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Item Description
This Ebay listing is for the sale of a CD ROM publication of the Sears Catalog Kit House Plans.
Sears Catalog Homes 1908 to 1927
Originally published in the early 1900's
What do Sears, Social Revolution, Our American Dream, and mail order homes have to do with each other? First, before we look at mail order homes from Sears, we need to look back at the founders of Sears and their history and goals, their dreams. The founders were watch engineers and technicians, technocrats who were, despite their desire to unite to make better products for profit, essentially believers that better technology would change the nature of society, of human nature, and make the evolution of each successive generation faster, more visionary, and more spiritually sophisticated. After all, if you increasingly free men-women-humanity from the drudgery of day to day life with better housing, better technology, more aesthetic and educated circumstances, how can they not help but evolve to a more beautiful and loving society and future?
You can read the detailed content pages further down this page.
Sample images from this CD 
This CD contains 55 House Plans and a handful of color images of houses. In PDF file format.
Anyhow, though they were practical men, even visionary ones in business, one sees again and again that Sears made choices based as much or more on the desire to be of benefit to the people, as on pure profit motive. With the Craftsman home movement (Stickley) well under way, in 1908, Sears decided to undertake to being these simple and functional home ideas to all Americans, in as affordable a manner as possible.
When Craftsman died off slowly and Frank Lloyd Wright took up the torch of building beautiful and evolved designs to help elevate our lives … and homes … Sears continued to offer Craftsman homes … and evolved their designs to reflect a touch here and there of modernism and Wright’s more modern aesthetics of multilevel living and open vistas in homes (where space allowed).
Wonderful simple designs such as these, Craftsman, Wright, and Sears; became the basis around which generations of American architects and designers have humbly wrapped their designs, based on functional emulations of these great designs.
So why move away from proven simplicity and functional beauty to new designs, when there worked so well?
Don’t... take a look at these beautiful designs and choose something to make your heart sing !
OH... you might ask, why did this wonderful program end?
Sears was at one time, by the 30"s, the largest home builder in the USA, if not the world, with over 100,000 homes delivered, and customer satisfaction at over 97%... a rate that is almost unheard of for any builder in any times, from roman times to the present.
So what went wrong ? Simply put they did everything right for the customer, truly acting as social revolutionaries of the building industry, but their extending of credit and rapidity of growth combined to make continued growth impossible... finally the "financial float" caught up with them, but even as they were going down, they were still acting with the best social graces, and the employees of their production plant managed to buy out their own factory.
Amazing folks.
The precedents and expectations they set changed the way the federal government handles housing and helps with the financing and managing of Mortgages, and the way we look at, and have expectations of quality housing for America.
The innovations they made in design to make their homes easy to build with a minimum of carpenters or homeowners to do the work were amazing (and worth reading about), but really, like any good design, it is the overall integration of something affordable, pleasant, functional and affordable... as a system ...that made Sears homes the legend they were.
Their home programs kept expanding they even accepted and modified plans from potential homeowners, inspired members of the public, etc.
Here is the result... a worthwhile addition to your architecture collection, and a great piece of American history...
What did this mean personally to American families, it was an inspiration and fulfillment of dreams to be able to order your home, get financing, and have your home arrive at the local railroad depot, even piece precut and ready to assemble, your family all waiting in delight to help build their own first real, new, personally chosen home, knowing that only days from now they will be sleeping under the tight and secure roof of their own new home.
This was a Sears supplied American dream, the stuff families smile and cry about for years... with joy.
Here are the designs that made it happen.
Sears no longer cuts and delivers these, nor do they finance them, but the designs can be yours... and the dream as well... feel free to smile and cry thinking of the hundreds of thousands of American families that were delivered to a better future and family life by these homes. I know I did (cry with delight).
God bless Sears and these brave and intrepid social revolutionaries...damn, they did right by us all!
Of course, in the end, both the Sears Homes and Sears itself became victims of the social change their helped American realize, for a better life for us all ...
Oh yah, their Homes came with the usual, nearly absolute Sears guarantee... and they stood behind everything they sold with a pride that would shame even the boldest retailer today ...
Innovation, Functionality, Value, Pride, a Vision to help others... what wild ideas these folks had ...
Get a copy, take a look for yourself.
We at Rocketbrain are dedicated to finding, publishing and distributing highly exceptional knowledge found in rare books. It is our mission to make available valuable knowledge found in very old rare books at affordable prices and easy to use CD ROM form for today's reader.
In CD ROM format, you can easily enlarge the contents of the pages on your computer screen to see more details and with better clarity.
you can also print out select pages of text and pictures as needed for your particular project you are working on. We even have a customer who printed out the illustrations to create a collage background paper for her scrapbook project!
User friendly PDF file format, the CD is Microsoft Windows as well as MAC compatible.
Want to buy-it-now? click here to look for it in our Ebay Store.
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