One thing overlooked is that the majority of the components were made in the U.S. This was pre-globalization, when even fasteners, pipe, and fittings were manufactured in the U.S. The increase in number and specificity of building codes has come in-part due to foreign-made building materials and poor QC.
Even the quality of lumber has decreased as old growth forests that were harvested 80 years ago no longer exist. Heart pine lumber that were used in 1940s homes (I own one) is more dense and stronger than new growth pine lumber. [1]
It would be tough to offer the same kind of kit in this day and age given the difference in building material back then compared to now.
> Even the quality of lumber has decreased as old growth forests that were harvested 80 years ago no longer exist. Heart pine lumber that were used in 1940s homes (I own one) is more dense and stronger than new growth pine lumber. [1]
I'm a woodworker and I've also owned a property management company and done my own home's remodeling (the kind of remodel that means you talk to structural engineers). What you say is true, in some ways and with asterisks. It is also irrelevant. New growth pine is preposterously strong when loaded in the correct dimensions and balloon- and platform-framed houses are designed to do exactly that.
Modern silviculture is an absolute marvel. It turns out prodigious amounts of more-than-good-enough material at remarkably cheap prices.
To the average consumer who might buy a few 2x4's a year from Home Depot there has been a marked change though. 20 years ago you could get reasonable quality dimensional lumber and plywood from your average big box home improvement store. Nowadays that's practically impossible. Where I'm at, I've had to resort to going to lumber yards to get what I used to be able to get from Home Depot years ago -- the big box store's stuff is rarely even close to being dry and maybe 1/20 2x4's are anything resembling straight.
Your average framing contractor is going to already buying from a lumber yard most likely, so they haven't seen that change, but in the consumer space it's been noticeable.
If you move a few bays over from the unnamed or explicitly listed as “whitewood” (usually a poplar) 2 x 4 to actual pine/fir/spruce, the quality returns. Recently they cost only two more dollars. Whitewood is fine for supporting most hobby loads. It’s not meant to build a house. It will happily act as a French Cleat, frame some shelving, or serve as a jig.
Buying from lumber yards also matters due to grading and various standards builders have to abide by that weekend warriors do not.
What area are you from? I have never seen or heard of a big box store selling 2× poplar. I am also surprised to hear that the poplar 2×s are cheaper than pine. For hobbyist woodworking I think poplar is preferable to pine everyday.
I think it depends on what you want whether poplar or pine are better, tbh. Poplar's very stable, it's great if you want to paint it, and it does take some machining (chiefly routing) a little nicer, but I personally really like the grain of pines and firs quite a lot compared to the weird greens/purples of conventionally available poplars.
Both are soft enough that you can't really beat them up.
So I mean, I'm from New England, and maybe this is just a cultural thing, but I think that well-treated pine looks really nice - a golden hue from an oil-based finish, plus pretty brown knots. I don't love the table design here, live edge isn't my thing, but this wood looks great to me: https://cswoods.com/products/eastern-white-pine-dining-table...
But you can get nice grain out of other softwoods, too. Because it's very easy to get hold of here, I use white fir sometimes in furniture. Not "fine" furniture, but simple house stuff. This tabletop was actually the first thing I ever did in my shop and while it hasn't held up amazingly (my breadboards popped and I haven't fixed them yet) I quite like it for what it is as a learner messing around, more or less, and the sap intrusion along the breadboard still makes me happy when I see it: https://i.imgur.com/nipUhLs.jpg
Thanks, worth the explanation! Would have been self-explanatory with something like "little more that" added, but having it right in there would ruin the joke, as integrated explanations tend to.
It's the same experience here for those kinds as well. Part of the problem is that I'm on the US west coast, so most of the wood in our stores is probably somewhere from the PNW and thus from more or less the same lumber companies no matter the kind.
It certainly might be the case, or you might not even be getting the same stuff - I did some looking around and apparently people in British Columbia are having trouble getting local Douglas fir because it's all getting shipped out east.
Agreed with this - the Home Depot stuff I’ve looked at is often warped or cracked. The prices they ask for it make me put my DIY projects off till next summer.
Not from what I've seen at the retail end. They're certainly not at their crazy peak prices from that one May, but they're still much higher than even a few years ago, and have not been decreasing commensurate with the futures. Especially if you start to consider a quality/$ measure; For example, I used to be able to buy lumber that was ready to use. Now I _have_ to give it time to air dry because it's too wet to work with immediately despite being 'kiln dried'. That's time and additional preparation I have to do, not to mention have the room to allow it to air dry. I can imagine that being a pain if you needed a 2x4 for some small project in a small apartment.
anecdotes are not data, which is what the parent poster supplied.
i'd imagine the averages are down across the country but that doesn't mean things are cheaper everywhere, esp. if you're in a high COL area and they know you can pay
I once got some used wood for free from Craigslist…somebody gave away his fathers old scraps.
One piece was a 2x4 from 1982, from RONA (a Canadian store) and it a very beautiful piece of pine. It was exactly 2” by 4”, and straight grain. Obviously it was air-dried by then :)
Now it might have been from the select pine section of the store, not SPF construction lumber.
Pine ought to be treasured, not tested as a garbage wood like we do nowadays. If it were scarce it would be priceless.
I don't know about "treasured", but pine is nice! The main thing is that it's soft. Furniture made from pine will dent if you look at it. My coffee table is something I made early on when I was learning and it's made of white fir, which isn't far off mechanically from pine; the grain lines are dramatic when stained and it looks really cool, but you have to baby it similar to a white pine.
I am a big fan of ash, but the bugs are going to make that very hard to source going forward.
This claim doesn't make sense. Every store I've seen in the last five years includes nominal sizing of their dimensional lumber (which, for a 2x4, is generally a quarter off on every side, not an eighth)--and if you are buying dimensional lumber for its dimensions other than length, you either know what you're doing (I buy 2x8s and mill them sometimes) or you're doing it wrong.
Your experience is certainly possible, but it's also localized. It also depends on what you bought. Both big-box stores in my area have two different kinds of 2x4s. Both have "whitewood studs" and both carry a flavor of hem-fir. The latter are a little more expensive. They're also generally much straighter and easier to work with. If you buy "whitewood" you will probably be full of regrets, but if you don't buy the cheapest thing on the rack you can do OK.
That said, unless you are framing a wall I think that the real key for dimensional lumber is to forget that 2x4s exist. Big-box stores start giving you much, much more uniform material once you get up to 2x6s. While I work in hardwoods sometimes, I like making simple furniture and gifts out of softwood because of the regularity, the price, and because I don't care nearly as much if I make mistakes. My primary materials are 2x6s and 2x8s from my local Lowe's and Home Depot (because my jointer can't handle anything bigger). Lowe's are Idaho-sourced white fir and Home Depot are unknown-source Douglas fir. They both make pretty decent 1" x 5" milled boards, for the most part. Knots in white fir open and crack in interesting ways that give it a rustic feel that I like, but the color is pale and weird (so I break out stain for most of those projects, shhh don't tell). In other parts of the country you can get stuff like the southern yellow pines (slash pine most common), which have interesting properties as they age with regards to strength. Though I think they're kinda ugly.
