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Sears Kits Built Many Homes in the Rural Midwest [1]
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Date: 2025-05-22
When she started her search for a house, Amy Balicki didn’t set out to buy a Sears kit home in Downers Grove, Illinois – but she probably should have.
That’s because Downers Grove was a prime location for siting Sears homes in the 1920s and 1930s. Now, there are 66 Sears kit homes located in the mid-size town – the fifth highest concentration of kit homes in Illinois, according to Nina Fuscaldo, curator of the Downers Grove Museum.
In its heyday, many rural shoppers relied on the Sears mail order to purchase everything from pins to pants. The convenience was most important to residents of rural and suburban areas where the nearest stores had limited inventory.
They also turned to retailers like Sears and other kit home companies like Montgomery Ward and the Aladdin Company to build their family home. Between 1908 and 1942, Sears sold some 70,000 customizable home kits across the country through the company’s Modern Home catalog, according to the Chicago Architectural Center.
Kit-related catalog entries featured a sketch of the house, a floor plan, and a basic cost that ranged from $360 to more than $2,000. All the kits included at least two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, and a front porch. Most were located in the Midwest, including Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri, and almost all of them were located in rural or suburban areas.
Judith Chabot, a researcher who authenticates Sears kit homes and maintains a database of these types of houses around the U.S., said that the kits especially appealed to buyers who had building sites, wanted convenience, and were eager to save money on the construction.
“The typical way for folks to have a home built in that era was to buy blueprints from a booklet of plans offered at their local lumber yard or contractors’ office, and then to hire a contractor to organize all of the purchases and construction using local supplies,” Chabot said.
By contrast, entire home kits would arrive by rail with all the materials that a kit home purchaser needed to build the home, including at least 10,000 pieces of precut lumber to suit the model of the home, drywall, asphalt roof shingles, carved staircases, and the nails, door knobs, drawer pulls, paint and varnish needed to do the job. Electrical, heating systems, and plumbing materials could also be purchased at extra cost. Shipments were made on a schedule determined after consulting with the kit buyer.
That’s almost exactly the same story Balicki heard when she was researching why Downers Grove, located just 23 miles from Chicago, became a popular place to site for kit homes, many of which remain in that town today. “The way I heard it is that the end of the railhead was in Downers Grove, so it was easy to bring the boxcars out of the area,” she said.
Initially, a kit home buyer would receive a boxcar containing pieces that would get the kit home buyer started. Subsequent deliveries would contain materials for each remaining phase of the construction. The owner of the construction site was responsible for moving and the costs related to relocating the materials from the depot to the home site.
“I would imagine that the draw for rural buyers might be the availability of being able to purchase everything they needed for the house from one source, since stores would have been few and far between in rural areas,” Chabot said.
Cost was a factor, too. At a time when the average worker’s salary was $687 annually, kit homes offered variety – about 400 different styles. Sears kit homes carried a price tag of about $659 that included all the materials needed to construct a home, sans the cost of the home site and concrete to get the project started.
As a result, according to Sears Homes Chicagoland blogger Lara Solonickne, the average 3,000 square foot Sears kit house cost about $6,500 in 1930, or about $119,269.33 in today’s money.
“The actual house price usually ended up being about double the price listed in the Modern Homes catalog,” she said.
While kits offered buyers a way to build a homestead of their own, kit home construction also boosted the local economies of communities where the homes were sited.
“Many customers had help building the houses from local carpenters and other tradesmen,” Solonickne said. “By the early 1930s, few customers were building the homes by themselves.”
In 1911, Sears continued to capitalize on the convenience shopping concept by offering its kit home customers an easy way to finance their family home dreams. According to Forbes magazine, kit home buyers were initially only able to finance the cost of building materials. Later, the retail giant expanded its financing options to include a mortgage on the lot where the building would sit.
Financing terms required a 25% down payment on the cost of the house and the lot, and 6% interest for 5 years with a higher rate for financing up to 15 years. And because financing applications did not inquire about a borrower’s race, ethnicity, gender or credit history, Sears kit homes make home ownership possible for buyers who might have been turned away by banks.
These days, Sears and other kit homes are still appreciated by home buyers who want their homes to carry some history along with sturdy construction. But that’s not to say most kit homes have not undergone some kind of renovation over the years.
“We’ve made upgrades to the kitchen and the bath and we’re had to replace the roof which you would have to do for any house,” Amy Balicki said. “But the house is pretty much like it was with hardwood floors, original trim and other architectural features.”
Whether they have been changed or not, Chabot said that there are more than 18,668 on the National List of Sears kit homes still standing around the U.S., and there are likely even more.
“We have no way of knowing how many of those original Sears houses are still standing,” Chabot says. “We just haven’t found them yet.”
But to Balicki, the number of kit houses still standing is irrelevant to her. What’s more important, she said, is how the house “feels” to her and her family.
“Does it have all the [features] a modern home would have? No it does not, but that’s okay with me,” Balicki said. “When I’m inside this house, I’m happy.”
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