Mail-order houses?
Sears, Aladdin, Gordon Van Tine, Montgomery Ward, Lewis, Harris Brothers, Sterling, and Pacific Ready-Cut Homes were the big companies that sold kit homes via mail order. These 10,000+ piece do-it-yourself kits, sold from the "Wish Book" were shipped to the buyer along with a 75-page instruction book that told the builder how all those pieces went together. Kit home companies promised that a man "of average abilities" could build his own kit home in about 30-90 days. Most kit homes were built in the 1920s, so predictably, they are bungalows.
Pacific Ready-Cut Homes was our home-town producer, selling approximately 40,000 of them between 1908 and 1940. They were located at South Boyle Avenue and Slauson in Vernon, but they shipped all over and had a "show room neighborhood" at 1330 S. Hill Street. There are a great number of them still being lived in and if you want to see quite a few nearby, check out North Carson Road in Beverly Hills.
Nerd Alert! Like train-spotting, there are enthusiasts out there who travel around to search these out. To be completely candid, we get a little giddy when we see one of these pop up on the MLS, like these:
5906 Tipton Way, Los Angeles
155 N Carson, Beverly Hills
If you want to know if you live in one of these early kit homes, you can look for numbers stamped on the framing, or labels sometimes on the back of trim, but it's easiest to just look at the old catalogs:
Can you still buy kit homes? You sure can! A few companies are Pacific Modern Homes (Elk Grove, CA), Clever Homes (Oakland, CA), Stillwater Dwellings (Seattle, WA), and Imagine Kit Homes (who sell via Home Depot). Shop carefully. Some kits include walls, a roof and insulation, but leave you responsible for the foundation. Some kits come with everything you need for the interior. Others will not. If you're in the market, ask lots of questions.