May 24, 2004

• Also check out Aladdin Homes--a prefab manufacturer that actually outlasteded Sears by some twenty years...
• ummm. "outlasted"
• Do they have floorplans? You can't properly house-fantasize without floorplans.
• I can't find any web sites specifically about it, but I know that Montgomery Ward also sold houses. Three houses within five miles of my parents house were Montgomery Ward houses.
• OMG, Dizzy!! I'm amazed, AMAZED!!! I had no idea. Ages ago, my family lived in Spokane, Wa. with my grandmother in a place called Corbin Park. I swear the neighborhood must have been nothing but Sears homes. Their beautiful. I'm totally sick with envy at what you used to be able to get. Plus, as far as I can tell, they were all well made. I'm positive my grandmother's house was a Sear's house. It was huge and wonderful. It had a trippy basement (coal room, hidden rooms) and an entire apartment on the third floor (with more hidden rooms). As children we were sure it was haunted, and of course, my grandmother perpetuated that with glee. I miss that house.:(
• jb: floorplans. Start organizing the furniture.
• I know of one of these Sears bungalows for sale just a couple of miles from me. The asking price is US $2,500,000. (That shocking number includes the surrounding 193 acres of riverfront property.) That's a thousandfold appreciation in seventy years. Not bad for a single-wide.
• I had the pleasure to live in a Sears Home several years ago. It was a variation of this house, built in 1912. It was solid and well designed inside and out. The original deep-relief paneling, on walls and ceiling, had been preserved downstairs. The landlord still had the original assembly manual, and you could see the part numbers stenciled on the joists in the attic and basement. To think that ordinary, middle-class people used to live in such places! It was just a house, but my wife and I miss it to this day. Some living spaces really do make your life better. This was one of them.
• Probably the closest to the old prefab kits are double-wide house trailers set on slabs. I've seen one or two which were impossible to distinguish from regular construction. But my favorite alternative housing is a dome home MonkeyFilter
• Scratch that, please. The URL is: http://www.monolithicdome.com/ . If you google for "dome homes" you'll find a lot of scruffy looking things, but this was on Metafilter a few years ago, and I've been hankering after a particular floor plan ever since. Unfortunately, they say that the cost is about the same as other custom construction, and I'm sure the lot cost has a lot to do with the cost.
• Well, domes look cool, but they've got a lorra lorra joins to seal.
• (Also, I'm going to be knocking this house over in a couple of years and building a new one, and I've been very pleasantly surprised by the quality of prefab stuff on offer. Not bad at all.)
• I think it would be so cool to have a strawbale home. Their so versatile. /off-topic
• Wolof - the ones I like aren't geodesic. They're polyurathane and concrete shot onto an inflated form (with rebar reinforcement.)
• schadenfreude: being a lazy reader, I first took your comment to say "start organizing the future." I don't know entirely what that would mean, but it sounds cool :)
• (and thank you, of course!)
• path- The Sears homes were anything but pre-fab. Comparing a craftsman-style home to a doublewide trailer is, um, inappropriate. The kits were a big pile of parts, all cut to shape and numbered, but you still had to build a house out of them. There was nothing pre-assembled. And the finished product was just as structurally sound as any other home of the time. The manufacturers hadn't figured out yet that people would settle for a lesser quality duplicate, like a pre-fab home.
• Thanks, zedediah, I stand corrected.
• Yes, the Montgomery Ward houses were the same way. I didn't even know that the houses near my parent's house were anything special until I got accepted to the Master's Degree program in Popular Culture at Bowling Green. They sent me a flier saying that their department building was a Montgomery Ward house and my dad told me that these other houses I had grown up around were too.