I will tell you for sure, however, that the stuff you're buying is dry. It's just not dry to what you think it is. Dimensional lumber is dried to somewhere between 8% to 12%. That's dry enough to drive out most bugs and to reduce the future movement of the wood to the point where it can be safely and effectively constrained by fasteners--that is, while it may try to warp, it won't warp so much that it can potentially strain a fastener (which can absolutely happen, wood is strong). HD will not put lumber that is not adequately KD'd on the rack (barring accidents, etc.) because the stuff won't get signoff from builders, who absolutely do buy from HD and buy in bulk, and incurs liability. (Builders, at least where I am, do a lot less with lumber yards, because HD's prices are cheaper.) But 8% is the top end of what a furnituremaker or somebody making something that needs to be stable will expect; many aim for 6% moisture content, and that's in hardwoods which move a little less.
Plywood...is a different story, but plywood is having much bigger problems across the world right now. Again though, depending on where you are, you can do OK. My local Lowe's has adequate (not good) hardwood-veneered; my local HD has a "birch" ply that, while probably not entirely so, isn't awful. The bigger problem is that both are still ridiculously expensive, while both dimensional lumber and hardwoods have largely come back down in price.
It likely varies based on where you are in the world too.
Old pine sold her in New Zealand was full on knots and was pretty gnarly stuff. Anything I could buy now (except fencing timber) would be straighter and of more consistent dimensions.
The quality of framing wood you choose does not factor into home longevity at all. If you follow standard stick framing practices (16" or 24" OC) use the correct sheathing and fasteners, there will be no difference.
What really determines how long a house will last is water/moisture management.
Where the same methods are used a higher quality products does make a significant difference.
Denser growth means it's harder for pests to damage and water to penetrate.
My mom's place is build with high grade fir for every stud and beam and there's clear differences in how it's holding up to contemporaries built using pine from the same era (old growth too). Materials make a difference.
Most firs and pines tend to be around the same density (around 25-28 lb/ft^3).
Wood isn't magic and no common softwood is particularly moisture resistant. It's more likely that the envelope of the house was built better than anything to do with the framing materials.
While driving the fastener, or over time while the structure settles?
Either way, I can't see how this is a problem with the wood itself. The structural design and material properties have to be specified in a compatible way. The only three options are the spec is wrong, the materials are out of spec, or the engineer considers it a non-issue.
Yea I'm wondering if we just had more of it left more recently than the Yanks and thus most of them have absolutely zero clue about this as they literally had zero of this type of material in any of their old construction aside from historic homes with listed status...
I think the point (accurate or not) was that building codes are what they are to accommodate crappy modern lumber.
Although actually afaik older buildings are often overbuilt because there was no engineering to figure out the least you could safely get away with.
I agree with you that houses are more likely to rot than to break from under building and fall down, although events like decks collapsing during
party or roofs collapsing in heavy snow do happen.
There's a ton of survivorship bias here too. Older houses that we're familiar with were well built, which is why there's still here. Plenty of poorly built ones are no longer around.
> The quality of framing wood you choose does not factor into home longevity at all.
This is just absolutely false.
Older growth wood is more stable and more likely to resist moisture.
We have zero examples of homes built with fast growth SPF (etc) lasting 100 years or more. Hell even 75. On the contrary, we have a plethora of examples of old growth pine lasting centuries. Just look at the cold, wet, and snowy northeast. Plenty of moisture there, yet the historic homes still stand.
No contractor I've spoken to thinks the homes being built today will last half a century or longer.
edit: I will stand by my comment. Lets see how many 70's and 80s era houses last until 2040.
You can't assert this is absolutely false, you have not even in your comment established the criteria to say so.
If "older growth wood is more stable and more likely to resist moisture" it still stands that any wood can perform well in the absence of excess moisture.
I certainly agree that my 120+ year old house made of fir would last much longer with a leaky roof than a house from the 1960's or 1990's with a leaky roof.. but all of those houses would be unfit for occupancy while they deteriorate.
75 years ago is 1957 by my reckoning, you have some example of 75 year old houses deteriorating because of the quality of wood in the absence of moisture penetration?
There is no point in having a structure that is uninhabitable due to moisture penetration that still stands except for the purposes of salvaging it.. which I guess has some value..
My personal opinion is that building built to code today will stand for 100+ years no problem, buildings built in the 70's, 80's and 90's to code in many places will also do so if moisture (Rh) mitigations are reasonably executed (lots of mould & vapour barrier issues in that era). Older houses don't face the moisture issues because they are not as well sealed and as with all structures - keep a good roof on them and they are fine.
Framing wood quality doesn't matter, how fast that wood rots is a question of every other material used in the construction of the envelope.
Honest question: modern builds seem to have a lot of plastic, rubber and foam materials used for insulation, ventilation, etc. Won’t all of that deteriorate much quicker than 50 years? Things like spray foam and polystyrene seem to be in areas pretty hard to replace (or even notice they are degrading).
Well.. I don't really know. I know that the copper drain plumbing in my house was failing and needed replacing and it was a lot younger than many abs installations in the world that are just fine?
It certainly could be the case that something like spray foam degrades over very long periods of time.. but you'd have to figure the savings from the enhanced insulation value over that period would more that pay for its replacement.
> No contractor I've spoken to thinks the homes being built today will last half a century or longer.
Contractors adhere to code largely as far as they can be forced to and work on a "we've always done it that way" basis. On the other hand, architects and engineers are pretty sanguine about modern softwood, and for good reason. You start seeing "modern" SPF in broad use starting in the mid-seventies and construction from that era is by-and-large fine.
Remember that the houses that sucked--and there were a lot of them in the 1900s and earlier--simply no longer exist. Survivorship bias is real.
I've worked on plenty of hastily built houses from the 70s that are still standing half a century later and in relatively good condition. They may run up slightly higher maintenance bills, but I'd be surprised if they don't last to see 100 years. Houses today are undoubtedly better constructed. The quality of materials in the old days compensated well for the stress from poor environmental and thermal design, but you can probably get the same longevity by designing the house to not have that stress in the first place.
> edit: I will stand by my comment. Lets see how many 70's and 80s era houses last until 2040.
2040 is only 17 years away! Houses from the 1970's and 1980's are selling for top dollar today in suburbs all over North America, if the expected life spans of those structures were only 17 years they'd be worthless.
Where I am from the late 60's and early 70's homes are the worst quality ones on the markets, really a terrible time for home building. The issues are all foundations, plumbing, and wiring.
Yep. Late 70s is when the major shift happened: no more lead paint, no asbestos, electrical with a ground, Romex wire instead of that dangerous cloth crap, and ductwork for basic HVAC (furnaces at least.)
The only major advancements beyond the late 70s-80s are energy efficiency-related.
Boards that will not hold a screw? OK, I'll bite. What kind of wood? What fastener? What direction into the wood? How was the wood stored prior to use?
Forgive my skepticism, but for wood boards (and not engineered materials being used incorrectly), ones not stored in deeply failure-causing conditions to the point where you wouldn't want to touch them because they'd be gross, this just does not happen.
Then it gets thrown away by your framers. Otherwise the nailing pattern (generally every 12" or 6" at sheathing edges) is over-engineered to cover cases where you have sub-optimal pieces of wood (twisted, warped, holes, etc).
And I've come across screws that won't hold a board securely. The screws just cracked.. It was only a table and a gate. From now on I test the screws i use for how much it takes to brake in half, and if it bends or just snaps
I’ve started to only use GRK screws for things I care about. They’re like twice the price, but it’s not like you go through many screws to do most DIY projects, and how easily they screw into stuff makes it worth it.
Of course it matters. But that doesn't mean (very moderately) less dense softwoods are not fit for purpose. In home construction, you're either loading softwoods in compression along the grain or you're using thick material (or engineered ones, which are Lignins Georg and should not be counted) as beams.
