I currently live in an unaltered Sears & Roebuck kit house built in 1927. I can verify that they are exceptionally well-crafted. I live in an area that receives heavy snow-fall and my house has held up beautifully all these years. I will be reaching out to the website as I have the paperwork that verifies it as a kit house. I purchased it from the family that ordered and built it.
@@J-wm4ss they did. I'd give a limb for an old craftsman house. Built to a better standard than today. The proof is how long they've been around. It was a wonderful thing.
@@Kerry-uo6ogNot all craftsmen were kit houses. Most were stick-built (i.e. built from scratch). Probably the most popular style were American Foursquares due to the low cost of materials.
I grew up in a Sears house from 1927. They shipped the complete kit of materials, along with the plans, to a local contractor who built it. When I was a kid in the 70s I found the plans in the attic, along with all the correspondence between the builder and the original owner.
Honestly Amazon is flooded from sellers from China, so there is a very good chance that there is a language barrier. However, as I used to also have to cram search terms into a page for a living, I can tell you that there is also an equally good chance that someone had to cram the term "Shelter" into the page somewhere. SEO is a nightmare and I swear its ruining the internet for us all.
This gets to the core of why the "Tiny House" and "Van Life" movements bother me. They're not an aesthetic or lifestyle choice but an economic indicator that regular housing is out of reach for most young people.
the sad thing is that these things are aspirational like for many even buying a plot of land in the middle of nowhere is a big investment, never mind the huge lifestyle changes that you have to do in order to achieve this... I know, because I'm living the dream
I chose to get an RV over buying a house for my home now. I live in a 31xl Jayco Redhawk. I am currently typing this in what was the bunkbeds area of the RV. I removed them and placed my work from home office in there with currents to block me off from the rest of the RV. Yes I have a bedroom and living room and I can travel with my home but to me, I feel like it was me giving up on the housing market. And I am main Scheduler for the Texas and OK area for a large name security company. So I don't make a small wage. But its all really I can afford. When I say RV my Jayco is a used unit 2016 so its not nothing fancy.
You're now buying leftovers from the plague quarantine economy. Those are meant to be mobile PCR test huts and housing for construction workers. But they're superficially cheap, hooray poverty!
Kinda, but there are a lot of people who do it for the lifestyle/aesthetic choice. We know this is the case because they'll spend the same amount of money, if not more, as a prefab or mostly fab solution For example, someone spending $14-35k on one of those houses online could literally just buy an RV and a vehicle to tow it, *or* a "shed" or even a shipping container(maybe 2) that's the size of a small house and pay to have it finished out, insuring everything meets code. Delivery tends to be free within a certain distance(often 25-50 miles). Similarly, I've seen some people spend so much on "van life" to try to "save money" that they could've just bought a camper van and saved themselves a lot of work.
Depends on what you mean by a “regular” house. The average size of a house in the 1950’s was 983 sq feet while, today it’s 2,014 sq feet. In the 1920’s, the average home size was 1,048 sq feet. So the size of a regular house changes and to be honest if you can live in a smaller home people should live in the smaller home.
I sometimes really wish Sears had not decided that the internet was a fad and had actually gone through with the plans to open a webstore back in the 90s.
@@guard13007 - Companies are neither good nor bad. It is the people leading them that determine how ethical they are. You can have a 200,000 employee corporation that is socially and environmentally conscious that treats its employees and customers well, or a self-employed person that rips off every person he does business with.
@@Bustermachine LMAO where do you think half the garbage on Amazon comes from? The "houses" shown in this video didn't first come to my attention through Amazon, I learned about them through Alibaba which is basically just another Temu. Literally have the stuff being sold on Amazon anymore can be found through Temu. Amazon will get it to you faster and they might give a little more assurance to you through their return and exchange policy. But in the end it's the same damn stuff most of the time.
Something that freaks me out is the idea that even the "good quality" stuff isn't good anymore. Like going to the lumber yard, you are going to find worse quality wood than you would in past because they've started harvesting the wood too early so it isn't as hard as it's supposed to be.
That's what's required for infinite profit baby Everyone sells bad stuff as good stuff and we all smile and put up with it It's only going to get worse
I live in a 65 year-old house with inside walls made from 2 X 3s (the outside masonry supports the floors) and, from the number of rings, they are definitely not old-growth. But after 65 years of sitting around, they are hard as a rock and it's easy to destroy a drill bit trying to get through one. The sapwood in today's lumber is softer and more rot prone than what was used in the 1800s, but if it is kept dry for 50 years, it will probably solidify just like the lumber in my walls. Of course, that's only if the builder lapped the roof flashing and housewrap correctly, something which has been a challenge for many builders in recent years.
I love a good amazon product name (with restroom). They look a lot like the temporary classrooms that my high school had when they were remodeling and building. They were a nightmare, too cold in winter and too hot in the summer.
Arguably worse. Portables were normally just specialty trailers. Cut down to be enough for a classroom and connected with walkways. These look like they have 0 insulation.
I'm a residential cleaner and I promise you, they do NOT suck! .. They're absolute trash BECAUSE of that 😂 I have a couple clients who STILL have theirs and prefer we use it vs our commercial vac... There's definitely a noticeable difference between the 2 and.. the smell 😅 (I guess they're so good the clients don't care that they haven't changed their filters since 1995 😂)
People will have to accept the possibility that we won't ever return to 3%. If sellers must sell, home prices will have to decline, and lower evaluations will follow. Sure I'm not alone in my chain of thoughts.
Well i think, home prices will need to fall by at least 40% before the market normalizes. If you do not know whether to buy a house or not, it is best you seek guidance from a well-experienced advisor for proper portfolio allocation. So far, that’s how I’ve stayed afloat over 5 years now, amassing nearly $1m in return on investments.
@parrish8386 Finding financial advisors like Amber Angelyn O'malley who can assist you shape your portfolio would be a very creative option. There will be difficult times ahead, and prudent personal money management will be essential to navigating them.
Finding financial advisors like Sharon Ann Meny who can assist you shape your portfolio would be a very creative option. There will be difficult times ahead, and prudent personal money management will be essential to navigating them.
I lived in a 1920s Sears catalog house in college! They had the order page and newspaper article about it from the time framed. It was a lovely 3 bedroom house! Very cool
Surprisingly, kit homes still exist, just not in the way they used to. Home Depot sells “tiny house kits” for about $60,000 but it’s just timber and metal frames. Electrical, plumbing all has to be done separately
The price for a tiny house "kit" is ridiculous ! ! You have to add on the cost of land, basement or footers, building (cause nobody can DIY houses these day), and plumbing, electrical etc. Better off to buy an older existing home. That said, I would like an old style Sears home kit cause my sons are handy like that and we already own a 6 acre lot.
I've live in a 'Sears' house, and it was built with the best materials, and was beautifully detailed. And as it dated from 1926, I would say that it was well-built, too.
I still remember Sears tv commercials from 2002. They were just so repetitive and played so often. Wife: We need something fast. We need something good. Husband: We need something like Sears. And then the wife would stare at the husband, seemingly amazed that he's not braindead. 😂
@@teslashark It amazes me that of all the companies to be put out of business by the internet, Sears is one of them. Their biggest hook was always their catalog. If they had just thought to put the catalog online, they could have been a serious competitor to Amazon.
As a city planner in California, i can confirm that the Amazon houses would be hard to implement in most cities. A lot of jurisdictions require permanent foundation for a structure to be habitable. Also some still restrict the use of “Tiny homes”
I'm a surveyor in East Tennessee, and trust me, I have plenty of problems with planners and the whole concept of planning and zoning. However, "you can't put your tiny house here because it doesn't have a foundation and this part of the county regularly sees 90+ mph winds" seems like a reasonable thing to say.
@jericho86 weird my house is a homebuilt trailer just sitting on blocks my 12x24ft shed just Sits on blocks we have storms every few years with 80mph+ sustained and gusts a lot higher than that. My place hasn't moved an inch in the 50+ years it's been here. Soo I think your "codes" are full of crap. Also I have a nearly empty shipping container sitting in my yard that has also never moved an inch from "wind" unless it's literally a damn tornado I think I'll be just fine. Building codes are stupid my house ill do whatever I want to it
@@ThatOneGuyWithTheEyemost of the US does frequently see tornadoes, and not just tornadoes but MASSIVE ones. I’d happily get a manufactured home if they could install it into a foundation like a real house, but even the way they do it isn’t safe enough for Texas. Like, I’ve lived in the northeast and in the south, I’ve never had the liberty of not worrying about tornado weather.
