experience that this is the ideal size for a bedroom - big enough for a king-size bed and all the necessary bedroom furniture - but not so big that you feel you are sleeping in an airport terminal.  The second bedroom is big enough for twin beds; the third is small, but handy for use as a guest room or sewing room, or in today's world, a home office.

• Notice also that the plumbing fixtures  (bathrooms, laundry closet, and kitchen) are all grouped at the back of the house - this saves a lot of money on piping in construction.  This arrangement of three bedrooms around two bathrooms is very clever and space-saving; I'll be showing more examples of this in future posts.  

• Another brilliant feature is that each bedroom is insulated by closets from noise in other rooms - most important in a small house.  

• The master bath opens into the "family room," which is a bit of advertising puffery - obviously, it's the logical place for a dining table, though it could be a play area for babies and toddlers under mother's watchful eye in the kitchen.  If you don't mind informality, a trendy breakfast bar could easily be built on the living room side of the kitchen wall, open to the kitchen. 

• And finally, just look at that great big 7' x 8' storage room at the back of the carport, which could be anything you wanted it to be:  laundry room, workshop, garden shed, etc.  You could connect it to the house if you wanted, so you wouldn't have to step outside to use it.  I knew a couple of families where Dad turned this room into a hi-fi den, his private getaway.

2,  Home Planners 1963 - Design D1187

3BR, 2BA - 40' x 28' - 1120 sq. ft.

The same plan as the first, but reversed and two feet longer, with a garage instead of a carport.  

• The living room is larger, and so is the "family room" - I believe the dimensions of the latter room are mislabeled here, or on G759, as this is obviously a slightly larger room.  

• The Pullman kitchen in both plans is quite small, but efficiently laid out; I'd extend the back kitchen counter two more feet to the edge of the sliding-glass doors, and extend the other by adding a 2-foot pantry closet, if I had my druthers.  

• I'd also dispense with the trendy wall oven to get more counter space, and I would not have the range and the refrigerator jam up against each other - what a strange thing to do.  They should be at opposite ends of that counter, or one should be on the other side of the kitchen.

3.  Home Planners, 1963 - Design D1191

3 BR, 2BA - 44' x 28' - 1232 sq. ft.

Again, the same design but four feet longer and with some added features.  

• Now you're talking - it's almost luxurious.  You're coming up in the world, making good money, and feeling fine.  The wife has more room to display her pretty furniture, draperies, and china.  The kids have plenty of indoor play room on rainy days.  The good traffic flow from room to room means you can entertain friends and family on weekends and holidays without crowding.  

• The missus parks the new Pontiac in the garage overnight, while your ugly-cute VW bug waits patiently in the driveway for your morning run to the office.  All your hard work is really paying off now, with central air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpet in the living room, a console color television, a Barcalounger, and a big barbecue pit off the back patio.  It's the good life.

• This plan has the same 3-2 plan of bedrooms and bathrooms, but notice that the master bath now has its own tub (I'd prefer a shower stall) and the washer and dryer are located outside the hall bath, convenient to the dirty clothes hamper, so no effort is wasted carrying clothes back and forth.  I'd rather put the machines in the garage, to avoid potential water-leak disasters, and use the two spaces for linen and towel closets instead.

• The so-called family room begins to live up to its name, being insulated from the living-dining room by closets, and the kitchen is a bit bigger.  The back terrace is what everybody I grew up with called simply a patio - a slab of bare concrete.  This could be roofed over and even screened in, to make a more pleasant indoor/outdoor spot for patio furniture and outdoor meals.

• I don't like the doorway that cuts through the kitchen into the living room, eating up precious counter space.  But I see no way to eliminate that doorway in this plan without completely redesigning the kitchen and family room.

I suppose it's obvious that all three plans are single-story and without basements, which was standard practice in my day.  Judging by plan books dating back to the turn of the century, it seems that basements were practically a sine qua non of northern houses, and perhaps still are - but they were rare in the suburban Deep South, as were two-story homes.  

By the way, central air conditioning was not a standard feature in most Southern homes, old or new, until about 1970 or after.  Before then, you opened the windows and ran electric fans to keep cool in summer.  In some localities, attic fans or swamp coolers were very effective.  Those who could afford to buy window-unit air conditioners typically used them to cool certain rooms - like the dining room at dinner time, or bedrooms on hot nights - not the whole house.

These ranch homes were typically built with crawlspaces underneath (pier-and-beam construction) or on concrete pads.  Rooflines of these one-story ranch homes were usually simple gables extending across the whole house, or hipped roofs, which were fashionable for a time.  Variations and elaborations did exist, though, and I'll show you some of those in future posts.

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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 . . .