Look at https://www.wood-database.com if you want numbers. Balsa is around 9 lb/ft^3 dense, with a crush strength of 1,690 lbf/in^2 and a modulus of rupture around 2840 lbf/in^2. White spruce--which is a pretty representative member of "SPF" in the USA--is about 27 lb/ft^3 even in its modern, "oh so weak" form, with a crush strength of 4,730 lbf/in^2 and a modulus of rupture around 8,640 lbf/in^2. That's, uh...a lot. Is it Good Old Hardwood? No, but who cares? The numbers we're talking about are so strong that if you need more, you need a big span or something, you throw a 2x12 at it or you go to engineered materials (which are basically wood alchemy, they're magic).
From a numbers perspective, the modern "oh they take so much off" 2x4 is overkill for things like external wall framing. We use them because of safety margins and because it allows us to box in more insulation.
Where it can matter is in terms of rot resistance. Sort of. Heartwoods do have accumulated waste products (they're basically dead while the tree is standing, if you ever see a tree desleeve it's because there's too much heartwood for the sapwood and it just peels off) that bugs don't like. And you can tell why; if you've ever bought a decent-sized board, you can taste the difference if you lick your finger, touch the wood, and lick your finger again. Heartwoods are bitter. There is value in that, and old growth does have more heartwood. But we have modern building practices that maintain a better moisture envelope not "because the wood is worse", but because it makes for a nicer house to live in. It also happens to compensate pretty well for that.
The people who fulminate about "the wood isn't as strong" are old and old at heart. It is not just "strong", but it is strong enough, and the fact that we can produce so much softwood for so cheap at such truly incredible strengths is worth celebrating.
Myself and friends are using 200-400 year old growth jarrah in our building today - it was sourced from treefall in the 1980's, slabbed and stacked in sheds on farms for retirement.
Jarrah was used to pave high traffic thoroughfares in London at the turn of last century.
Once our state stopped the wholesale clear felling of jarrah by europeans, we turned to harvesting regrowth:
Jarrah is a sustainable, exclusively sourced from regrowth forests in Western Australia. Strict regulations are in place to ensure jarrah sustainability is managed in a way that balances ecological, economical socio-cultural factors.
The guidelines and policies outlined in the The Forest Management Plan and the WA Regional Forest Agreement are regularly reviewed to ensure world-class standards are upheld. All native forests that are harvested in Western Australia are regenerated or replanted every year. Jarrah can be recycled and repurposed for other uses.
Even though Jarrah is very sustainable timber, the West Australian Government has made the decision to ban logging any native timbers by the end of 2023.
Exposed beams with detailing look great, not to mention the milage you can get using hybrid techniques such as steel I-beams masked with long thin jarrah inserts.
Natural edged shelves, island tops, tables.
South-West W.Australia has a lot of old craft skills kicking about - I was in the midst of a crowd doing glass blowing, cabinet making, solid and ply shell drums when I was writing pre-Google Earth not exactly KeyHole geo spatial processing and display software and we'd often going out to retrieve all manner of wood and rock that was toppled or exposed by storms.
It's not just jarrah stashed away, there's also wandoo, granite slabs, numerous burls extracted .. and a lot put back in terms of replanting, cool burns, 'artifical' hollows, culling ferals, etc.
NO DOUBT, I am lucky to live in central coast and my house is made of it. I think the post a couple up was talking about moisture and rot resistance tho.
Edit: just says old growth ... i thought i saw redwood
Building codes aren't necessitated by having individual parts of lesser quality - if a part doesn't meet its required specifications then the overall assembly is deficient regardless. Rather they're due to the tendency of builders to want to save money/labor by skimping on materials which only shows up long term (say putting studs 24" OC, or using 2x3's instead of 2x4's), or the adoption of cheaper less robust types of material that fail less gracefully (eg romex vs AC, drywall vs veneer plaster). Plus increasing risk adversity due to increasing wealth, and enough data to know how these systems actually fail in practice to make a meaningful difference. Building codes are basically part of and a response to our ever-increasing ability to analyze designs ahead of time - such analysis tells how we can make something less expensive while still meeting the requirements we're aware of, while codes make us more of ever more requirements that had previously been met by an overspec'd design.
Not sure I follow how the location of manufacture of fittings matters. Is it your assertion that domestic manufacture is inherently of higher quality, and therefore in less need of regulation? There’s just some inbuilt good old Americanness in those 1950s US-made fittings that meant an untrained homeowner could reliably construct a sturdy and safe home without screwing it up, in a way that is just not possible when the parts are made overseas?
While I don't like the language you chose, and the way it presents your reply as snide, I'll ablige. I addressed that already.
"The increase in number and specificity of building codes has come in-part due to foreign-made building materials and poor QC."
Quality Control from foreign made building materials was far less than those components manufactured in the U.S. at the time. I grew up in a pipefititng and piping wholesale family, which is closely adjacent to steel manufacturing. You're welcome to dive in if you're genuinely curious, there's tons of reading material available. I'd recommend starting with the decline in fitting production and consolidation in the U.S. in the 90s with the introduction of Korean-made fittings. Chinese-made cast iron is another one to poke at. Starting in the 70s, Chinese-made cast iron was widely imported and was used widely in underground piping, namely sewer and sanitary. Cast iron failure was a huge problem for 20 years.
If you're looking for a xenophobe angle to argue, it's simply not there.
> You don’t mean ‘foreign made’, you mean ‘cheaply imported’.
The price of them being imported does not have the same meaning to me that I think you want it to have. Why are we pussy footing around this? Shit is just made with less quality than it was "back in the day". Even shit made in the USofA is of lower quality than it used to be, so it's not just something "foreign made". Why? Because consumers did not want to pay for quality. Making it right is expensive. Good quality assurance is expensive. Manufactures trying to get ahead decided to start cutting costs and lowering quality and lowering QA standards, and consumers bought that shit up left, right, and center. People decided they preferred to have cheap things now, and if it breaks and it's still cheap, then just replace cheap with cheap.
This is not any different than companies looking for short term profits to make stockholders happy rather than what's better for long term results for the stockholders or the company itself. So, it's not just a thing evident in manufacturing but in all business.
We (the royal we) have lost long term vision in pretty much all aspects
Okay, generic rant about everything going to hell in a handcart since someone back in the day decided to prioritize profits over quality. Gotcha.
So I think the thing I'm confused about is what this has to do with Sears kit houses.
Were they, like, really good quality? Was Sears not an incredibly profitable company that made its money by volume supply of cheaply sourced parts?
I got the impression Sears houses were basic but functional. The fact that "Remarkably, almost 70% of these Sears DIY houses are still standing today" is reported uncritically in almost every online source about them, including the original piece, but... is that remarkable? How much 1920s suburban housing stock in general is still standing today?
70% of homes not built by contractor professionals are still in use? Regardless of all stock, that still feels fairly impressive outcome this many years later.
Consumers didn't want to pay for quality to the extent demanded by corporations that need to grow YOY. Companies were placed into a cost-cutting race to the bottom. Everything continually gets worse, until we no longer remember how it was better.
Making things worse while hiding that it's gotten worse is just corporate strategy, and corporations have every incentive to attempt to do it all the time.
> companies looking for short term profits to make stockholders happy rather than what's better for long term results for the stockholders or the company itself
Oh, that old trope that never dies. Companies that sacrifice the long term for short term profits have their stocks tank and go out of business.