@@jericho86 That's funny. You have Randy Johnson in your backdoor with his tiny home community in Eastern Tennessee. He has a youtube channel selling his tiny homes as well as his properties. Its called incredibox.
Most of the US restricts tiny homes. Also the definition of a tiny home can be surprising. In county and twp ordinance in MI, most view anything under 1k sq ft as tiny. In fact most places, minimum build for sq ft is 1000 to 1500. I find this out when I want to build a 650 sq ft house and find they will not allow it. Who even needs more than that? It's truly a mess
My father was born in Carlinville in 1920 and my grandmother saw the 'Standard Addition' go up. For some reason she strongly distrusted living in 'company housing' (or electricity) and refused to buy a home there when she and my grandfather were looking for a house. No one ever thought some day the neighborhood would be so historic. I wish Sears homes, like they were made then, was still an option.
Honestly your grandmother was probably on to something, it can be such a dangerous game to have your housing connected to your company. I think Carlinville was after this was common practice, but there were earlier examples of company towns in the Chicago area that were terrible for the workers (Pullman Strike). I wonder if that might have be in the collective memory of the entire state.
@@kendragaylord yea, a soulless company having that much control in people's lives is never good. Same reason company scrip was horrible and eventually outlawed. Though ofc Amazon has tried both...
I own a sears house, finished in 1929. There are a few additions, the electrical still has some in-service post and beam. What I am most impressed by is the MASSIVE sears stamped oak beam spanning the foundation that holds up the center of the house and second floor. The nearest oak tree to me that is even close to the size of this beam is probably 3000 miles away.
That was a really interesting watch. Seems like the catalog houses should come back. Particularly in the UK where newbuilds are so bad they are regularly condemned. A video on rubbish UK newbuilds might be interesting. Thanks for this, I learnt a lot.
From a US standpoint: I think the things that are different today that would make this not a viable option are: 1. Building codes that, for better or worse, make it so unskilled people are less likely to be able to successfully meet them (and that's assuming the code doesn't force you to use a licensed professional). 2. The local availability of mass produced lumber in standardized forms. The shipping alone would kill a kit house.
@Kandralla I think you both underestimate people's ability to learn code, and have overlooked the merits of a kit home in the first place. you dont need to learn the code if the instructions instruct you to follow them. you just have to build it the way the company tells you, and the company has to build their kit to code for your area. this puts much of the code-related headache on the business and not the consumer. as for shipping, that needs to be done in-house for sure. the kit home company would need to run its own warehouses and drive the kits to their destination themselves. can't use a middleman like Amazon when you're shipping entire homes full of construction material. Sears already had these warehouses and shipping channels before they ever started their kit homes, which is what made them the perfect people to do it. but that isn't to say it would be impossible for a company to start up without already having these things, they'd just have to have a large initial investment and start in a small local area instead of sending a catalog across the nation like sears did.
@@arcanealchemist3190 1. Peoples ability to build to the code doesn't mean anything if the codes, for instance, require a licensed electrician to sign off on the work. I'm for sure not going to sign off on some random persons work. 2. It's easy to say "they just need their own infrastructure", its hard to actually do it. No company is going to be able to beat a local lumberyard on just 1 round of shipping, much less shipping it to your factory, cutting the pieces, and then shipping that out to the builder. You realize the Sears wasn't sending you 2x4's right. The lumber was all pre cut, you assembled it like a Lego kit.
@@Kandralla okay, now im certain you dont care what reality is, you just want to "win" an argument. this will be the last reply I send to you. you didn't watch the video, did you? they were legitimately sending 2×4s. not all of the kits came pre-cut. and they were coming from Sear's affiliated lumber yards. what do you think a lumber yard does, if not cut lumber? and YOU may not want to send people to make sure work gets done right, but all of society pretty much runs on sending people to make sure other people do their jobs right. building code inspectors have had jobs for a long time and will continue to do them regardless of how viable you personally think that is. it's a normal thing that should be done and does get done, all the time. and EVERY person is "some random person", thats why the people who sign off on code inspect the work! sorry, just everything you're saying comes so clearly from a place of ignorance that I just can't find the motivation to respond to it in a nice way. confidently being wrong is still wrong!
@@arcanealchemist3190 "confidently being wrong is still wrong!" Yes I watched the video and you haven't actually told me where I'm wrong. The Sears houses came with pretty much all of the lumber precut in their facilities which weren't local; I'm not talking taking a log and making 2X4's I'm talking taking a 2X4 and making the detailed cuts (stuff that is usually done on site by a carpenter). That's the whole point. That's how people that weren't carpenters could quickly put together homes that lasted. They weren't making many detailed cuts, and measurements. All that was already done. As for code there's a big difference between the building inspector and a licensed electrician signing off on work. The electrician is signing off that the work was done correctly and takes on liability if it's not. The building inspector takes no liability for the work done; their job is largely to make sure the requirements to close out the permit have been met. I have no clue what set you off, I just responded why it wouldn't work today if the goal is affordability. If you just want to say stuff and not have people critique it post it in notepad and not on the internet.
This channel slaps. I gotta say it. Also, I have a page from a winter 1917 sears roebuck catalog framed on my wall. I love looking at it and thinking about how it could have been used as toilet paper but it’s behind glass instead lol
That amazon "house" is an air mattress. Something for occasional short term use. It would be great for a festival or a weekend in good weather. Frankly an RV is a better home. The Sears houses are cool too especially the concrete ones.
My middle school social studies teacher was very indulgent with student-imposed distractions and one time I raised my hand in the middle of a lesson and pointed out the window to the water tower and asked how the heck they worked. He went up to the whiteboard and erased the notes he'd prewritten for his lecture and drew a diagram of a water tower and explained the whole process lol dude was like a forestry-coded, bearded Mr. Rogers. His voice never rose above a supported murmur, like he was saying something important but it was as if someone in the room was holding a sleeping baby and he was being mindful not to disturb them. Anyway, random anecdote and memory but I will never forget having water towers gently explained to me in his classroom lol
I urbexed a Sears Catalog home that was built in 1914 for around $1,800, according to the granddaughter that lived in a newer home next door. That was 2012. The home hadn't been occupied since 1991[owner passed away] but it was on a plot that had other, newer family homes nearby so they had kept up superficial repairs. Transients had stayed in it from time-to-time but hadn't actually damaged anything. The property owners razed the lot in 2019. That house was as solid, if not more, than any non-custom home built around here after 1993.
my parents, who own a 2nd hand car sale, had to relocate their business to a larger place, though it didn't have an office building, therefore they bought a "container room" similar to what you're showing. It's great for work and to host some customers, but I would never ever want to (permanently) live in that
This is embarrassing but when I first was told "This is a historic craftsman house" I thought that meant it was from Sears because Craftsman was the tool brand from Sears. My mother (who is way to into historic homes) gave me a whole displeased lecture on the matter. Is it true they also told you how many nails you would need for each step in assembly?
I grew up in a Sears house from 1909, had the original paperwork and deed and everything from througout the years- we were only the third owners. Although we passed the paperwork stuff to the new owners when we sold. Loved growing up in that house. Lots of windows and sunlight, a smart layout safety-wise with all the bedrooms upstairs and communal spaces on the ground floor, it had a sleeping porch off a bedroom on the upper floor, and it had a three season porch in front perfect for us kids to change out of muddy and snowy stuff, for storing outdoor toys, and for my parents to supervise us playing in the front yard without having to deal with the mosquitoes themselves. After we sold it and moved, it got renovated though :/
Our last house was a 1930 Sears house. We loved it. I theorize the basement was constructed by someone who spent the entire time drunk, but that wasn't Sears' fault. - Nice to learn a little bit more about their history. Thanks.
My parents owned a Sears house from the 1900's. The house is still around and looks pretty good. Those old Sears houses were built sturdy. Unlike these modern ... things.
Wonderful video, Kendra! Thanks for showcasing several of the blogs and websites of our research group members! This was a pleasure to watch, especially because it was accurate and well researched (which is not always the case, when folks start talking about Sears houses).
Thank you for your kind message, and most of all for all your work commemorating all these kit houses! The video would have been so much shallower without all the great research your group has been doing.
Yes please to a water tower video! I grew up in a neighbourhood called Tower Hill because of the water tower down the street, but the water tower got removed. So the name Tower Hill is weird now.
