Tag: authenticate a Sears kit house

Fullerland Or Wooderton? A Case Of Hybrid Sears House

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Customized Sears Woodland-IMG_3066
This 1927 Sears “Woodland” Kit House in Silver Spring, MD, was customized to incorporate features and design elements of the smaller but popular “Fullerton”

There’s a lot of discussion in the historic kit house community about custom built kit houses, and the difficulty they pose when it comes to authenticating a mail-order home. “Custom kit” sounds like a misnomer, but it actually isn’t. The customization was done not on site by the builder but before shipment by a Sears (or Lewis or Wardway, etc.) staff architect, and the kit was then cut, sorted and packaged according to those changed specifications.

All the major mail-order house companies, including Sears and Lewis, the  most popular brands in the DC area, offered such options to the consumer. In fact, national kit house expert and historian Rosemary Thornton (“The Houses That Sears Built”) believes that 30 percent all all ordered kit houses came with some kind of customization.

Some of those customizations were upgrades (like brick veneer instead of wood siding), others had to do with lot restrictions or a family’s size requirements (making a house a couple of feet wider or narrower, or working extra additions like sunrooms or pantries into the  floor plan).

Woodland - 1925 Sears Honor Bilt HomesAnd then there were the ones for the more picky kit house buyer, who just couldn’t find the perfect model in the 135 or so page catalog. The ones that wanted a “Martha Washington” portico on their “Rembrandt”  or different windows, or liked one model but preferred the staircase location of another.

In some cases, the result was a hybrid of different models of the same mail-order catalog. One of those just came on the market in close-in Silver Spring, MD. It’s a 1927 Sears “Woodland” (by dimension, structure, footprint and architectural detail), but received the facade, smaller entry area and stairs of the  (overall much smaller) “Fullerton” model. Obviously, someone did not want to waste space on a useless, if stately, reception hall!

It’s a pretty house, and many other modifications have been made since (such as a powder room in the former first-floor closet or the transformation of one bedroom into a master bathroom). Some of the origins can still be traced nicely–as in the sturdy kit house window trim or the original built-in “medicine case”–, other elements–such as all the door hardware–have been obliterated. You can see excellent pictures of the listing here. The 4-bedroom, 3 1/2-bath house is offered by Re/Max Plus for $699,900.

Fullerton - 1925 Sears Honor Bilt HomesAs always, if you’d like to tour this “Woodland” or any other DC/MD home on the market — kit or contemporary — just let us know!

If you’d like to learn more about the historic 20th century mail-order homes, or if you think you live in one and would like help authenticating it, check out some of our other kit house blogs and posts.

And if you’re thinking you would like to live in an original Sears catalog home… maybe even a Woodland, please get in touch with us.  We are constantly scouring the marketplace for authentic catalog homes, and would be delighted to help you find one of your own.  Fill out the form below, or simply pick up the phone and give us a call.

The Fabulous Tale Of One Family’s Kit Home

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History of a Sears Kit Home

History of a Sears Kit HomeAs Marcie and I have been chasing (and writing about) kit houses for a while, we’ve always been interested in their history, or better: their connection to history. sometimes, I have found an old ad in the Washington Post that advertised a house we identified, or that promoted the local mail-order offices from Sears and Lewis. Sometimes information about the people who lived there in the early years can be found, about their successes or their death.

Most of the time, however, there’s a blank. We can only speculate (and we often do!). More often than not, current kit house owners have no idea their home was built from a kit, and sometimes they have no idea what that even means. (We’ve been asked whether that meant it was “kind of manufactured” or “prefabricated.”) Other people, however, who have heard of kit homes and are excited about them, frequently have come to believe their house is a kit when in fact it’s not.

Rare House HistoryThat said, it’s always delightful to come across a real kit house history, like the one that’ so lovingly documented on this little website. The Troyers of Kansas are telling the almost 100-year old story of their Sears “Concord,” complete with lots of pictures. Gee, I love this. Really.

Romantic Rodessa in Northwest DC’s Kent

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If Cati and I had our druthers, we would write about local kit houses on a weekly basis (this has  always been the goal).  Work, however, has a way of interfering with our plans.  I guess we shouldn’t complain!

So, about three weeks ago I headed out with my trusty tape measure to pay a visit to 5414 Hawthorne Place, NW in the District, right along MacArthur Blvd. Had I been a bit speedier with my posting, some of you might have chanced a visit.  As it stands now, the Sears Rodessa (see a pdf of the original catalog page here) bungalow is under contract.  Rats.

Built in 1925, this modified “Rodessa” (click here for MLS pictures) offers up 3 bedrooms and 2 full baths.  It would appear that it started off with a simple 2 bedrooms and 1 full bath (hey- count your blessings. Sears also offered a version without a privy).  Along the way, someone added some really unfortunate faux-stone siding, which remains to this day.  At the same time, they appear to have expanded the front porch to accommodate the massive FormStone® posts, so perhaps it was a good trade-off?  Naah.