Big investors are not the fools people imagine they are. About 3 milliseconds after they catch wind that a company is eating its seed corn, they dump the stock.
But if you are sure you've identified a company that is doing this, then short their stock and make a bundle.
Very recent example: Instant Brands. Arguably one of the most popular new markets for kitchen appliances in recent memory. Brought electric pressure cookers and countertop convection ovens (ahem air fryers) into the public consciousness in a way no one else has. Purchased by private equity in 2017, now filing for bankruptcy.
You're probably right about big public corporations and institutional investors. But PE firms don't have the the same incentives; their incentive is often to squeeze as much ROI as possible out of the companies they purchase, consequences be damned. You're mostly right though on this part:
> Companies that sacrifice the long term for short term profits have their stocks tank and go out of business.
Or they file for chapter 11 bankruptcy and let someone else pick up the pieces, while destroying a good business and leaving a bunch of people unemployed.
You are restating the obvious point of the original statement, just with the addition of trying to pillory the GP for not choosing to make the obvious point in as many words as you’d prefer…?
The post said that one of the reasons Sears houses could exist then, but can’t now, was
> The increase in number and specificity of building codes has come in-part due to foreign-made building materials and poor QC.
And clarified specifically:
> the decline in fitting production and consolidation in the U.S. in the 90s with the introduction of Korean-made fittings. Chinese-made cast iron is another one to poke at.
I’m not pillorying anyone, I’m just trying to get them to join some dots up.
Why is the location of fitting manufacture relevant to the decline of the Sears house?
Doesn’t the availability of cheaper parts manufactured to apparently lower quality standards make it easier for catalogue houses to exist?
And didn’t the Sears house decline long before the Chinese cast iron of the 70s and these Korean fittings of the 90s?
Did building regulations make it harder to offer kit houses? Yet building regulations did not prevent cheap imported parts coming in to the US apparently, so… building refs both were a reaction to foreign parts but also a cause of a decline in US part manufacturing?
Yes you are correct, but they are foreign made because they are cheaply imported in the first place. Otherwise they would be both made and purchased in the US.
You're probably a little less likely to make shoddy parts if you're in reach of the recipient's legal system. Which most Chinese factories are not when selling to Americans.
This is literally the point of customs. Otherwise, literally any product regulation would be toothless as foreign companies would simply sell us products that meet the requirements of their country, not the US. Since that does not happen at scale, it would seem that US customs does have some ability to enforce US regulations on foreign sellers.
If I were to say, purchase 100,000 gpu's direct from a chinese manufacturer, and half of them were dead on arrival, what is my recourse? Where does customs fit into that recourse?
Now if I were to purchase them from an american company, I may have an opportunity to sue.
You could sue the Chinese-owned American shell company that imported the GPUs. I’m sure they didn’t wire the money away and close up shop immediately, like plenty of Amazon importers caught selling counterfeit or downright dangerous electronics.
I think it's more that cheap, low quality labor was not available for manufacturers at the time, whereas when it did become available they used it. The difference being that labor in the US is "high quality" in the sense that it is more regulated than what can be found elsewhere.
So a cheap and bad option appeared on the market it was only from overseas, not domestic. It's not an issue of where it's made - just different qualities made available.
> There’s just some inbuilt good old Americanness in those 1950s US-made fittings that meant
It's not what was built in here per se, it what wasn't - not back then at least - cut out to shave a penny (or a buck) off costs. On the other hand, to break into a new market (lower) price - often with lower quality - is a known entry path
Along the same lines, look at American made cars back then. Sure there were sloppy manufacturing issues. But no one accused any individual part of skimping, cutting corners, etc.
Believe it or not, things were noticeably different back then.
Car manufacturers never skimped on QC? Take a look at the wonderful Corvair. Or the Pinto.
So much of this is survivor bias or just nostalgia. Some things were better back in the 50s, some weren't. Somethings in the 50's seemed great but in hindsight were pretty bad (asbestos, thalidomide, DDT, aluminum wiring).
And some of the "American Exceptionalism" was also a response to WW2. I know an entire generation who would never buy anything made in Japan because of Pearl Harbor. And I had an uncle who flew in the 8th AF who would go into a rage whenever he saw a VW Beetle on the road. In electronics, Japanese-made used to be a slur, until they dominated electronics.
My first home was a Sears home. It was small but seemed okay for a first home. It had new siding, and the previous owner had replaced the aluminum wiring. I don't know if the plumbing had been replaced, but it was, as most houses are, a House of Theseus.
Thalidomide is actually a weird example where American exceptionalism is accurate- the FDA refused to approve it for morning sickness, despite the manufacturer's pressure on the reviewer, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey. It was approved basically everywhere else in the industrialized world, including Kelsey's native Canada.
The US was "lucky" in that they had the elixir sulfanilamide scandal a while earlier which pushed them to adopt medicine approval standards. France was another country that avoided Thalidomide since they had their Stalinon scandal a few years earlier which had spurred them into stricter regulation as well.
Sadly, everyone had to learn this lesson "the hard way", the timelines were just different.
Keep in mind with this discussion that these houses were sold from between 1908 and 1940. Korea's export-driven industrialization started in the early 60's, China not until the 80's.
That said, building codes are about creating safety and resiliency in structures, primarily as a safety issue. They've been around a very long time, with events like the 1886 Chicago Fire and the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake being drivers for big change.
There isn't much in terms of code to stop you from using crappy materials in a house, as long as they are safe.
This argument for the quality of American made parts is easily refuted by the endurance of European and Japanese tech that still function today, particularly cars and electronics. My home still has a JVC TV and a National steam iron from the 60s
This analysis is easily refuted in that your Japanese car isn't representative of builders buying the cheapest available 2x4 or screw and trying to deliver the cheapest built house with the most profit, and not really worrying about building a long-term brand.
That sounds like an argument FOR having prefab homes from a company like Sears that's trying to build a long-lasting brand. Maybe there is opportunity for a different kind of Apple Homepod.
That's a survivorship bias. You're counting the few things that survived, and discounting the majority that didn't.
Of course there is nothing inherently less dependable about something made in Japan compared to the United States. But things made cheaply are generally less dependable, and a lot of that stuff was made on the cheap for a reason: to break into the U.S. market.
totally. metal studs are widely used in commercial construction as well. you'll also see metal studs in finished basements instead of wood furring strips. they're used where they're a good fit, and if the region and conditions there support it.
It would be tough to offer the same kind of kit in this day and age given the difference in building material back then compared to now.
Menards carries house kits. I looked into them about 20 years ago, and a search tells me they still exist today.
And these kits are nicer than the sears kits. Many of the sears kits wouldn't have factored in electricity. Some of them wouldn't have plumbing. Insulation was probably minimal and I'd not be surprised to find out that folks have had to deal with asbestos in their house. Central air/heating might not have been the same: My parents had a house built in 1918. It had hot water heat. The hot water was supplied by a huge boiler, insulated by asbestos, and originally fired by coal.
It should be tough to offer this kit in modern times: the new house kit of today is much better.
> This was pre-globalization, when even fasteners, pipe, and fittings were manufactured in the U.S. The increase in number and specificity of building codes has come in-part due to foreign-made building materials and poor QC.
In other words, when American companies would leave profits on the table by providing building materials of gratuitously good quality, rather than cost-shaving them?
Given what the US food industry was doing pre-FDA, that sounds .. questionable.
In pretty much any area, modernization is all about moving the emphasis from materials and workmanship to design and specification.