I grew up in a sears house. They are common in neighborhoods around car plants. GM, Buick, and Ford families made Sears houses into multi-generational homes. Now a lot of these houses are falling apart and people are being pushed out of them as car plant neighborhoods don't really exist anymore. It's fascinating to see the same system being replicated by an online mega supplier like Amazon. The main component that seems to be missing, just like everything else in modern society, is a sense of community.
I’ve always thought the Amazon house is kind of a modern/worse version of the Jean Prouvé demountable houses built in post war France. Both had to be dirt cheap to produce, build in a matter of hours and fulfil the absolute most basic of needs a house must… only really difference is one was built as a solution to a crisis the other feels like a bit of a cash grab
In the town that I grew up in there is a replica Sears house that was built from an original set of Sears house plains. I found out about when I was building my house, when I was building my house I was talking to an old guy about how I was building my house and he said that is like a Sears house and he told me about Sears house kits. With my house I bought a set of plans for a 24X24, 2 car garage with a one bedroom and one bath apartment above the garage. All I wanted was the plans for the one bedroom, one bath apartment. I then went to 84 Lumber and bought a 24X24 two car garage kit and used the plans to build it into a 576 sf. one bedroom and one bath house. I traded the two garage doors back to 84 Lumber for the lumber to fill in where the two garage doors would have gone and 2 windows and and a 2nd man door. This was around 1994, I had the land so when the house was finished I had just under *_$17,000.00_* in it and it was 100% paid for.
Just saw a 43 foot ketch sold on ebay for $3000. It was a beauty. Needed work but double king main bedroom, bath, kitchen, stove oven, refrigerator, double sink. 2 single bed bunk rooms, double seat sofa living room/dinette, 45 hp diesel runs, Sails, and some new deck ware, inflatable dingy, 5 hp motor, and trailer.
I have been a fan of the pre WW2 bungalows, specifically Sears and it's competitors... Another company that built & sold these houses was Gordon Van Tine, based in the Quad Cities that marketed many of their homes thru Montgomery Ward. It is a great concept, and with slight modifcation their floor plans are excellent for modest sized homes today!
Yay a new video!!! 👏 🎉 You have become my new favorite channel & podcast over the past 6 months😁❤ Please keep up the amazing work - you have a very soothing voice & demeanor while being naturally funny. The perfect combo for niche topics like the ones you expand on 🙌
The Sears Catalog was how we did Amazon Wish Lists before the internet. Every fall, Mom would leave one in the bathroom with a pen. My brother and I would put our initials next to each product we might want for Christmas. I don't know how many of those gifts were purchased from Sears, but those catalogs really saved Mom time and money.
A friend of mine has a piece of land out in the middle of relatively nowhere. I had recommended something like this kind of thing as a dry cabin, for summer use. The reason is that it's quick to setup, but if it also can be folded back up, he could do that for the off season times. (It would reduce wear and tear, and possibly just be more secure.) All of that being said, you can do something similar with a 40ft shipping container, which also has higher ceilings. (You'd have to cut out and install windows.)
I hope this doesn't sound weird, but your voice and manner of speaking makes it sound like everything you say is deeply profound, even for sentences like "the depression kept depressing"
I live in a kit house. (FirstDay Cottage). We couldn't have afforded anything like as nice a house without the kit. Also, we got to prioritize what we care about. More windows, fewer bedrooms. It was MUCH more expensive to get the contractors for plumbing and electricity and the slab foundation than we'd thought when we started. Even kits from reputable companies aren't quite as easy to organize forand build as you hope. A shed/booth is not a house. Great video. __----Water towers! Water towers!----__
Great video. Amazon really isn't very reliable for buying anything that isn't a branded product you're already familiar with. This might do as a garden office or something but even then it's pretty ugly. The Sears houses blended in enough that somebody wouldn't know it was a kit.
Also, as for the "houses" themselves- these things are not new, and they are not now and never were intended to be homes. They're temporary office spaces, found all over train depots and construction sites around the country. No one should be living in them, and the fact that they are being marketed this way is both deceptive and borderline unlawful.
@@JohnSmith-wx9wj Given that a shipping container can be had and filled out for the same price or less, it's not even cheaper except per sq ft. That doesn't even matter too much because the shipping container is structurally sound enough that one can expand off it, unlike the rapidly deployable mess
@@JohnSmith-wx9wj Depends on how you get'em from. I've seen some that are only a few grand more than the shipping container's base price(which itself was only a few grand)
Ok now that I've actually watched the video... My partner and i have pretty much sworn off Amazon about 6 years ago because of their awful labour practices but very infrequently I'll look something up on it if it's the kind of weird thing that you can't find elsewhere. I have to say, the dip in quality of amazon as a shopping experience between when i used it semi-regularly and now is pretty crazy. You feel like you're constantly trying to fight the algorithm to find what you're looking for and their categorisation and UI is abysmal. They've gone from being "an online store where you can get anything without paying a premium" to having a weird black market vibe where nothing is as advertised and you're constantly checking to see if you've been robbed 😂 I still like your work btw.
Your videos EAT id love to hear u talk more abt urban anth and like “eyes on the street” type architecture im so curious to know your thoughts on the history of white flight and suburban sprawl in the context of structure and space too
Oh I’m so glad you posted this!! When the Amazon houses started going viral I wanted to do my own deep dive into how they compared to the sears homes but never got around to it!!
There’s a TON of these in the St. Louis metro. I grew up on the east side in granite city and I’m like 90% sure a good chunk of houses were sears houses but I haven’t been able to verify. Granite was a company town built for people to work at the steel mill.
Strange story: my grandparents lived in a house in the Birmingham, Alabama, area that reminds me so much of Sears kit houses. I spent quite a bit of time online searching for a Sears house that matched theirs, and although while there were many that were nearly the same, none were a perfect match. Both grandparents were gone by the early 60s, when I was in junior high school, and their house of decades was sold. Fast forward to the late 70s. I am married, have two little girls, and my husband and I live in a very small town in Eastern Oregon. We wanted to buy a house for our little family to live in. The realtor showed us my grandparents' house. Well, obviously it wasn't actually theirs, but it was the exact design and floor plan. I was stunned, and wanted so much to buy that little house, so I could live in the "same" house as my grandparents, but frankly, it didn't fit our needs at all. Since then I have wondered if those were Sears kit houses -- or if not Sears, kit houses, at least. I would love to know...
Wow this video is awesome!! Funnily enough, I first learned about mail order houses from the epilogue of Red Dead Redemption 2. It shows the whole process of your character, John Marston, getting a loan in order to build a pre-built ranch house and I thought it was so fascinating that people back then could literally just buy a house and build it if they had the land. Now, with Amazon, the concept of mail-ordering is very similar, but very lackluster in quality. I loved how you took the time to go through the history and really show why this isn’t such a “new” idea but also the differences between mail-order houses then and now.
Kendra, every single video of yours that I've seen is incredible. I go out of my way to share your channel with people because they're so well researched, well spoken, and interesting. I can't speak for your stamps videos because I haven't watched any (not my thing), but learning about real people that lived in the places you discuss feels like we're being blessed with a little bit of microhistory in a sea of modern rhetoric about grand narratives and discussions of whole movements and events. You bring things down to the level of human interaction and impact, which is what everyone should be most concerned about. Please do keep up the great work, if it still makes you happy, and thank you for enriching my life by introducing new ideas, histories and perspectives
This is such a kind comment! My dream has always been to explain things how I learn best, which is focused around people and the things they did. I hope to do this for a long time. Thank you for such a lovely comment, it brightened my day!
Code was maintained by the skilled trades who did the work on sears homes. that work is just now, all packaged inside the product you get. Yeah, without the install, there is no guarantee that anyone who cares checked out the code situation. UL listing, or other rating agencies maybe, but I dont know that they have a standard yet, and I dont expect they bother with the local legalities
I’m sorry, but I’m distracted by the floral pattern in your shirt. It’s gorgeous. Also my partner’s grandparent’s have a few of the Sear’s homes in their neighborhood. It’s a hurricane prone area and they’re still there 🤷
Codes are by far the biggest killer to tiny home projects. Mine require you install a full septic tank, even if the house is a 10x10 shoe box. That's a 30k$ addition to your box without electricity.
Requiring a proper and safe septic system for a dwelling is merely sensible in an area without domestic sanitary sewers. Cess pools are not sanitary. Sewage holding tanks must be cleaned out regularly at about $700 a time. Complaining about safety issue requirements is not exactly helping your case.
