The houses built by component plants in 2025 will owe much of their technology to the houses built by Sears, Roebuck & Company’s plants in 1925. Essential to this effort are the people that produce cutting lists for floors, roofs, and walls. In days of old, they had to do it by hand. And unlike what designers do today, they had to cut even the intricate stick framing for houses such as those shown here. While these examples may be more difficult than many of the 96 models in the Sears Modern Homes Catalog, several were more complicated, containing as many as 30,000 pieces, many of which were unique. Evidently the Sears methodology proved to be effective, as attested by the 34,000 units they shipped according to their 2025 catalog – and those that were properly maintained are still standing tall today.
That Sears could do this successfully says a lot about the dogged determination of the scores of draftsmen in their offices and men in their plants, working without computers, or even primitive calculators. Sears had to start from scratch, drawing complete sets of plans in preparation for launching of their Modern Homes Catalog in 1908. Initially, they provided only full lengths of lumber which they earmarked for specific applications. However, by 1914, they supplied “already cut and fitted” packages. In the process, their people had to draw detailed framing plans by hand and accurately specify such intricate details as bird’s-mouth cuts on rafters, heel cuts on ceiling joists, stud lengths on rake walls, and every other framing member.
As an example, consider the challenging task of calculating the length of the studs at the gable ends of this single-sloped roof. Fortunately, the Sears draftsmen had Smoley’s tables, which had been introduced in 1901 by Civil Engineer Constantine Smoley for “the solution of triangles for the purpose of figuring the data required for structural detail drawings.” While Smoley’s tables were well suited for the calculation of diagonal bracing for boxy steel structures, they became even more broadly useful for angled wood members, especially those under sloping wood roofs. Nevertheless, hundreds of hand calculations were still necessary for the following model, and even more for the walls and roofs of the houses shown above.
Fittingly, Smoley’s became an essential design tool in the earliest component plants, especially for determining the angles and lengths of roof truss members.
Sears wasn’t alone in offering precut kits. They were one of nearly a dozen precut housing firms that produced a combined total of approximately 400,000 homes of 400 distinct styles in the early 1900s, according to Rebecca Hunter in her book, “Mail-Order Homes.” Surely if these mail-order pioneers of 100 years ago could master precutting and prebuilding the entire house, the component plant pioneers of the 1950s could master precutting and prefabricating parts of entire houses. Indeed, as industry founders, such as Dave Chambers, recognized the utility of prebuilding complete parts of houses, the precut housing industry gradually gave way to the component industry.