I think some of the low quality materials available with globalization might be because other places understand how to use those materials better than we do, we're still trying to use the old mindset with the new materials.
We might not be able to do kit houses, but I think it's pretty cool that we don't chop old growth anymore, and we use less material for most things, and it all still generally works except when it's designed to fail or there's extreme corner cutting.
I live in a 1920s house in Portland Oregon... The wood in my house has broken innumerable drill bits. What can be drilled through in a few seconds with new wood takes me a good fifteen or so minutes.
I added Ethernet wiring to the whole house when we had it rewired off knob and tube. It would take ten minutes through each stud and my hands would often tire of holding the drill
I know what you're saying but I have come to see the utility of modern materials like OSB in construction. Sure, it's ugly, but I suspect it holds up in terms of stability to older lumber.
Someone in architectural engineering — feel free to correct me.
The increase in number and specificity of building codes has come in-part due to foreign-made building materials and poor QC.
I agree, due to your uae of "in-part".
Foreign parts are indeed very low quality, comparatively. What's worse are bog box stores importing, creating their own brand, and selling this junk.
I honestly believe we should pass a law, if a big box retailer does this, they assume full liabilty and responsibility for QC and all damages. This includes if they have any ownership in any corporation, no matter how many shells or distance orml country, and the CFO, CxO should be criminally liable for compliance.
EG no hiding.
The big box guys like to import off brands by setting up a shell company, then in a few years axe the brand and close the corp, evading liabily. It needs to end!
That said, I think many building codes exist because too many people take shortcuts.
N=1; an MBA friend of mine worked for Sears on their website offering. He nearly ripped out his own hair, since instead of being a web commerce department they were "online catalog", and the culture matched.
Instead of adapting to the medium, they tried to force the medium to their offering, suffered when web-first companies showed up, and then decided the internet was a fad.
I live in one of these. Still standing since 1908, and honestly the quality of the wood used in the construction is the secret, I’ve been trying to find tight grained fir that I can make some plugs to patch some holes drilled for wiring in the original wood floor, and I can’t even come close. Luckily mine was made by a craftsman who obviously took pride in his work.
I owned a house built around that time, for a while, but not a kit house.
The lumber they used for structural members (huge, 8x10ish boards, very long, all around where the foundation met the house; joists; et c) or for other parts that were never meant to be seen, like floor underlayment (which was a bunch of ordinary boards laid diagonally, so they wouldn't match up with wood floor boards laid atop it—not plywood) would probably have gone to veneer these days. Knot-free, perfect stuff. Much of it's likely nearly impossible to get these days at any price, in the same size and quality, short of salvage from houses like that. I never got much of a look in the walls, but it was 2 stories plus a full-height floor for the attic (need that for temp control, in the days before air conditioning) and was "balloon" construction, which means they used a whole bunch of boards 2-3 stories high to frame the exterior walls, which, again, probably nearly impossible to find these days, straight and strong enough to do such a thing.
I follow some wooden window restoration businesses on YouTube and usually that is the first thing they say. Save your windows, because you can't buy wood of this quality anymore no matter what you spend.
It’s certainly possible to get such wood, but rare. Harvesting 1% of a timber parcel per year is devilishly hard. Those that do it have all the customers they need and don’t really want to talk with anyone else - it’s more a factor of how the wood is going to be used than the price.
Do you have any idea of suppliers or where to find such suppliers? Like I said, I'd like to find some of the tight grain Douglas Fir for my floor, and I also make furniture and pour hours and hours of my time into it, the wood is cheap in comparison.
That's my understanding, yes. There was so much old-growth wood (in North America, anyway) that practically all lumber produced was excellent by modern standards. No reason to bother with young or otherwise low-quality trees.
I notice that working-class houses of the 60s-80s (and a bit into the 90s) usually had solid wood trim and doors, too, typically throughout. Those are now luxury-tier, and even rather expensive houses will use particle board (basically cardboard—sawdust and glue) or pieced-together pine that must be finished with paint, and hollow doors, often without even finish-grade veneer (so they have to be painted, can't stain and varnish them). Expensive houses where the person building it cared a little more (or the buyer had input) may put solid wood in certain public areas, but e.g. bedrooms? Hardly ever, now, at least in houses built for/by people who work for a living. So the process of lumber-worsening may be ongoing.
The tight grain pattern that comes from slow growth in an old growth forest is something impossible to replicate in a post clear cut environment.
I am not positive, but increasing temps and lighter winters, more CO2 in the atmosphere, probably also increase the growth per season even in a forest that hasn’t been logged, if there are any.
In New Orleans (and surrounding areas), we have a large, dusty industry of salvaging old long leaf pine and either reusing it directly or re-milling larger pieces like beams into flooring etc. You can easily pick up old growth pine with tight grain here, but depending on where these kits sourced their wood, it is probably the wrong species. Might still be closer than anything you can find locally. If you ever make a trip to New Orleans, most salvage stores like The Bank, Riccas, Demo Diva etc will sell you a chunk of wood no problem.
I too live in one, although it was heavily modified around 2009 with a second story put on it. All the houses on this side of the street are the same Sears house model and all have been slightly greatly modified over the last 110 years.
It is amazing to me that people used to spend one month full time on their own to build their own house using the instructions provided by Sears. Does anyone know whether any instruction booklets have survived? And whether it is possible for someone today to follow the same instructions and build their own house?
What you showed are the advertisements of the homes, but these are not the instructions that Sears sold. I assume the instructions would include a bill of materials and the step-by-step assembly process.
The story, not sure it's true, is that settlers out on the prairie would order these things and assemble them themselves, maybe with help from the neighbors. It wasn't your typical suburban guy with a job downtown.
I would love to know this as well. Can the current automation and robotics driven systems make this a more efficient and viable option for manufacturing?
This often comes up as a "look how much cheaper housing used to be" discussion. Keep in mind things like gfci outlets, fire code, insulation requirements, electrical/plumbing inspectors, permits, etc weren't an issue back then.
That stuff really isn't that expensive though, I mean it adds up, but the real cost is the multi levels of labor mark ups going through contractors for the labor to ultimately be done by someone with very little experience making very low wages.
You will have a "builder" who hires a GC, the GC will then hire subs. The subs will bring in crews and the crews are typically two guys with a truck and whoever they picked up at home Depot that morning.
Every one prices per job except the home Depot laborers that end up doing all the work and they get like $100 / $150 a day cash. But they are who is doing 90% of the work.
In the 40s when you hired someone to build a house they actually built the house, like would be out there sawing or even straight up milling the wood themselves.
Today almost no one that's experienced does new construction where they actually do work themselves. The actual quality workers are all in remodeling because the price to time/work/labor ratio is so much more profitable.
There is also just simple supply and demand in many areas of NA. There aren't enough houses to match demand, so developers don't even really need to focus all that much on cost control when building: you're already making a killing on the initial sale. A new home that sells for $1mil in a neighbourhood vs one that sold 2 years earlier for $700k is not wildly better made, at least $300k more; people are just willing to spend that much more for a limited supply.
New construction homes are almost universally Value of Land + Cost to build structure + ~10%. The supply/demand aspect of new construction cost only factor into the value of the land, and how increased demand can cause increased labor/material costs.
It's not like real estate developers pull numbers out of a hat to determine how much to charge. Most areas will have several major developers in direct competition to attract new home buyers, and if their costs every get out of hand people will just start buying land and managing the build themselves.
