There's a group of people hunting down the remaining Sears and Roebuck homes, the DIY houses built from kits Sears once sold in its famous catalog.
Findings
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Sears shipped a house the way it shipped a sewing machine — about 25 tons of material and more than 30,000 numbered parts, sent by railroad boxcar to the nearest siding and carted to the lot from there.
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Plenty of them have since been torn down or remodelled past recognition, which is exactly why a confirmed sighting is worth logging.
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Sears sold more than 70,000 kit houses between 1908 and 1942 across roughly 370 models — but fewer than 5,000 have been positively identified today.
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Sears wrote the mortgages too — typically five to 15 years at 6% to 7% — until Depression-era defaults ended the company's home lending at the close of 1933.
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The company's home sales records were destroyed in a corporate clear-out, so no master list of addresses survives — every hunt starts from zero.
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A house is confirmed from the inside out: stamped letter-and-number codes on the framing, shipping labels still glued to the back of millwork, old building permits, then a line-by-line match against a scanned catalog page.
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The house at the top of this post is a Magnolia, the largest and most expensive model in the catalog — only about seven are documented as still standing anywhere in the country.
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