@@michaeltutty1540 Most tiny houses are not a full time living residence. Most are just a studio space for hobbies. There's no reason a glorified shed needs a whole septic tank to itself if it's not an actual full time living space. It's not about sanitation it's about overreaching regulations thst don't have nuance in how their applied.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - your scripts and delivery are among the best on UA-cam and you always get at least a few honest to god lols out of me.
I grew up in post-war Sears housing from the 40s, and I loved that house so much. It felt sturdy and practical and even though it was from 1946, it didn't look dated or cheap.
I live in a four square sears house ! So freaking solid brick. What we discovered last year with a remodel of kitchen that the house was built before indoor plumbing. The cast iron plumb was added after and the pipes painted the wall color.
My mother grew up in a Sear home assembled by my Grandfather (with help from friends and family). Likely similar to the Fairy. By the time I first saw it, it was 2 floors, and likely about 1,200 to 1,800 sq ft. My Grandmother liver there until she passed on (widowed decades before), and my Uncle still lives there. I haven't seen the home since the late 80s, but it seems to still be in great shape.
i would Absolutely watch a water tower video. They were one of my hyperfixations as a kid for some reason. I would LOVE to see a video essay on them omg
We live in a 1962 Sears house. My whole neighborhood are all sears homes. Ranches, split levels, raised ranches, and center hall colonials. You can walk around the neighborhood and see all the choices that were available.
Hugh Hefner's childhood home was a sears home and they showed it on the Girls Next Door it was still in great condition. If only we still had this type of quality today. My grandmas first doll was from sears, it was a story she always remembered even when she started suffering from dementia. I would have loved one of these homes, the styles are so nice. I love the history of who bought these homes.
Friends of my family when I was growing up had a Sears house. It was probably built in the late 50’s or early 60’s. It was a nice house and is still being lived in today.
I grew up in a Sears home -- the Crescent model, built in 1926 -- in Glenview, IL. I know exactly where the alphanumeric markings are located on the floor trusses, which can be easily seen in the basement. The house is about 1/2 mile from the train depot in Glenview; that's how these home kits arrived -- by train.
I was raised in a 1920 Sears house and it's... A mess. This thing has so many problems. It's unending. It's a terrible idea if you live in a cold state like Wisconsin. My dad had to plastic wrap my bedroom windows because the insulation is so terrible.The kitchen is built for giants and the bedrooms are built for ants. I shudder to think of any kids growing up in Amazon homes because their parents don't have any better options.
The Sears houses are fascinating. I only know of one in my area, down the road a bit in Benson, NC there is a Sears Magnolia that is now a funeral home. Interesting thing I noticed while looking at the catalog, they DID offer houses without bathrooms. Remember, when these houses were being sold a lot of places, especially out in the country, didn't have running water or electricity. Sears wanted to be able to sell homes to those people too.
I can see the benefit of these quick fold out houses for emergency housing, if they really did have all the basic amenities a family would need. But to live in long term? Unlikely. Plus this doesn't look like it would be suitable in extreme heat or cold. I live in NH and that looks like it would be very drafty, you can't tell if it's really sealed.
The concept of Sears houses is simply how houses are built in Sweden. You order from a catalog. The companies will have places where they have example houses so you can go and look at them. They come as pre-built modules, and the company will put them up in a few days. You can pay for internal finishing or do it yourself. They cost from $80.000 up. Edit: Those fold up houses look great if you need a temporary office, say at a building site or so.
@@653j521 No, having prefabricated modules started in the 1920's in Sweden, but those modules weren't as finished as these Sears houses, they were more to make it easier for people to build their own houses. Finished modules with plumbing and electricity already pre-installed became popular in the 60s.
From the descriptions I've read of these Sears houses, building one involved a lot more than 2 days of work. The foundation, any masonry, and plaster had to be sourced locally, and it would take all manner to tradespeople to put it all together. Sears offered pre-cut drywall or Beaverboard (both of which had to be joined with battens in sort of a mock-Tudor pattern) for those who didn't want to get involved with plastering. I've seen one suspected Sears house with drywall in the main areas and Beaverboard in the basement and mud-room. They were real houses, but their assembly must have been daunting. On the other hand, this flat-pack thing from Amazon seems more like some camping trailers I've seen with crank-out sections. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you need a roof over your head in a hurry; I could even imagine it being the start of a bigger permanent building in a place with very loose or non-existant building codes. But you have to know what you're getting before parting with $15,000.
"Catalogue houses" are still the main way of building single family houses in Scandinavia. Pick a house, speak with the manufacturer about modifications and they show up on a semi truck, craned in wall by wall. Electricity, plumbing, even wall paper already done. Sweden also has a tiny home culture dating back to 1979 when minister of housing Birgit Friggebo allowed for houses up to 10m2 to be built without building permit, nicknamed Friggebod(Frigge huts) This was later expanded to 30m2, nicknamed Attefallshus(Attefall houses), after then minister of housing Stefan Attefall.
I currently live in an unaltered Sears & Roebuck kit house built in 1927. I can verify that they are exceptionally well-crafted. I live in an area that receives heavy snow-fall and my house has held up beautifully all these years. I will be reaching out to the website as I have the paperwork that verifies it as a kit house. I purchased it from the family that ordered and built it.
I've actually lived in a couple, and I can tell you, how well crafted they are really, really depends on who originally built them.
@@kidthorazine or who wrecked them..🤔
makes sense, sears was headquartered in chicago (and it sounds like many of their customers were in the Midwest) so they must’ve done things right
@@J-wm4ss they did. I'd give a limb for an old craftsman house. Built to a better standard than today. The proof is how long they've been around. It was a wonderful thing.
@@Kerry-uo6ogNot all craftsmen were kit houses. Most were stick-built (i.e. built from scratch). Probably the most popular style were American Foursquares due to the low cost of materials.
I grew up in a Sears house from 1927. They shipped the complete kit of materials, along with the plans, to a local contractor who built it. When I was a kid in the 70s I found the plans in the attic, along with all the correspondence between the builder and the original owner.
I own a house from 1920 bought from the Eaton’s catalogue here in Canada. Built better than nearly all modern houses.
"It's a shelter."
"Don't go inside in storms."
Do they know what a shelter is?
O. M. G. I guess they don’t!!😮😮😮
Honestly Amazon is flooded from sellers from China, so there is a very good chance that there is a language barrier. However, as I used to also have to cram search terms into a page for a living, I can tell you that there is also an equally good chance that someone had to cram the term "Shelter" into the page somewhere. SEO is a nightmare and I swear its ruining the internet for us all.
Do you know what a legal disclaimer is?
@@bensmith8682 so they're basically saying you shouldn't have any legal expectations of their shelter to be a shelter
@@mykal4779 More like a picnic shelter in a park?
This gets to the core of why the "Tiny House" and "Van Life" movements bother me. They're not an aesthetic or lifestyle choice but an economic indicator that regular housing is out of reach for most young people.
the sad thing is that these things are aspirational like for many even buying a plot of land in the middle of nowhere is a big investment, never mind the huge lifestyle changes that you have to do in order to achieve this... I know, because I'm living the dream
I chose to get an RV over buying a house for my home now. I live in a 31xl Jayco Redhawk. I am currently typing this in what was the bunkbeds area of the RV. I removed them and placed my work from home office in there with currents to block me off from the rest of the RV. Yes I have a bedroom and living room and I can travel with my home but to me, I feel like it was me giving up on the housing market. And I am main Scheduler for the Texas and OK area for a large name security company. So I don't make a small wage. But its all really I can afford. When I say RV my Jayco is a used unit 2016 so its not nothing fancy.
You're now buying leftovers from the plague quarantine economy. Those are meant to be mobile PCR test huts and housing for construction workers. But they're superficially cheap, hooray poverty!
Kinda, but there are a lot of people who do it for the lifestyle/aesthetic choice. We know this is the case because they'll spend the same amount of money, if not more, as a prefab or mostly fab solution
For example, someone spending $14-35k on one of those houses online could literally just buy an RV and a vehicle to tow it, *or* a "shed" or even a shipping container(maybe 2) that's the size of a small house and pay to have it finished out, insuring everything meets code. Delivery tends to be free within a certain distance(often 25-50 miles).
Similarly, I've seen some people spend so much on "van life" to try to "save money" that they could've just bought a camper van and saved themselves a lot of work.