What would you advocate to lower the cost of housing by 50%?
Personally I suspect the land cost is one huge part of why people don't build their own homes today. Today's version of the sears catalog home would be like "2 dozen people buy a small plot of land together in/near the city and build a condominium to share the land in a cost-effective way". But while random people can build a basic pre-fab home with lots of determination, they probably can't build a 5-over-1.
Single pane windows, lead pipe, lead paint, knob and tube electrical, no sump pumps, no drainage tile, no Tyvek, clay chimneys, poor insulation, poorly ventilated attics, creaky floors, etc. Old houses have a lot of inferior elements. Sure, the denser wood and some of the masonry or plasterwork is nice, but it ends there.
Single pane windows but windows made by hand. Lead pipe but instead of a dozen people in the pipe factory it's a few hundred. Things have gotten better but also much cheaper to produce. If we can't get 2 panes of glass for the price of 1 a hundred years ago something is wrong.
>Lead pipe but instead of a dozen people in the pipe factory it's a few hundred
You haven't been in a factory lately, or toured one from 100 years ago?
Its exactly opposite to how you say. Mechanization slimmed the employee count, then automation did it again, then again with everything going digital.
This is seen in all sorts of industries.
The plant I work in has loads of empty offices, former machine shops bereft of millwrights/used for storage), and only half the lockers in the change room are claimed, and that's after they carved out a locker room for female employees. And that's only a 50 year old place.
One night I was working alone, and the site labour supervisor was the only person I saw all night, as he stopped in a few times to check on how I was doing. I asked him how many people he had on site, and he said about 30, including he and I. Since then, when I work nights, I check up on people too. Its a big place. The population swells during the day, but most of it is contractors(like me) and office personnel. But the plant runs 24/7, as much as possible.
I've worked nights in another part of the plant, in finishing/warehouse/loading, and there's about seven people there overnight (and the same during the day), and only one (me) doing actual physical labour(and not hard stuff at all). Because product is mechanically wrapped, packaging is machine counted and printed these days, not hand lettered, moved around via conveyor and forklift, and loaded for shipping with machinery. Even closing the rail car doors is done with a machine.
Even 50-100 years ago, the world ran much more on muscle power and human eyes, and many more employees were needed.
And that these building codes are actually expensive things, and that some - but probably not all - are worth it to the homebuyers.
Especially worth thinking about in the most extreme cases, like when it’s a state with very high housing costs (like California) and extensive mandates (like EV-ready wiring in all new single family homes). There are many who wouldn’t have chosen some of these specific tradeoffs!
Someone should do a study to see how many of these are still standing versus how many are not, and how modern hyper housing regulation might have influenced the outcome.
My guess is those Sears houses were more than good enough without all the added bureaucracy of today.
For the framing/support that's probably true, but things like electrical are largely written in response to fires/shocks.
The house kits seemed to started falling out of fashion as society started deeming electricity an essential, though the timeframe also had other things like the depression/ww2 going on to cause issues with it too.
From the Tweet (article): "Between 1908 and 1940, Sears managed to sell over 70,000 DIY homes' and "Remarkably, almost 70% of these Sears DIY houses are still standing today." That would mean around 49,000 are still standing.
And I guarantee you 48,999 of those homes have been gutted to replace the lath+plaster, lead pipes, and knob+tube wiring. Timber isn't all there is to a good home.
Lath & Plaster is still pretty common, they were usually built without insulation so retrofitting the knob & tube was actually pretty simple to do from the attic.
Bathrooms have usually been gutted though, if for nothing else than the common designs had windows in the bath/shower and pretty much guaranteed water damage in the wall.
a significant fraction of the houses in major cities in the northwest, particularly seattle, are these sears homes. there are entire blocks of them, built around 1920 by developers plotting out whole neighborhoods.
many have extensive renovations, others are essentially standing as-built. typically they are worth millions, but that's more about geography and zoning than the construction itself.
i have lived in a few, all with the original plaster, and a mix of original plumbing/electrical. generally i would say even the mostly-original ones were are some of the nicest places i've ever lived, but that's not saying much.
there is definitely a survivorship bias, but the ones still standing seem to have weathered the moisture well. much of the ~70/80s era construction i have seen seems to have fared worse, and the new construction i've seen is downright laughable.
I think you’d be entirely surprised to discover how many have NOT been gutted. Most houses built in thy era still standing probably have original piping or wiring somewhere.
I tend to agree that we're past a point of optimal amount of bureaucracy in housing. I don't know that I'd go as far as saying these were more than good enough, though they are close.
Things like fire rated doors/drywall might not lower the likelihood you'll have a house fire, but they will give the occupants time to exit safely. Ditto for electrical breakers/gfci.
In fact very few code changes for residential buildings cause retroactive enforcement. Called “grandfathering” you’re allowed to continue to use a house that was legal when you built it.
There are often laws that say repairs beyond a certain point must bring it up to code, but minor repairs to keep it working are fine.
Now you may want to get it to code, but that’s another question.
We’re talking a house that is OVER 10x the price after adjusting for inflation. Does that not ring some bells financially in people’s heads? Or is the older generation just okay with this destruction of purchasing power for basic needs?
Yeah, this is something people forget these days. Regulations are written in blood. We have far fewer people dying in house fires today per 100k people than used to be the case.
I learned about this from Red Dead Redemption 2 (spoiler ahead), where the protagonist purchases a pre-built home from a catalog modeled after the Sears Home catalog.
What I found particularly interesting is that what Americans today consider stereotypical American farm houses were actually these Sears houses! They had a significant influence on the country's architectural history.
Easy to do! I've known several in my hometown, even rented one for a while. Recently looking at properties for sale around the state, found a fancy house with a pillar'd porch and elaborate newel post, pillared doorways, sliding doors, screened summer kitchen in the back - and instantly recognized it as a Sears Roebuck house with added features!
If you enter into a 'parlor' with a switchback staircase on the right, fancy newel post, maybe a gabled landing then it's a good chance. To the left, a double doorway to a sitting room. Right from there, pillared fancy doorway (possibly sliding doors) to a dining room with bay window. Behind that a pantry and then a screened summer kitchen, often closed in in later years.
Straight from the entryway you get a sort of closet with the basement stairs on the right (and maybe another exterior door) and a shelving unit on the left. Through that to a play room or downstairs bedroom. If there's a bathroom it's behind that.
All lathe-and-plaster walls, wainscoting of various designs depending on the money they had to spend.
Upstairs a short hallway with four doors to four bedrooms. Maybe a sleeping porch behind the first bedroom on the right.
Anyway seen this design around here (midwest) many times, sometimes a little larger or smaller but always the same layout!
For anyone in the Los Angeles area, the Nixon Presidential Museum and Library has his childhood home in the premises, which is a Sears Kit home built by his father. You can tour the inside (but not the second floor, thanks to OSHA regulations, an agency founded by Nixon).
One of the anecdotes they shared is that the kits did not come with fireplaces, so his father learned to mod kit based comes with a brick fireplace and made a side gig of doing it for others.
Half the time some local NIMBY refers to the "vernacular" of some supposedly irreplaceable house it turns out to be a catalog kit home. It is one of the stupidest aspects of American discourse.
I mean, the kit homes aren't eyesores like the typical McMansion builders pretty much have to build if they're to make a profit in today's environment.
There's not a lot of money to be made buying land for top dollar and trying to build something affordable on it - especially with any quality to it, too.
