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A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

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Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#51

Post by jameshart »

tw04 wrote: post #50
jameshart wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you going to get this ‘crew that cares’? How much of a premium does making them care cost? When you’re hiring a crew to build one house, what’s their incentive to do a great job? You’re not likely to build another house soon. I don’t understand why people romanticize Sears houses like this. It’s like saying ‘I’d rather have an IKEA table assembled by a person who cares than a piece of furniture made by a cr…

>Where are you going to get this ‘crew that cares’? How much of a premium does making them care cost? I can name three GCs off the top of my head who have reliable crews. If you have never had any construction work done, you pull up google or your search engine of choice and look for GCs in your area then ask for some references - or just ask a friend? >When you’re hiring a crew to build one house, what’s their incen…

You’re obviously right. Nobody has ever hired a general contractor and regretted it. Housing would be better if it was all sold flat pack by a mail order monopoly and assembled by local contractors.

Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#52

Post by bluedino »

doomlaser wrote: post #10

Love the original catalog index of homes. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011... ) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :) On a tangential note: Sears kill…

>> Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon.

That's like saying Ford could have been Tesla, they just needed to make an electric car in 2012.

Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#53

Post by bluedino »

vsskanth wrote: post #3

I'm really impressed by how timeless these homes look even today. Why are kit homes not a thing today ? What replaced them ?

People don't build their own houses like they used to.

One of my grandfathers, and both of my wife's grandfathers built their own home at least once in their life.

Re-modeling a bathroom is about the limit of my abilities, plus I work an 8-5 so I'm not sure when I'd have time to build a house.

Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#54

Post by sct202 »

bluedino wrote: post #52
doomlaser wrote: post #10

Love the original catalog index of homes. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011... ) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :) On a tangential note: Sears kill…

>> Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon. That's like saying Ford could have been Tesla, they just needed to make an electric car in 2012.

Sears did have an internet store on Prodigy (an AOL competitor) in the early 90s it went nowhere... a lot of these megacompanies weren't going to turn it around even if they were first movers.

Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#55

Post by [deleted] »

jameshart wrote: post #48
tw04 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A. Identical houses that aren't directly next to each other are far less obvious, and generally look better for the simple fact they look unique in their setting. B. The fact the houses are identical is less the issue than sub-par materials and most importantly, as you'll find in all of the DR Horton lawsuits, sub-par construction. They're not just pumping out 100 houses, they're doing it as fast as humanly possible…

Where are you going to get this ‘crew that cares’? How much of a premium does making them care cost? When you’re hiring a crew to build one house, what’s their incentive to do a great job? You’re not likely to build another house soon. I don’t understand why people romanticize Sears houses like this. It’s like saying ‘I’d rather have an IKEA table assembled by a person who cares than a piece of furniture made by a cr…

[deleted]

Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#56

Post by JKCalhoun »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #27
codelikeawolf wrote: post #20

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and I didn't realize how weird the term "Chicagoland" was until I started traveling around a bit. I'm not aware of any other city in the world that tacks "land" onto the name to describe the surrounding area. Do this with any other city and it sounds like a weird amusement park: Dallasland, Indianapolisland, Seattleland, etc.

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and nobody says "Chicagoland" in conversation. It's only used by newscasters, and car dealers in their commercials. Even dumber is "Chicagoland area." My copyediting professor (who worked at the Chicago Tribune) loved to mock this dumb term, pointing out that nobody says "Detroitland" or "New Yorkland" or "Indianapolisland."

"Frisco" anyone?

No?

Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#57

Post by nimajneb »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #49

On the theme of pre-fab (albeit not mail order): I'm in western Ohio and we have a few Lustron houses[0] left around. These were a post-WWII product. Once you know the design features they're easy to spot. In the town where I live we also have the Hobart Steel Houses[1] that were a quirky proof-of-concept by a local manufacturer. My daughter's first school is located in one of these houses. Being able to stick magnet…

Those houses are cool. There's two next to each other near where I grew up. I noticed them in High School I think. I never knew what they were until a couple years ago when I watched a video about them. They look quite unique with the smooth panel looking tiles for the exterior.

Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#58

Post by potatochup »

bluedino wrote: post #52
doomlaser wrote: post #10

Love the original catalog index of homes. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011... ) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :) On a tangential note: Sears kill…

>> Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon. That's like saying Ford could have been Tesla, they just needed to make an electric car in 2012.

I mean, GM came kinda close with the EV1. It was essentially as good as a Nissan Leaf was, in the 90s! It was more of an organizational failure than a technical one that killed it.

Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#59

Post by ssl-3 »

doomlaser wrote: post #10

Love the original catalog index of homes. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011... ) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :) On a tangential note: Sears kill…

When folks say things like "Sears could have been Amazon," I feel like they don't quite see the whole picture.

They adopted digital tech earlier than most other companies.

Sears co-founded the Prodigy dialup service eons before "The Internet" was a household name, and they were selling hardgoods on the web (for delivery or free in-store pickup) when Amazon was still mostly a cheeky book store.

Sears died mostly because of corporate raider tactics that made it impossible for them to survive.

Re: A trip to see Chicagoland Sears houses

#60

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

tkgally wrote: post #40
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and nobody says "Chicagoland" in conversation. It's only used by newscasters, and car dealers in their commercials. Even dumber is "Chicagoland area." My copyediting professor (who worked at the Chicago Tribune) loved to mock this dumb term, pointing out that nobody says "Detroitland" or "New Yorkland" or "Indianapolisland."

> It's only used by newscasters, and car dealers in their commercials. When I was growing up in Southern California, “the Southland” was used in the same way to mean the Los Angeles area. I heard the term only in the mass media, never directly from a person in conversation. A little googling turned up this list of media-only geographical terms: https://www.cyburbia.org/forums/threads/nicknames-for-metrop... I noticed…

Ha, I moved to L.A. from Chicago and immediately noticed "the Southland" used in exactly the same way.

Another WTF is "the inland empire," also used for some nebulous part of the L.A. area by newscasters only, as far as I can tell.

But then CA absolutely loves meaningless names for stuff, like the perennial "red flag warnings." So... we're being menaced by red flags? Why do we fear them?

And "sigalert." Whatever, man.

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