A Santa house & a tornado house. They didn't show the floorplan of the Osborne but that's the one I think I'd like.

TY for sharing!

Can you imagine the excitement of seeing your house components arriving at the train station?

I was surprised at the quality of these homes. They sure weren’t cheaply made.

Those homes were really solidly built and they have lasted so well! Plus, they're beautiful!

Damned clever of the folks at Sears who thought up this great idea: a home in a box.

They were quite nice and the quality was exceptional! What a great idea.

i assume the designs r in the public domain now? not sure how that works for stuff like this.
but w housing so unaffordable for so many, i honestly think it cd make a big difference. town i grew up in had a ton of sears houses.
the hood i live in now was all built by 1 company. they managed to add so much variety on cookie cutter designs.

I wonder if it would be cheaper to build a house this way today, in this economy, or more expensive? Might be feasible only for a very small house? I have no idea.

Imagine seeing your new home arriving at the train station in a huge crate!

when u do it that way, u do away w a lot of waste. u dont cut 2x4’s to 8 or 10 ft, u cut them to the exact size at the mill. u dont pack tiles into random size boxes, u pack them to the exact number u need. etc, etc.
u dont need an engineer to draw blueprints for each home.

these houses were engineered so that anyone cd put them together. community groups cd put them together. habitat for humanity cd bang them out in a day or 2.
fema cd use them, instead of putting ppl in stinky trailers that outgas formaldehyde.

they werent all tiny homes. but most of them used the same components, just in different arrangements. the hood i live in was built by 1 group of developers. they’re all built on a basic design. the 2 & 3 flats r pretty much all the same, but the single families have a lot of variation. it doesnt look like levittown, at all.

that was a Sears kit house. Over the years the front wrap around porch was closed in to expand the living room. I liked the house but was disappointed in the faux fireplace.

Did you know that in the early 1900s and again in the 1950s Sears sold cars out of their catalog?

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a23786730/sears-failed-selling-cars-twice/

TY for posting, sdfernando! That was interesting!

How cool you lived in a Sears house!

Other than bumping my head in the stairwells, it was pretty sweet.

You must be tall???

I bump my head going down to the cellar in my own house and I’m only 5’5”

I want to say they were 5/6 scale compared to "normal" standards but I'm probably mistaken.

In Harwick, PA, outside of Pittsburgh. My cousin lived in it until he passed last year. (Fortunately, AFTER voting for Kamala!)

Probably sometime in the 30's.