> There's not a lot of money to be made buying land for top dollar and trying to build something affordable on it - especially with any quality to it, too.
There's actually maximal profit to be made by building affordable housing (i.e. dense condos that make efficient use of expensive land). The only problem is that it's illegal in most places.
The phrase "historical" has been so abused that at this point I assume that it just means that it's 70 years old and there's nothing else special about it.
Yes, they were huge in the depression. I live in one my parents bought and built in the 30's for $1400. One large room, 2 bedrooms 12x12, kitchen 9x12, bathroom 7x7, mudroom 7x7. Just wood. They used an early lay-away plan and it arrived as lengths of labelled wood and a number of single pane swing to open windows. Totally un finished, no wires/plaster/lathes etc, they wired/plumbed it but did not plaster it as we used it as a summer cottage They left to Dad and he got married and he and wife added insulation and dry wall and a sleeping loft. 3 kids later and after being widowed, I live here alone and see kids/brother via the internet. It is still a small house, but grandfathered taxes are only $560 a year.
I now 84, taxes will leap after I pass...
I doubt such kits are viable now, as this was built over several years with grandparents in tents and codes/inspectors - what are those? The current codes and frequent inspection milestones as the build progresses are less suited to kit homes. Might be viable for a handy person with hired in trades for trade tasks.
Home building is ripe for a disruption - huge inertia in the code/inspect system. Law here states you must have a window in every room to ventilate the fire place?? I can see many people happy in a house with a home office, TV room etc with no window. Hang a 48" 4K display on the wall and dial up an IP view of any where at all, or watch TV?
I had a co-worker who built a house in the same sort of way while living with his father nearby. I did ask about inspections and he said that out in rural Texas, they just don't do that, and they also pay very little in property tax.
Generally speaking you want at least one window per room as a means of escape in the event of a fire in case the door is blocked, but the natural light might also be important to people.
It’s still the case that in much of the country (rural) the inspections are more concerned with “will your house kill the electrical/water/sewer/neighbor” than with your safety-its assumed you know what you’re doing.
Even in the big cities inspections are often cursory if it seems obvious to the inspector that the people involved know what they’re doing.
And this is why you should hire a good home inspection service that knows how to inspect construction and when; they will be more thorough.
Other companies out there bundle additional components (more than just the frame). A quick google search turns up DIY kits that includes insulation, floors, walls, etc.
The fuck? 1400sq feet is not a tiny home. That's the size of the house I live in.
Also for barely more than that, you can just get a manufactured home, that comes with walls, power, carpets, insulation, plumbing, cabinets and bathrooms.
These tiny home things are all a joke, they're not cheap, and never have been. It's kinda like these people building container homes. Sure they're cheap to start, then you start putting in all stuff that makes it a house, and lo-and-behold it becomes as expensive as a house.
We recently built a house. We'd absolutely have considered this if they were still being offered.
We couldn't get any of the modern prefab builders to call us back, so we ended up going full custom. I'm sure we would have gotten more bang for our buck with some sort of middle-ground kit.
From my understanding the prefabs are amazing great if they’re exactly what you want, but as you deviate from that the more and more full custom actually becomes the best deal.
It’s interesting to note that in Akron, Ohio in 1950 (a medium sized industrial city at a population of around 350,000) a city home like the Sears home would have sold for around $8,000. Assuming the land at 1/3 the cost and a 1/4 acre lot, the land would have been worth about $2,500. With inflation, that lot should cost about $31,500 today.
According to [1], the median cost of 1/4 acre in Akron in 2020 was around $25,000. To be fair, Akron does not have the economic advantages of the industrial 1950’s any longer, but the price is still close to the expected value from inflation.
What has changed are people’s expectations. Today, a Sears home on a 1/4 acre lot is not what people dream about owning. Nevertheless, it is indeed still an option throughout the middle of the US, and once the people on the coast get hungry enough for their own home, they will move inland, do remote work and live very comfortably.
A lot in the middle of nowhere is what people don't want, hence why it's cheap.
House pricing in the popular areas is perverted by speculative investment and shitty zoning, which are issues that still need solving. It could be much cheaper, then people don't have to move out to the middle of nowhere. We just need to get better at accommodating affordable city living.
Huh. Strange that our perceptions are so different. I associate fast food with "the middle of nowhere". Part of why I like living in the city is that I don't have to eat at Chipotle.
I wonder if something like this could be done today with prefabricated panels (e.g structural insulated panels) and some sufficiently bulletproof joint system to meet modern safety and efficiency standards without requiring a bunch of training. You'd presumably still want licensed professionals to do the actual utility hookups (and some jurisdictions would probably want them to do the interior wiring/plumbing as well), but at first glance I feel like it ought to be viable.
It already is, and in great quantity, done with prefabricated panels. I worked for one of Quadrant Homes' builders in the PNW about 12 years ago and our framing came out pre-assembled on trucks. We would then nail it all together. They even boomed up the bottom and middle floors pre-assembled and nailed them together on-site.
A few factory made home startups have come and gone. Sadly the standards/codes vary state by state = hard to automate. I can see a large market for 9 foot panels 4 feet wide with a pre-wired plug as an option to have a wire to an attic wire set.Some 2" thick, 4", 6" Some with windows, thicker for exterior insulation foamed in option. There would be some with closet door kits, front door kits etc - buy your own door or buy theirs.
There may be someone doing this out there now.
As a Chicago native I have to mention its connection here.
Sears was based in Chicago. Lumber came down from Wisconsin via Lake Michigan and got shipped out on the new railroad network as DIY houses. The Silicon Valley of its day.
All the money to be made is selling to the top end of the market, especially since land is priced at developing the land as much as you can (to then sell to the top end).
If you are interested in Sears homes, and near Chicago, I suggest you pay a visit to Downers Grove. I took them for granted growing up. There are quite a few Sears homes, and even a walking tour.
https://www.architecture.org/news/happening-caf/sears-homes-...
I hope for a future where kit or prefab housing can be profitable for contractors/builders or desirable for home buyers enough that they'd go for it on empty land, because where I live the only new construction is "luxury" (in the sense that it's priced like $200/sqft and the minimum size worth building is 2k sqft). There's still plenty of stock in 2-3 bedroom single family homes from the 1940s-70s of that kind of construction but you don't see anyone building a small ranch today.
Since there are so many knowledgeable people here right now, I'd like to hijack a bit. I am retiring and moving to the Ozarks, where I bought an older home (mid - 60s) in the mountains that was framed in rough cut white oak. From what I understand, this is largely termite - resistant and of course very hard wood. Are there any downsides, other than being difficult to sink a nail into this stuff?
I lived in a San Jose house framed in old Redwood. A century of drying and hardening made in virtually impossible to drive a nail. The 'dimensional' lumber (sawn to no particular standard) made it hard to fit any modern fixture.
Having been modified several time over the century it was a warren of misshapen rooms and awkward hallways & stairs. Had a single 15 amp circuit for the downstairs and nothing upstairs. Wire run in conduit instead of inside the walls - and not stylish office conduit, galvanized pipes hung from the walls with nailed-in hangars!
My neighbors had it worse - no foundation! Just built on the dirt. He jacked it up and used a skid loader to build a basement and foundation, get the wood away from the termites. Lived in it the whole time! An amazing couple.
> Sears asserted that an individual with "average" skills could construct the entire house within a span of 90 days.
I wonder what the actual average construction time was for owner-occupants? Three months sounds unrealistically short for a single person, but maybe it's not actually quite as hard as I'm imagining it.