Depends on what you mean by a “regular” house. The average size of a house in the 1950’s was 983 sq feet while, today it’s 2,014 sq feet. In the 1920’s, the average home size was 1,048 sq feet. So the size of a regular house changes and to be honest if you can live in a smaller home people should live in the smaller home.
I sometimes really wish Sears had not decided that the internet was a fad and had actually gone through with the plans to open a webstore back in the 90s.
Sears is the alternate reality Amazon that was ethical. Still a company, no company is good, but they would've been BETTER than what we have now.
@@guard13007 somewhat more ethical. Let's not go overboard here
@@FakeSchrodingersCat I have hard time imagining they could be worse than Amazon . . . well . . . I guess Temu.
@@guard13007 - Companies are neither good nor bad. It is the people leading them that determine how ethical they are. You can have a 200,000 employee corporation that is socially and environmentally conscious that treats its employees and customers well, or a self-employed person that rips off every person he does business with.
@@Bustermachine LMAO where do you think half the garbage on Amazon comes from? The "houses" shown in this video didn't first come to my attention through Amazon, I learned about them through Alibaba which is basically just another Temu. Literally have the stuff being sold on Amazon anymore can be found through Temu. Amazon will get it to you faster and they might give a little more assurance to you through their return and exchange policy. But in the end it's the same damn stuff most of the time.
The Sears catalog house that my great grandparents built is still owned by my family.
❤❤ what style/model???
@@superlovelynumber1I wish I knew. It was built in Iowa
Something that freaks me out is the idea that even the "good quality" stuff isn't good anymore. Like going to the lumber yard, you are going to find worse quality wood than you would in past because they've started harvesting the wood too early so it isn't as hard as it's supposed to be.
That's what's required for infinite profit baby
Everyone sells bad stuff as good stuff and we all smile and put up with it
It's only going to get worse
@@sandwich2473capitalism is the best 😬
Or linen fabric that isn’t what it used to be. At least it’s more comfortable I guess
@Purplesquigglystripe Linen is such a good material, but all the linen you can get now is processed on machinery made for cotton. It's such a shame.
I live in a 65 year-old house with inside walls made from 2 X 3s (the outside masonry supports the floors) and, from the number of rings, they are definitely not old-growth. But after 65 years of sitting around, they are hard as a rock and it's easy to destroy a drill bit trying to get through one. The sapwood in today's lumber is softer and more rot prone than what was used in the 1800s, but if it is kept dry for 50 years, it will probably solidify just like the lumber in my walls. Of course, that's only if the builder lapped the roof flashing and housewrap correctly, something which has been a challenge for many builders in recent years.
I love a good amazon product name (with restroom).
They look a lot like the temporary classrooms that my high school had when they were remodeling and building. They were a nightmare, too cold in winter and too hot in the summer.
and sooooo sweaty
Arguably worse. Portables were normally just specialty trailers. Cut down to be enough for a classroom and connected with walkways. These look like they have 0 insulation.
og yeah, the portables all had to be demolished because of mould. I wonder how these breathe?
I'm not even sure why someone created such a shit product . It makes a manufactured building look amazing.
@@TruFalcofirst thing I thought when I saw then putting it up was “even with AC/heat on blast this is going to be like living in a shipping container”
"when you're trying to buy a dishrack that doesn't suck or a vacuum that does -" That caught me off guard. Thanks for the good laugh
I'm a residential cleaner and I promise you, they do NOT suck! .. They're absolute trash BECAUSE of that 😂
I have a couple clients who STILL have theirs and prefer we use it vs our commercial vac...
There's definitely a noticeable difference between the 2 and.. the smell 😅 (I guess they're so good the clients don't care that they haven't changed their filters since 1995 😂)
+
People will have to accept the possibility that we won't ever return to 3%. If sellers must sell, home prices will have to decline, and lower evaluations will follow. Sure I'm not alone in my chain of thoughts.
Buy now, home prices will not go lower. If rates drop, you can refinance.
The government will have no choice but to print more notes and lower interest rates.
Well i think, home prices will need to fall by at least 40% before the market normalizes. If you do not know whether to buy a house or not, it is best you seek guidance from a well-experienced advisor for proper portfolio allocation. So far, that’s how I’ve stayed afloat over 5 years now, amassing nearly $1m in return on investments.
@parrish8386 Finding financial advisors like Amber Angelyn O'malley who can assist you shape your portfolio would be a very creative option. There will be difficult times ahead, and prudent personal money management will be essential to navigating them.
Finding financial advisors like Sharon Ann Meny who can assist you shape your portfolio would be a very creative option. There will be difficult times ahead, and prudent personal money management will be essential to navigating them.
I lived in a 1920s Sears catalog house in college! They had the order page and newspaper article about it from the time framed. It was a lovely 3 bedroom house! Very cool
Surprisingly, kit homes still exist, just not in the way they used to. Home Depot sells “tiny house kits” for about $60,000 but it’s just timber and metal frames. Electrical, plumbing all has to be done separately
This was also how Sears houses worked pre 1930s.
Lindal also sells an upscale “Kit House”. I think they start at around $150,000.
The price for a tiny house "kit" is ridiculous ! ! You have to add on the cost of land, basement or footers, building (cause nobody can DIY houses these day), and plumbing, electrical etc. Better off to buy an older existing home. That said, I would like an old style Sears home kit cause my sons are handy like that and we already own a 6 acre lot.
Wow. In 2001 I bought a 690 square-foot house. It was built in 1900. Solid as a rock. And I paid $67,000 for it.
@@nogames8982 AND, you got a yard - and didn't have to assemble the house.
I've live in a 'Sears' house, and it was built with the best materials, and was beautifully detailed. And as it dated from 1926, I would say that it was well-built, too.
I still remember Sears tv commercials from 2002. They were just so repetitive and played so often. Wife: We need something fast. We need something good. Husband: We need something like Sears. And then the wife would stare at the husband, seemingly amazed that he's not braindead. 😂
They could have gone back to the catalog market and become an online store...
@@teslashark It amazes me that of all the companies to be put out of business by the internet, Sears is one of them. Their biggest hook was always their catalog. If they had just thought to put the catalog online, they could have been a serious competitor to Amazon.
They were a dying company by then. They tried everything to stay afloat.
“Another scorcher”
As a city planner in California, i can confirm that the Amazon houses would be hard to implement in most cities. A lot of jurisdictions require permanent foundation for a structure to be habitable. Also some still restrict the use of “Tiny homes”
I'm a surveyor in East Tennessee, and trust me, I have plenty of problems with planners and the whole concept of planning and zoning. However, "you can't put your tiny house here because it doesn't have a foundation and this part of the county regularly sees 90+ mph winds" seems like a reasonable thing to say.
@jericho86 weird my house is a homebuilt trailer just sitting on blocks my 12x24ft shed just Sits on blocks we have storms every few years with 80mph+ sustained and gusts a lot higher than that. My place hasn't moved an inch in the 50+ years it's been here. Soo I think your "codes" are full of crap. Also I have a nearly empty shipping container sitting in my yard that has also never moved an inch from "wind" unless it's literally a damn tornado I think I'll be just fine. Building codes are stupid my house ill do whatever I want to it
@@ThatOneGuyWithTheEyemost of the US does frequently see tornadoes, and not just tornadoes but MASSIVE ones. I’d happily get a manufactured home if they could install it into a foundation like a real house, but even the way they do it isn’t safe enough for Texas.
Like, I’ve lived in the northeast and in the south, I’ve never had the liberty of not worrying about tornado weather.
@@jericho86 That's funny. You have Randy Johnson in your backdoor with his tiny home community in Eastern Tennessee. He has a youtube channel selling his tiny homes as well as his properties. Its called incredibox.
Most of the US restricts tiny homes. Also the definition of a tiny home can be surprising. In county and twp ordinance in MI, most view anything under 1k sq ft as tiny. In fact most places, minimum build for sq ft is 1000 to 1500. I find this out when I want to build a 650 sq ft house and find they will not allow it. Who even needs more than that? It's truly a mess
My father was born in Carlinville in 1920 and my grandmother saw the 'Standard Addition' go up. For some reason she strongly distrusted living in 'company housing' (or electricity) and refused to buy a home there when she and my grandfather were looking for a house. No one ever thought some day the neighborhood would be so historic. I wish Sears homes, like they were made then, was still an option.
Honestly your grandmother was probably on to something, it can be such a dangerous game to have your housing connected to your company. I think Carlinville was after this was common practice, but there were earlier examples of company towns in the Chicago area that were terrible for the workers (Pullman Strike). I wonder if that might have be in the collective memory of the entire state.
