Imagine my surprise when I read Anton Vincent Hoefer's (a 6th cousin 3 times removed) obituary which mentioned the purchase of a house from the Sear's catalog. What? I had never heard they sold real houses! "Florence and Frank (2 of his children) were born in the house that Anton bought and built from a Sear's catalog". Then he later built another house -- this time it was a 2-story square house.
So, of course, I had to research this practice of "purchasing a house kit from the Sear's catalog. How do they delivery it? Who builds it? I found out that 70,000 of these ready-to-assemble kit houses were sold through the mail order from 1908-1940. These kits contained 25 tons of material with 30,000 parts and were shipped by railroad.
I wonder how many pages there were in the instruction booklet for these house? Is Amazon.com planning on offering these house kits anytime soon?