I'm not sure how they account for the foundation, but you could probably have the house roughed together in 2 weeks, that is studs up with sheathing and roof. The remainder is a real bitch though, imagine doing all that plaster mixing and throwing it up onto the walls!
Three months sounds about right - if you dig into modern house building you can see that each step isn’t that complicated, it’s just time.
Having helpers on hand is probably not counted; literally one person is significantly harder than having three.
Here’s a crew of three that threw up three walls of a garage in a day: https://youtu.be/D5U753R3N_A (tons of other delays have happened, but framing is pretty darn fast - find a development near you can drive by everyday and watch, a whole house can go from nothing but a foundation to a thing with a roof in a week).
i think you can buy an equivalent prefab home these days for about $125k. A bit of inflation over $84k, but not approachable. But the appreciation formula for such types of houses hasn't changed - still lower than traditional stick or stone.
Ah, yes, the popular urban myth that houses in cities are made of gold and platinum (or similarly expensive materials) while the houses built on the periphery are doomed by planned obsolescence. Thank you for telling us that isn't the case.
There's a heckuva lot more than that. In the vast majority of cities, the land isn't worth a fraction of everything else involved. You can't just pay your 10k(or even 100k) for a plot, 125k for a prefab, then call it a day. If you could, house values would absolutely plummet.
You've got the permits, the foundation, driveway, utilities, and the whole issue of paying someone to put the parts together, to name a few.
I live in a fully restored (c.a. 2011) Sears Columbine house. We love it, almost open first floor floor plan and even has a root cellar under the front porch. We also live on the railroad tracks, which is how it was delivered.
I'm trying to find a reference for it, but I vaguely remember a large subdivision around the Toronto Area being built using modular components.
The interesting part was the prefabricated components were being built onsite, in a large metal building. I guess you can get an assembly line concept going, work at nights, in poor weather, etc, to really crank out a bunch of homes in a short period of time...
I live in one of these. Still solid after 100 years, and the 2x4’s are actually two by four inches. I wish the walls were a bit thicker (so I could insulate it better) but no other complaints. I live right up the road from some railroad tracks, I think that’s how it was delivered.
Trailer parks and doublewides also existed prior to microhouses. Prefab housing isn't new, it just has a bad rep associated with the trappings of predatory business models targeting the poor.
Edit: Fun fact - The Sears catalog was used as improvised or actual toilet paper since before WW I.
When I was a kid I saw a movie or TV show about a guy who had won one of these in a contest, but then threw a party and never completed the build out of the house... so the kit was left in parts all over the plot of land he won.
High-velocity air is amazing. Nearly silent, tiny openings instead of large grills, fairly even temperature throughout each floor of the house, doesn't tempt people to put a business-style drop ceiling in a historic home. I wish it becomes common enough & cheap enough that all the old leaky space-hogging ductwork, everywhere, gets replaced.
I grew up in a small one that did have central "air" in the form of an attic fan. At about the center of the house there was a ~4 foot fan mounted in the ceiling, concealed by louvers that opened when the fan turned on.
My frustration now is I can't find non-DIY stuff. Like, I don't care about random appliances or furniture. Just getting a guy to install stuff along with the purchase is frustratingly hard.
There is a couple blocks of these houses near me (near Boston) that seemed like normal small homes. Did not realize until someone mentioned at a party that they lived in a Sears house.
Sears was started in the 1890's as a mail order business to compete against local general stores (think of all those westerns with "General Store" on one of the buildings - they were Sears competition). The guys Sears worked on railroads, and he saw all the middlemen tacking on markup as products moved west in the distribution chain until they go to the stores.
So he started a catalog, the famous Sears catalog in 1893. It was 300 pages, and had everything. Now think about this for a second. In 1893, you had a mail order catalog that sold pretty much everything that was for sale in 1893 - machinery, bikes, toys, dry goods, etc. Does this sound like another business you know?
So every year the catalog comes out, and after a few decades it becomes an American institution. For much of the population, the Sears catalog includes a decent quality, low cost version of every mass market nonperishable consumer product in the United States that wasn't a car (they did sell those at one point very early on. They also sold mobile homes too, up to the 1940's).
You could pick anything from the catalog, mail in your order with a check, and in a few days/weeks you'd get it. If you didn't like it, for any reason, Sears had a "satisfaction guaranteed" policy that you could return it at anytime for a full refund.
Now pay attention, because here's where it gets good.
In 1931, Sears starts an insurance company - Allstate. It buys financial investment firm Dean Witter and real estate broker Coldwell Banker in 1981. In 1984 it starts a joint venture with IBM called Prodigy, an online computer service, sort of a prototype AOL. In 1985, Sears launches a new major credit card, the Discover card. For the next eight years, the only credit card you can use at Sears is Discover.
At this time, the early 80's Sears is the largest retailer in the U.S.
By 1993, the 100th anniversary of the Sears Catalog, Sears had built up considerable goodwill in the mind of consumers. They weren't the lowest price, but they had what you needed at good prices and the service was second to none. They had real estate, insurance, financial planning, and all at good prices with top customer service.
This is 1993. In quite possibly the greatest example of corporate shortsightedness, Sears shut down it's mail-order business in a cost cutting measure. It spins off Allstate that same year, and soon dumps Dean Witter and Coldwell Banker.
In 1993, Sears had the most extensive and sophisticated mail-order retail operation on the planet and they closed it.
Two years later, Amazon.com launched, and was soon selling everything that sears sold through it's catalog. By the late-90's Walmart's push of low-cost China imports killed Sears retailing. Online banking takes off. Credit card use surges as mail order and retail purchases are shifted online.
Sears had its own computer network in 1993. They had access to IBM, they should have understood the power of the internet. All they had to do was shift the catalog online instead of killing it off, promising in store returns and the same Sears satisfaction guaranteed. Discover could have been the credit card of choice for security and protection online. Dean Witter could have been what Schwab, E-Trade and Ameritrade became. Back in the mid-late 90s when many people were hesitant to use credit cards online, Sears could have been a familiar face online.
Sears could have used the Catalog to create searscatalog.com or wishbook.com and owned online retailing, owned amazon's business, owned online brokerage and banking, but they blew their chances to save a few bucks in 1993. They could have made huge profits in the early 2000s real estate boom by leveraging that success with their real estate arm (imagine if Amazon sold houses).
By my estimates, Sears could have spent about $200 million in 1994-1996 to develop and promote retailing and financial services online, and they'd be reaping billions.
Sears could still be a huge American company today, instead of a historical footnote.
Just waiting for the god damn AI assistants to be more useful, we have the sensors; lidar, vision, chat comprehension.
Then it's just a matter of loading up on amphetamins.
"Help me build a Sears catalogue house from 1920. I own the property X and i have $87k. Be concise."
X-GPT: "You do not have enough funds to build at this time. According to survey X your property contains X mineral. Go to this location X and buy shovel X, rock cracker X. Or I can order it for you and it will arrive tommorow"
Your average dude 100 years ago could build his own fuckin house. Your average zoomer can't tell you the difference between a Phillips Head and a Flat Head.
Even the quality of lumber has decreased as old growth forests that were harvested 80 years ago no longer exist. Heart pine lumber that were used in 1940s homes (I own one) is more dense and stronger than new growth pine lumber. [1]
It would be tough to offer the same kind of kit in this day and age given the difference in building material back then compared to now.
[1] https://etmoore.com/news/reclaimed-heart-pine-vs-yellow-pine....