@@kendragaylord yea, a soulless company having that much control in people's lives is never good. Same reason company scrip was horrible and eventually outlawed. Though ofc Amazon has tried both...
@@kendragaylord Probably. And she was distrustful of authority in any event.
The one in carlinville is actually amazing. The houses are pretty and they even built it walkable with wonderful sidewalks!
@@joyoung2483 smart lass
I own a sears house, finished in 1929. There are a few additions, the electrical still has some in-service post and beam. What I am most impressed by is the MASSIVE sears stamped oak beam spanning the foundation that holds up the center of the house and second floor. The nearest oak tree to me that is even close to the size of this beam is probably 3000 miles away.
That was a really interesting watch. Seems like the catalog houses should come back. Particularly in the UK where newbuilds are so bad they are regularly condemned. A video on rubbish UK newbuilds might be interesting. Thanks for this, I learnt a lot.
From a US standpoint:
I think the things that are different today that would make this not a viable option are:
1. Building codes that, for better or worse, make it so unskilled people are less likely to be able to successfully meet them (and that's assuming the code doesn't force you to use a licensed professional).
2. The local availability of mass produced lumber in standardized forms. The shipping alone would kill a kit house.
@Kandralla I think you both underestimate people's ability to learn code, and have overlooked the merits of a kit home in the first place.
you dont need to learn the code if the instructions instruct you to follow them. you just have to build it the way the company tells you, and the company has to build their kit to code for your area. this puts much of the code-related headache on the business and not the consumer.
as for shipping, that needs to be done in-house for sure. the kit home company would need to run its own warehouses and drive the kits to their destination themselves. can't use a middleman like Amazon when you're shipping entire homes full of construction material. Sears already had these warehouses and shipping channels before they ever started their kit homes, which is what made them the perfect people to do it.
but that isn't to say it would be impossible for a company to start up without already having these things, they'd just have to have a large initial investment and start in a small local area instead of sending a catalog across the nation like sears did.
@@arcanealchemist3190 1. Peoples ability to build to the code doesn't mean anything if the codes, for instance, require a licensed electrician to sign off on the work. I'm for sure not going to sign off on some random persons work.
2. It's easy to say "they just need their own infrastructure", its hard to actually do it. No company is going to be able to beat a local lumberyard on just 1 round of shipping, much less shipping it to your factory, cutting the pieces, and then shipping that out to the builder. You realize the Sears wasn't sending you 2x4's right. The lumber was all pre cut, you assembled it like a Lego kit.
@@Kandralla okay, now im certain you dont care what reality is, you just want to "win" an argument. this will be the last reply I send to you.
you didn't watch the video, did you? they were legitimately sending 2×4s. not all of the kits came pre-cut. and they were coming from Sear's affiliated lumber yards. what do you think a lumber yard does, if not cut lumber?
and YOU may not want to send people to make sure work gets done right, but all of society pretty much runs on sending people to make sure other people do their jobs right. building code inspectors have had jobs for a long time and will continue to do them regardless of how viable you personally think that is. it's a normal thing that should be done and does get done, all the time. and EVERY person is "some random person", thats why the people who sign off on code inspect the work!
sorry, just everything you're saying comes so clearly from a place of ignorance that I just can't find the motivation to respond to it in a nice way. confidently being wrong is still wrong!
@@arcanealchemist3190 "confidently being wrong is still wrong!"
Yes I watched the video and you haven't actually told me where I'm wrong.
The Sears houses came with pretty much all of the lumber precut in their facilities which weren't local; I'm not talking taking a log and making 2X4's I'm talking taking a 2X4 and making the detailed cuts (stuff that is usually done on site by a carpenter). That's the whole point. That's how people that weren't carpenters could quickly put together homes that lasted. They weren't making many detailed cuts, and measurements. All that was already done.
As for code there's a big difference between the building inspector and a licensed electrician signing off on work. The electrician is signing off that the work was done correctly and takes on liability if it's not. The building inspector takes no liability for the work done; their job is largely to make sure the requirements to close out the permit have been met.
I have no clue what set you off, I just responded why it wouldn't work today if the goal is affordability. If you just want to say stuff and not have people critique it post it in notepad and not on the internet.
This channel slaps. I gotta say it. Also, I have a page from a winter 1917 sears roebuck catalog framed on my wall. I love looking at it and thinking about how it could have been used as toilet paper but it’s behind glass instead lol
Hey Kendra thanks for the shout-out! Lara, of Sears Homes of Chicagoland
That amazon "house" is an air mattress. Something for occasional short term use. It would be great for a festival or a weekend in good weather. Frankly an RV is a better home.
The Sears houses are cool too especially the concrete ones.
What a well-researched and interesting video. “There’s a difference between what something can be used for and what it is” is a fantastic line.
Quietly whimpering by the notification bell until your release your video on water towers.
yes please to the water towers video. came here for this and to give Kendra engagement. do comment replies promote engagement?
@@easterntreesI’d like to believe that any engagement boosts channel promotion. In that case! HAPPY FRIDAY everybody🤘🏼
My middle school social studies teacher was very indulgent with student-imposed distractions and one time I raised my hand in the middle of a lesson and pointed out the window to the water tower and asked how the heck they worked. He went up to the whiteboard and erased the notes he'd prewritten for his lecture and drew a diagram of a water tower and explained the whole process lol dude was like a forestry-coded, bearded Mr. Rogers. His voice never rose above a supported murmur, like he was saying something important but it was as if someone in the room was holding a sleeping baby and he was being mindful not to disturb them. Anyway, random anecdote and memory but I will never forget having water towers gently explained to me in his classroom lol
@@easilystartled2203best teacher ever!
@@easilystartled2203 My, you have a way with adjectives!
the amazon house looks like the prefab stuff britan was building post WW2 as temporary housing
It looks inferior to a trailer park home. And I have to assume that "trailer home" didn't feature in the Amazon listing due to the connotations.
But with less asbestos and more carcinogens.
I urbexed a Sears Catalog home that was built in 1914 for around $1,800, according to the granddaughter that lived in a newer home next door. That was 2012. The home hadn't been occupied since 1991[owner passed away] but it was on a plot that had other, newer family homes nearby so they had kept up superficial repairs. Transients had stayed in it from time-to-time but hadn't actually damaged anything. The property owners razed the lot in 2019. That house was as solid, if not more, than any non-custom home built around here after 1993.
my parents, who own a 2nd hand car sale, had to relocate their business to a larger place, though it didn't have an office building, therefore they bought a "container room" similar to what you're showing.
It's great for work and to host some customers, but I would never ever want to (permanently) live in that
This is embarrassing but when I first was told "This is a historic craftsman house" I thought that meant it was from Sears because Craftsman was the tool brand from Sears. My mother (who is way to into historic homes) gave me a whole displeased lecture on the matter. Is it true they also told you how many nails you would need for each step in assembly?
If I recall my father's explanation correctly, the tools were named after the house. He said the tools were also good quality.
The nails were included
@@andreajohns-o6w Yes I know but I was picturing a count so you could be sure you hadn't run out or something.
I grew up in a Sears house from 1909, had the original paperwork and deed and everything from througout the years- we were only the third owners. Although we passed the paperwork stuff to the new owners when we sold.
Loved growing up in that house. Lots of windows and sunlight, a smart layout safety-wise with all the bedrooms upstairs and communal spaces on the ground floor, it had a sleeping porch off a bedroom on the upper floor, and it had a three season porch in front perfect for us kids to change out of muddy and snowy stuff, for storing outdoor toys, and for my parents to supervise us playing in the front yard without having to deal with the mosquitoes themselves.
After we sold it and moved, it got renovated though :/
Our last house was a 1930 Sears house. We loved it. I theorize the basement was constructed by someone who spent the entire time drunk, but that wasn't Sears' fault. - Nice to learn a little bit more about their history. Thanks.
My parents owned a Sears house from the 1900's. The house is still around and looks pretty good. Those old Sears houses were built sturdy. Unlike these modern ... things.
truly one of the most interesting channels on the site!!! great work as always kendra!
This channel is a hidden bop, thank you for making content you genuinely enjoy!❤️
Buster Keaton did a hilarious movie called "One Week" about a mail order house. It's on UA-cam.
i have to check it out!
@@kendragaylord It's LOL funny. Interested to hear your opinion. Best wishes with the channel.
@@kendragaylord Do so, it's a great flick.
