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 . . .

Well, now that you've seen these selections, which would you pick?

And if some genie granted you the choice, would you rather live in 1958 or 2018?