> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.irvidas.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # You Could Once Buy a House the Way You Buy a Sofa - URL: https://www.irvidas.com/you-could-once-buy-a-house-the-way-you-buy-a-sofa/ - Published: 2026-09-02T05:51:23.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-02T05:51:23.000Z - Author: Irvidas Bulotas - Tags: Then vs Now You flip open a catalog. Page 3,270-something. There's a picture of a house — porch, dormers, a bay window — and beside it a price. You fill in the order form. You mail it. Weeks later the stationmaster calls, because two boxcars are sitting on the siding with your name on them, and inside is roughly 30,000 numbered pieces of lumber, 750 pounds of nails, 27 gallons of paint, and a 75-page book explaining what to do with all of it. Sears sold about 70,000 to 75,000 of these between 1908 and 1940\. Most are still standing. --- ### The instruction book was the actual product This is the part that gets underrated. The genius wasn't the lumber — it was the numbering. From 1916, Sears shipped the framing **pre-cut and fitted**, with every board stamped with a code. You didn't measure. You didn't cut rafters. You matched the number on the board to the number on the page and nailed it where the book said. Sears estimated it cut construction labor by around 40%, and the company's own line was blunt: no carpentry experience required. The manual warned that following the instructions exactly was the difference between a good house and a disaster — which is a strikingly modern piece of writing, and essentially IKEA's entire philosophy, eighty years early. The results weren't cheap prefab shacks. The top "Honor Bilt" line used quality framing lumber, real hardwood floors, and old-growth timber that hadn't been fast-grown on a plantation. Which is exactly why they're still upright. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/10/a6105552-ef05-458c-9aa7-d8e9d2490f4f/content/images/2026/09/1-6.png) --- ### Everybody built it The bit of this story I find genuinely moving isn't the catalog. It's the weekends. A kit house was assembled by the family who bought it, plus whichever neighbors turned up. Brothers, cousins, the man down the road who owned a good saw. It went up over a series of Saturdays. There was food involved. Kids carried nails. That model existed because the alternative — hiring a full crew — was the expensive part, and because the skills required had been deliberately designed downward until an ordinary person with the book could do it. Sears even lent you the money. From 1911 the company offered mortgages directly, sometimes with no down payment, which is how a factory worker got into a house at all. That mortgage business is also what killed the program. When the Depression hit and customers couldn't pay, Sears was left holding the paper. The company liquidated around $11 million in mortgages, foreclosed on people who had physically built their own homes, and shut the Modern Homes department down in 1940. --- ### Now compare it to today Here's where this stops being a nostalgia piece. **Price against income.** A mid-range Sears kit in the 1920s ran a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars against median incomes in the low thousands. Add land and a foundation and a family was typically buying a house for something in the region of one to two years of income. Today the median US home runs about five times median household income. The ratio was 3.65 in 1980, hit a record 5.83 in 2022, and sits near 5.08 — and out of the fifty largest metros, **not one** meets the affordability threshold economists generally use. Between 2019 and 2024 home prices climbed 31% while incomes rose 22%. So the house didn't just get more expensive. It moved into a different category of purchase entirely — from something you save toward to something you finance for thirty years and may never own outright. **Could you still do it?** Technically the product exists. You can buy modular homes, panelized kits, even shipping-container and tiny-home packages online right now. What you cannot buy is the 1920s conditions around them. - **Permitting and code.** Sears customers built with minimal inspection. A modern build needs permits, engineered plans stamped for local wind and seismic loads, and multiple inspections. - **Licensed trades.** Electrical, plumbing and HVAC generally have to be done by licensed contractors. That's the safest change on this list, and also the one that most thoroughly ends the weekend-with-neighbors model. - **Zoning.** Minimum lot sizes, setbacks and single-family zoning rules block a huge share of the small, cheap houses Sears specialised in before anyone touches a hammer. - **Land.** The kit was never the expensive part, and today it really isn't. In many markets the lot costs several times what the structure does. - **Financing.** Sears would lend you the money for a house you built yourself. Try getting a construction loan today as an unlicensed owner-builder with no general contractor. **And the materials are worse.** The reason so many kit houses survived a century is old-growth lumber — dense, tight-grained, slow-grown, and largely gone. A modern 2x4 isn't two inches by four, and it came off a plantation in twenty-five years. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/10/a6105552-ef05-458c-9aa7-d8e9d2490f4f/content/images/2026/09/2-5.png) --- ### Most owners have no idea Because Sears never marked the outside of the houses, identifying one is detective work. The tells are internal: - **Stamped numbers** on the back of joists, studs and rafters — usually visible in a basement or attic. - **Shipping labels** still glued to framing members. - **Sears-branded hardware** on doors and windows. - Original **blueprints or a mortgage document** in a county deed record. Enthusiast researchers have spent decades documenting them county by county, and the estimate of how many survive keeps climbing as more get identified. Whole neighbourhoods in Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania are quietly full of them. If your house was built between 1908 and 1940 and has a wooden frame, go look at your rafters. There may be a number written on them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/10/a6105552-ef05-458c-9aa7-d8e9d2490f4f/content/images/2026/09/3-3.png) --- ### My take The nostalgic reading of this is "houses used to be cheap." That's true but shallow, and it lets the wrong conclusion through. What actually changed is **who was allowed to build a house.** In 1925, the answer was: you, with a book. Today the answer is a licensed general contractor working under a permit, with a lender, an inspector and a zoning board involved. Almost every one of those additions has a real justification. I don't want my neighbor doing his own gas line, and the houses that burned down or fell over in 1925 didn't make it into the nostalgic photos. Building codes are written in response to people dying. But the cumulative effect is that an entire path into home ownership — sweat instead of money — was closed, and nothing replaced it. The catalog didn't just sell lumber. It sold the idea that a house was something an ordinary person could produce rather than only purchase. That's the part we lost, and it isn't really about the price.