Wonderful video, Kendra! Thanks for showcasing several of the blogs and websites of our research group members! This was a pleasure to watch, especially because it was accurate and well researched (which is not always the case, when folks start talking about Sears houses).
Thank you for your kind message, and most of all for all your work commemorating all these kit houses! The video would have been so much shallower without all the great research your group has been doing.
Yes please to a water tower video! I grew up in a neighbourhood called Tower Hill because of the water tower down the street, but the water tower got removed. So the name Tower Hill is weird now.
I grew up in a sears house. They are common in neighborhoods around car plants. GM, Buick, and Ford families made Sears houses into multi-generational homes. Now a lot of these houses are falling apart and people are being pushed out of them as car plant neighborhoods don't really exist anymore. It's fascinating to see the same system being replicated by an online mega supplier like Amazon. The main component that seems to be missing, just like everything else in modern society, is a sense of community.
I think the other main components that are missing in the new ones are features and quality.
I’ve always thought the Amazon house is kind of a modern/worse version of the Jean Prouvé demountable houses built in post war France. Both had to be dirt cheap to produce, build in a matter of hours and fulfil the absolute most basic of needs a house must… only really difference is one was built as a solution to a crisis the other feels like a bit of a cash grab
Feels like? It is. They're basically getting something that's worse than a RV trailer on everything except sq ft.
UPS is gonna be REALLY upset when I return it
lol
That sears elmwood is looking NICE
In the town that I grew up in there is a replica Sears house that was built from an original set of Sears house plains.
I found out about when I was building my house, when I was building my house I was talking to an old guy about how I was building my house and he said that is like a Sears house and he told me about Sears house kits.
With my house I bought a set of plans for a 24X24, 2 car garage with a one bedroom and one bath apartment above the garage.
All I wanted was the plans for the one bedroom, one bath apartment. I then went to 84 Lumber and bought a 24X24 two car garage kit and used the plans to build it into a 576 sf. one bedroom and one bath house.
I traded the two garage doors back to 84 Lumber for the lumber to fill in where the two garage doors would have gone and 2 windows and and a 2nd man door. This was around 1994, I had the land so when the house was finished I had just under *_$17,000.00_* in it and it was 100% paid for.
WE DEMAND THE WATER TOWER VIDEO. I beg.
Just saw a 43 foot ketch sold on ebay for $3000. It was a beauty. Needed work but double king main bedroom, bath, kitchen, stove oven, refrigerator, double sink. 2 single bed bunk rooms, double seat sofa living room/dinette, 45 hp diesel runs, Sails, and some new deck ware, inflatable dingy, 5 hp motor, and trailer.
for 3k id take that in a heartbeat. assuming she floats id take her no matter the condition otherwise. 3k for a boat that FLOATS???? BARGAIN$$$
I have been a fan of the pre WW2 bungalows, specifically Sears and it's competitors...
Another company that built & sold these houses was Gordon Van Tine, based in the Quad Cities that marketed many of their homes thru Montgomery Ward.
It is a great concept, and with slight modifcation their floor plans are excellent for modest sized homes today!
Yay a new video!!! 👏 🎉
You have become my new favorite channel & podcast over the past 6 months😁❤ Please keep up the amazing work - you have a very soothing voice & demeanor while being naturally funny. The perfect combo for niche topics like the ones you expand on 🙌
Your videos are always something I never knew I needed in my life. Seriously, this is so well done and your wit is A++
The Sears Catalog was how we did Amazon Wish Lists before the internet. Every fall, Mom would leave one in the bathroom with a pen. My brother and I would put our initials next to each product we might want for Christmas. I don't know how many of those gifts were purchased from Sears, but those catalogs really saved Mom time and money.
Really interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing.
Agreed. I'd rather a Sears house or Extreme Makeover Home Edition or an RV over this Amazon thing that looks like a shipping crate with windows.
Those tiny cabins or yurts showing up in some state campgrounds look better.
@@billsmith5109 They're probably safer too.
A friend of mine has a piece of land out in the middle of relatively nowhere. I had recommended something like this kind of thing as a dry cabin, for summer use. The reason is that it's quick to setup, but if it also can be folded back up, he could do that for the off season times. (It would reduce wear and tear, and possibly just be more secure.) All of that being said, you can do something similar with a 40ft shipping container, which also has higher ceilings. (You'd have to cut out and install windows.)
the Sears Magnolia, the largest house they offered, is such a magnificent beast
I hope this doesn't sound weird, but your voice and manner of speaking makes it sound like everything you say is deeply profound, even for sentences like "the depression kept depressing"
I live in a kit house. (FirstDay Cottage). We couldn't have afforded anything like as nice a house without the kit. Also, we got to prioritize what we care about. More windows, fewer bedrooms. It was MUCH more expensive to get the contractors for plumbing and electricity and the slab foundation than we'd thought when we started. Even kits from reputable companies aren't quite as easy to organize forand build as you hope. A shed/booth is not a house. Great video. __----Water towers! Water towers!----__
Lol can't even cut a pipe or tie some wires together? Sad
Babe wake up Kendra just posted another video
Great video. Amazon really isn't very reliable for buying anything that isn't a branded product you're already familiar with.
This might do as a garden office or something but even then it's pretty ugly. The Sears houses blended in enough that somebody wouldn't know it was a kit.
Also, as for the "houses" themselves- these things are not new, and they are not now and never were intended to be homes. They're temporary office spaces, found all over train depots and construction sites around the country. No one should be living in them, and the fact that they are being marketed this way is both deceptive and borderline unlawful.
@@its_cleanI guess they're cheaper than a shipping container office, but they come with AC and won't collapse under a slight breeze.
@@JohnSmith-wx9wj Given that a shipping container can be had and filled out for the same price or less, it's not even cheaper except per sq ft. That doesn't even matter too much because the shipping container is structurally sound enough that one can expand off it, unlike the rapidly deployable mess
@@InfernosReaper I'm talking about the pre-made shipping container offices with amenities. They're very expensive.
@@JohnSmith-wx9wj Depends on how you get'em from. I've seen some that are only a few grand more than the shipping container's base price(which itself was only a few grand)
My husband loves talking about Sears houses. So excited you made this video!! I sent it to him
I like your work.
Ok now that I've actually watched the video...
My partner and i have pretty much sworn off Amazon about 6 years ago because of their awful labour practices but very infrequently I'll look something up on it if it's the kind of weird thing that you can't find elsewhere.
I have to say, the dip in quality of amazon as a shopping experience between when i used it semi-regularly and now is pretty crazy. You feel like you're constantly trying to fight the algorithm to find what you're looking for and their categorisation and UI is abysmal.
They've gone from being "an online store where you can get anything without paying a premium" to having a weird black market vibe where nothing is as advertised and you're constantly checking to see if you've been robbed 😂
I still like your work btw.
Your videos EAT id love to hear u talk more abt urban anth and like “eyes on the street” type architecture im so curious to know your thoughts on the history of white flight and suburban sprawl in the context of structure and space too
Sometimes the algorithm is good. Just got suggested this channel and its an instant subscribe!
Oh I’m so glad you posted this!! When the Amazon houses started going viral I wanted to do my own deep dive into how they compared to the sears homes but never got around to it!!
There’s a TON of these in the St. Louis metro. I grew up on the east side in granite city and I’m like 90% sure a good chunk of houses were sears houses but I haven’t been able to verify. Granite was a company town built for people to work at the steel mill.
Strange story: my grandparents lived in a house in the Birmingham, Alabama, area that reminds me so much of Sears kit houses. I spent quite a bit of time online searching for a Sears house that matched theirs, and although while there were many that were nearly the same, none were a perfect match. Both grandparents were gone by the early 60s, when I was in junior high school, and their house of decades was sold.
Fast forward to the late 70s. I am married, have two little girls, and my husband and I live in a very small town in Eastern Oregon. We wanted to buy a house for our little family to live in. The realtor showed us my grandparents' house. Well, obviously it wasn't actually theirs, but it was the exact design and floor plan. I was stunned, and wanted so much to buy that little house, so I could live in the "same" house as my grandparents, but frankly, it didn't fit our needs at all.
Since then I have wondered if those were Sears kit houses -- or if not Sears, kit houses, at least.
I would love to know...
