From 1908 to 1942, you could buy houses through Sears catalogs. Sears sold about 70,000 of them throughout the US and Canada, and you could pick from 370 different styles. The cheapest models were about $360 (in early 1900’s dollars).
Although Sears houses haven’t been sold for well over 80 years, some people in modern times still build homes based on the old Sears plans, since they used fairly standard materials and many models were designed to be easily constructed by the homeowner.
Here is an ad for a large, 10 room model which sold for $6500, and an actual example of one,
I lived in a Sears home from 1920. We had a 100th birthday for it. It was surprisingly good condition. Neighborhood was rough and we ended up selling and moving about 3 years ago.
I love it!
I haven’t dug into it, but apparently there are web sites which try to catalog all the ones that still exist. But it’s difficult to figure out, because of look-alikes that used the same or similar plans, but without actually being Sears houses.
Is there anywhere that’s digitizing and providing the actual plan sets?
Good question. When researching the post I found a bunch of sites that provide floor plans and dimensions, but haven’t stumbled into construction plans.
Here’s an internet archive link I still had open in my browser showing the floor plans for a bunch of them. It’s 119 pages of floor plans! 1908 catalog.
https://archive.org/details/modernhomes00sear/page/22/mode/thumb
Did a little more digging. I couldn’t get this link to load, but wikipedia says it contains “blueprints for the Alahambra and Fairy models”. Maybe you’ll have better luck with the site than I did.
That link isn’t to view the collection itself; it’s for a reference to a physical collection you have to make an appointment and travel to the University of Maryland archives building to go look at in person.
If you click “Download PDF” all you get is the same information as on the web page but rendered as a PDF file, LOL.
Oh, bummer!
Slightly surprised they don’t have it online, since it doesn’t seem like it would have copyright issues after 100+ years.
Somebody has to do (and pay for) the work to scan it.