Coming home from World War I to a severe shortage of housing, 4 million American men had little hope of achieving the American Dream of homeownership. In fact, that optimistic characterization hadn’t yet entered the American lexicon. Most new families were stuck in rental housing, or in parents’ basements, in the crowded industrial cities of the 1920s. But hope flashed from the pages of the ubiquitous Sears Catalog, where the home buying process was condensed and vastly simplified. There, several 5-room houses were listed for less than $2000, which was about half the amount a traditional homebuilder would charge. Of course, to many families, the task of building it themselves seemed daunting. However, 34,000 elected to do so by the time the 1926 edition was printed.
Among the buyers, a portion were motivated because of the compelling Sears cache. Sears offered affordable financing, with payments as low as $30 per month, and guaranteed the quality of their product. This assurance from the worlds’ largest retailer was of untold significance at rural or suburban sites where building codes were lacking. And, not to be underestimated, was the standardization of construction technology established by Sears and others that made assembly by amateurs possible.
In many ways, these 1920s providers of some 400,000 precut homes changed the tenor of homebuilding. Their product had to be knocked down into smaller pieces for transport, which began the componentization and mass production of framing parts and discouraged the then-common practice of balloon framing two-story homes. Door jambs, window openings, headers, and corner framing assemblies were built in bulk, which set the stage for the uniformity of lumber sizes, lengths, and grades. And, procedures were developed that minimized errors in paperwork and plant processes.
The durable results of their efforts are evidenced by the thousands of century-old precut homes that are still standing in good condition in communities across the country. In the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, Illinois, for example, 25 stellar examples still attest to the quality of this process, such as the Lexington Model, sold until 1933.
While the precut home technology enabled many to realize their dream of home ownership, the rest of the 50 million annual recipients of the Sears Catalog realized that the American Dream was well within their reach. However, this latter group had to put their buying plans on hold during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and through the subsequent war years. During this long hiatus, Sears and most of their peers left the business of selling houses through catalogs. However, a small cadre of suppliers persevered by taking on government-sponsored projects, where they, by necessity, had to ramp up their productivity, and adopt the next innovation in home construction, prefabrication. Yet, the groundwork had been laid by the precut home innovators.