Wow this video is awesome!! Funnily enough, I first learned about mail order houses from the epilogue of Red Dead Redemption 2. It shows the whole process of your character, John Marston, getting a loan in order to build a pre-built ranch house and I thought it was so fascinating that people back then could literally just buy a house and build it if they had the land. Now, with Amazon, the concept of mail-ordering is very similar, but very lackluster in quality. I loved how you took the time to go through the history and really show why this isn’t such a “new” idea but also the differences between mail-order houses then and now.
Kendra, every single video of yours that I've seen is incredible. I go out of my way to share your channel with people because they're so well researched, well spoken, and interesting. I can't speak for your stamps videos because I haven't watched any (not my thing), but learning about real people that lived in the places you discuss feels like we're being blessed with a little bit of microhistory in a sea of modern rhetoric about grand narratives and discussions of whole movements and events. You bring things down to the level of human interaction and impact, which is what everyone should be most concerned about. Please do keep up the great work, if it still makes you happy, and thank you for enriching my life by introducing new ideas, histories and perspectives
This is such a kind comment! My dream has always been to explain things how I learn best, which is focused around people and the things they did. I hope to do this for a long time. Thank you for such a lovely comment, it brightened my day!
Commenting because your content is amazing and I want the algorithm to know it too!
Code was maintained by the skilled trades who did the work on sears homes. that work is just now, all packaged inside the product you get. Yeah, without the install, there is no guarantee that anyone who cares checked out the code situation.
UL listing, or other rating agencies maybe, but I dont know that they have a standard yet, and I dont expect they bother with the local legalities
I have family friends who live in a neighborhood of Sears homes - the factory is long gone, but the little houses are great for retirees.
I’m sorry, but I’m distracted by the floral pattern in your shirt. It’s gorgeous. Also my partner’s grandparent’s have a few of the Sear’s homes in their neighborhood. It’s a hurricane prone area and they’re still there 🤷
Waiting for the water tower video while looking at my Becher poster on the wall... You know what to do.
These are so well written
so interesting! loving your work, the editing is really good
Codes are by far the biggest killer to tiny home projects. Mine require you install a full septic tank, even if the house is a 10x10 shoe box. That's a 30k$ addition to your box without electricity.
Requiring a proper and safe septic system for a dwelling is merely sensible in an area without domestic sanitary sewers. Cess pools are not sanitary. Sewage holding tanks must be cleaned out regularly at about $700 a time. Complaining about safety issue requirements is not exactly helping your case.
@@michaeltutty1540 Most tiny houses are not a full time living residence. Most are just a studio space for hobbies. There's no reason a glorified shed needs a whole septic tank to itself if it's not an actual full time living space. It's not about sanitation it's about overreaching regulations thst don't have nuance in how their applied.
14:29 The beat right before "...but it also says 'booth'" made me laugh irl
LOVE YOUR WORK SO MUCH ❤❤❤
I've said it before and I'll say it again - your scripts and delivery are among the best on UA-cam and you always get at least a few honest to god lols out of me.
The rural Canadian towns I grew up were filled with Sears houses. Most of them still stand today and look beautiful
I grew up in a Sears kit home, and my mom still lives there! Such adorable little homes!
I grew up in post-war Sears housing from the 40s, and I loved that house so much. It felt sturdy and practical and even though it was from 1946, it didn't look dated or cheap.
I live in a four square sears house ! So freaking solid brick. What we discovered last year with a remodel of kitchen that the house was built before indoor plumbing. The cast iron plumb was added after and the pipes painted the wall color.
Another great video Kendra❤
Oh my gosh this is like that horrible foldout cottage Richard Hammond put on the back of a Land Cruiser in that episode of Top Gear.
“A dish rack that doesn’t suck and a vacuum that does” 😂😂 nice one
There are several of those fold out houses near me and people live normally within them. They fulfill a need!
My mother grew up in a Sear home assembled by my Grandfather (with help from friends and family).
Likely similar to the Fairy.
By the time I first saw it, it was 2 floors, and likely about 1,200 to 1,800 sq ft.
My Grandmother liver there until she passed on (widowed decades before), and my Uncle still lives there.
I haven't seen the home since the late 80s, but it seems to still be in great shape.
Would be stoked for the water towers video!!
I’m digging your videos. Glad I found the channel!
i would Absolutely watch a water tower video. They were one of my hyperfixations as a kid for some reason. I would LOVE to see a video essay on them omg
We live in a 1962 Sears house. My whole neighborhood are all sears homes. Ranches, split levels, raised ranches, and center hall colonials. You can walk around the neighborhood and see all the choices that were available.
Hugh Hefner's childhood home was a sears home and they showed it on the Girls Next Door it was still in great condition. If only we still had this type of quality today. My grandmas first doll was from sears, it was a story she always remembered even when she started suffering from dementia. I would have loved one of these homes, the styles are so nice. I love the history of who bought these homes.
Friends of my family when I was growing up had a Sears house. It was probably built in the late 50’s or early 60’s. It was a nice house and is still being lived in today.
Sears Modern Homes stopped in 1942. I would suggest most American homes built in the late 1950s-early 1960s are still being lived in today.
I grew up in a Sears home -- the Crescent model, built in 1926 -- in Glenview, IL. I know exactly where the alphanumeric markings are located on the floor trusses, which can be easily seen in the basement. The house is about 1/2 mile from the train depot in Glenview; that's how these home kits arrived -- by train.
Your voice is like Caitlin Daughty's. I love it!
The Norwood Lumber Company here in Cincinnati milled and supplied all the wooden doors, windows, and trim for the Sears kit houses.
Those Sears home kits included all the nails, hardware, roofing, everything. They even threw in a tree for the front yard!
was so excited to see posted again and on one of my favorite topics ever!! love your videos i truly always look forward to a new one from you!!!
I was raised in a 1920 Sears house and it's... A mess. This thing has so many problems. It's unending. It's a terrible idea if you live in a cold state like Wisconsin. My dad had to plastic wrap my bedroom windows because the insulation is so terrible.The kitchen is built for giants and the bedrooms are built for ants. I shudder to think of any kids growing up in Amazon homes because their parents don't have any better options.
The Sears houses are fascinating. I only know of one in my area, down the road a bit in Benson, NC there is a Sears Magnolia that is now a funeral home.
Interesting thing I noticed while looking at the catalog, they DID offer houses without bathrooms. Remember, when these houses were being sold a lot of places, especially out in the country, didn't have running water or electricity. Sears wanted to be able to sell homes to those people too.
I can see the benefit of these quick fold out houses for emergency housing, if they really did have all the basic amenities a family would need. But to live in long term? Unlikely. Plus this doesn't look like it would be suitable in extreme heat or cold. I live in NH and that looks like it would be very drafty, you can't tell if it's really sealed.
The concept of Sears houses is simply how houses are built in Sweden. You order from a catalog. The companies will have places where they have example houses so you can go and look at them. They come as pre-built modules, and the company will put them up in a few days. You can pay for internal finishing or do it yourself. They cost from $80.000 up.
Edit: Those fold up houses look great if you need a temporary office, say at a building site or so.
How far back do they go in Sweden? Before the late 1800s?
@@653j521 No, having prefabricated modules started in the 1920's in Sweden, but those modules weren't as finished as these Sears houses, they were more to make it easier for people to build their own houses.
Finished modules with plumbing and electricity already pre-installed became popular in the 60s.
From the descriptions I've read of these Sears houses, building one involved a lot more than 2 days of work. The foundation, any masonry, and plaster had to be sourced locally, and it would take all manner to tradespeople to put it all together. Sears offered pre-cut drywall or Beaverboard (both of which had to be joined with battens in sort of a mock-Tudor pattern) for those who didn't want to get involved with plastering. I've seen one suspected Sears house with drywall in the main areas and Beaverboard in the basement and mud-room. They were real houses, but their assembly must have been daunting. On the other hand, this flat-pack thing from Amazon seems more like some camping trailers I've seen with crank-out sections. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you need a roof over your head in a hurry; I could even imagine it being the start of a bigger permanent building in a place with very loose or non-existant building codes. But you have to know what you're getting before parting with $15,000.
"Catalogue houses" are still the main way of building single family houses in Scandinavia. Pick a house, speak with the manufacturer about modifications and they show up on a semi truck, craned in wall by wall.
Electricity, plumbing, even wall paper already done.
Sweden also has a tiny home culture dating back to 1979 when minister of housing Birgit Friggebo allowed for houses up to 10m2 to be built without building permit, nicknamed Friggebod(Frigge huts)
This was later expanded to 30m2, nicknamed Attefallshus(Attefall houses), after then minister of housing Stefan Attefall.