Identifying this Sears Rodessa was pretty easy, given all of the clues (again, see pictures at the very bottom of this post):

  • Many exterior finishes survived the not-so-pretty faux stone dress: the exposed pegged rafters under the clipped gable roof and decorative blind boards for instance
  • The front door matches the exact classic bungalow-style door in the Sears catalog.  With 8-glass panels sitting atop a small “shelf”, this one is in the bag
  • The original Sears medicine cabinet with its plain bottom and three-member crown… a dead give-away
  • All the interior window and door trim and much of the hardware (such as the “Stratford” door plates–see pictures in the slideshow below) are preserved, and some are more unusual, for instance the “door butts” or closet hinges.  To be honest, these had us fooled, until Cati spied them in a long lost catalog
  • Many exterior finishes survived the not-so-pretty faux stone dress: the exposed pegged rafters under the clipped gable roof and decorative blind boards for instance
  • The measurements of all the (unaltered) rooms in the front of the house “check out,” meaning, a clone would not adhere to Sears specs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kent is a popular, if not sleepy little section of Washington, DC.  While it’s hard to know how the Hawthorne house came to the neighborhood, remnants of the old Capitol Transit #20 trolley line (Union Station to Cabin John) are to be found throughout the Palisades, the neighborhood next to Kent. The #20 was a popular route though the Palisades out to the Glen Echo Amusement Park. Chances are strong that the Sears kit house was transported on this very rail line.

 

 

 

 

 

If you think you’ve got a kit house, or if you are interested in living in a kit house- get in touch!  Fill out the form below, or give us a call (yup, we still answer our phones).

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The Garage In The Mail

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1920s Mail-order Garage

1920s Mail-order GarageIf you ordered your house in the mail, some 90 or 100 years ago, and you had enough land (and money for a car) left, you might have wanted a garage as well.

So, not surprisingly, all the major kit house manufacturers–in the DC area mainly Sears and Lewis, but also Aladdin and Gordon-Van Tine–sold garage kits in their catalogs as well. The styles often neatly matched the homes with their exposed rafters, hipped roofs, pretty cedar siding or whatever features the house itself sported.

This blue garage here I spotted during the Takoma Park House & Garden Tour yesterday, in the backyard of a lovely Sears house. (Note that the former driveway had long been blocked by a deck; most modern cars no longer fit into these garages.)

1920s mail -order garage in catalogTrying to verify that it was indeed a kit garage, I went through stacks of 1920s catalogs last night–only to find out the model was actually sold not by Sears but by one of its biggest competitors.

“Ready-Cut Garage No. 102” was offered in the 1923 catalog of Gordon Van-Tine.

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If you own (or live in) a Sears house or other mail-order/ kit house, please click here

So Close, And Yet So Far…

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Truth uncovered: a peek at the floor beams reveals that it's simply the "wrong" lumber for a Sears kit house

This is the first time I’ve written about a kit or catalog house.  Cati has a few years on me with this recent obsession, and on our drives around town names of kit houses flit off her lips like old multiplication tables… it’s no longer a novelty… rather, it’s ingrained.  “Oh, there’s an Alhambra. Oooo, look at that Americus.  Isn’t that a Vallonia?”  I have some catching up to do.  She’s also very descriptive in the way she writes about these homes, having been a former journalist.  I mean, how will I ever top a title like “A Sears Winona Kit House and a Gallon of Blood”?  It’s just not in my make up.  It’s sorta like having Springsteen be your warm up band.

But, persevere I must.  Cati and I like to keep an eye out for the latest real estate listings that we think might have kit house “potential.”  Some weeks the listings are a plenty; others, we really have to scrape the the bottom of the barrel.  This was the case with a house we recently viewed on England Terrace in Rockville, MD. With a great deal of misplaced enthusiasm, we managed to talk ourselves into thinking that it was an original Sears “Winona.” After all, on paper it seemed to share many of the characteristics.  It appeared to have roughly the same (original) footprint, it was

Home-made or pre-cut? The trim often betrays the true origins of your supposed kit house

built during the right era, a dormer on the left side of the house appeared to be exactly where the dining room would fall, and it had this cool looking odd little door in the middle of the living room wall…once we spied that in the house photos, we were smitten.

Five panel door--purchased from Sears 80 years ago?
It's quite possible that this five-panel door was purchased from popular Sears Roebuck at the time--that it came as part of a kit is less likely

Tires screeching, we raced out to Rockville, took a few false turns, and eventually found the house.

Almost as soon as we entered the house, we knew it was a bust.  Why?  The trim–where it hadn’t been replaced–was all wrong.  And the dormer favored the front of the house, not the middle as in the Winona. The distances of the bedroom windows from the corners were wrong.  The odd little door in the middle of the dining room wall (which we had seen in interior photos of “real” Winonas) was still in place, but the similarities stopped there.  The basement entrance had been modified when the addition was put on, so there were no identifying marks near the stairs (where we’ve discovered them in the past).  And a good deal of the basement had been re-built, as evidenced by the newer beams & shiny metal plates at just about every corner.

The biggest revelation, however, were the darkened original beams: roughly finished and a crude kind of wood–nothing like the high-quality lumber that was the trademark of even the simplest Sears house.

The little door that accesses a storage cabinet above the basement stairs resembles the medicine cabinets Sears offered in the 1920s, but the trim looks too plain

It’s possible that someone built the house based loosely on the design of a Winona he’d seen somewhere.  That was done a lot in those times, that sort of “borrowing.”  It’s also possible that a builder bought the kit and modified it, though in this case the building materials didn’t point that way.  It could be a knock off from a competitive kit company that we just don’t know about.  The possibilities are endless.  All we can tell you, for sure, is that it’s not a Winona.

While the outcome was a disappointment, it got us away from our desks and computer screens, out into the brilliant blue afternoon, checking out houses, which is what we love.  Next!

 

(Click here for an authentic, though modified, Winona in Arlington, VA)