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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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.