Research: A possible match

Well, it looks like my odd little house has even stumped Rose Thornton. That's hard - she knows a lot about kit homes! Her best guess is that she thinks it might - maybe- be a Gordon Van Tine. I have asked her to ask Dale Wolicki if he recognizes that floorplan in his collection, as there are currently no pre-1920 GVT catalogs online.

However, that made me go looking again, in hopes that I might find something useful. And - I might just have done so!

Thanks to the Clarke Historical Library's online archive of Aladdin documents I may have found a possible match. In the 1912 annual catalog, there is a little house called the Sherman. It isn't in the 1910 catalog and there is no 1911 catalog in the archive.

Its footprint is off, it's a little narrower, (ETA: I had the dimensions wrong!) exactly correct, 26x48, and the room dimensions are a little off (another ETA) practically identical except that they are given as divisions of the plan, not wall-to-wall measurements (plus there is a pantry where my house has none), but this is the absolute closest house plan I have yet found. I wish the scan was clearer, I've tried to refine it a bit for my example, but it wasn't very good.

Here she is in the 1913 annual, with two plan options. Neither is as good a match to my little oddball as the 1912 plan (or to the exterior illustration! look at the windows). The only real difference between this one and the next year's example is that there are people in the image, and the scan is clearer.

By 1915, it's clear that no more changes are being made to this design, or even the catalog page, except perhaps for typesetting. The 1914 and 1915 layouts are almost identical. And, in the 1916 catalog, I think I may have hit upon an answer as to why the Sheridan looks so very very much like my little mystery kit home. In 1916, the Sherman's name is changed to the Sheridan, one plan gets updated, and the exterior image finally gets a full update to match the changed plans. 

Look how the unaltered windows (the dining room and kitchen windows have significant alterations in my home) line up with the plan! At this point, while I am very optimistic that this house may, in fact, be a customized 1912 Sherman, because of the differences shown in the overlay image above, it is still equally possible that the 1912 Sherman is a copy of a similar house from a competitor's 1911 or 12 catalog. And, of course, if it is an Aladdin ... why is it all Sears on the inside? What this has given me is a concrete time range for the design of the house. I always had a feeling it was early teens, and now I am certain of it. It makes the search more focused and I am very, very happy about that.

Research: What the House is Not

I've been saying recently that I have pored over - without any success - numerous online and print resources, without being terribly specific. I really ought to share where and what I have looked through. I've mostly focused on the best (most local) companies, since my town is on two north/south rail lines and Chicago and Cairo were likely sources. Another clue about this being cut at an IL mill is that the house is mostly, if not all, cut from cypress. However, while makes the house nearly bulletproof and resistant to water damage, that fact doesn't narrow the options any, since local lumber mills in IL cut lots of cypress lumber both for local and regional use. Sears even advertised cypress as a high-quality budget option for floors and millwork (cheaper than oak or birch, but not by much).

Features that make my house easy to identify:

1. Odd footprint size -apparently 28x48 overall is a weird footprint for the period.
2. One floor (fairly rare in a house of this size among all the various plans).
3. The arrangement of the bedrooms and closet between.
4. The bath positioned at the center rear of the house.
5. The kitchen is not square.
6. Front has two living room windows, the door, and the den/parlor window.
7. That crazy angle between the living and dining rooms (this may have been a custom feature, though it was still fashionable in the 1900's and early teens).

Superficial features:

1. Porch design, tucked under the hipped roof (could easily be customized).
2. Hipped dormer attic vent (now missing).
3. No living room or parlor fireplace (house was heated with stoves originally).
4. Lap siding, millwork and interior hardware are all Sears (and original, there is no sign whatsoever of the interior hardware ever being changed).

So, here you go, a quick illustrated guide to what this house is not.

From the Winterthur Archive (these examples are created from their archive scans):

Chicago House Wrecking Company 1913 house plans book.

The best candidate is the 119A - It looks good, from the outside, except this house is wider and has a different roofline, footprint (31x38) and similar, but still off, layout.

Montgomery Ward Book of Homes, 1916 (date taken from wallpaper book ad at end of catalog).

It isn't a 156, because the footprint (32x39) is wrong, and the plan is also far off. The only real similarities are the outer appearance and bath/kitchen positions. She looks a lot like my house, though!

Plan Book of Harris Homes 1915

The closest I could find is this one, the L-1001. It's not really even close, footprint is off, appearance is wrong, all details are wrong.

A later undated edition (all houses are "N-" designs) has no likely examples beyond the N-1001, which is almost identical to the above excerpt. Another I would assume comes between the two has houses designated "M-" and is equally unhelpful. Nearly all Harris Plan Book houses have a side-located bath in the one-story models.

Aladdin Homes "Built in a day" catalog No 29, 1917

It's not a Sunshine, though it is very close in some significant details, like the kitchen/bath/back bedroom arrangement (this is a very Aladdin style layout, actually), and the chimney stack position. Footprint is close but wrong, roofline is wrong. The Boulevard is just as close, but too small, as is the Stanhope.

Oh, now we get to the Sheridan, which really, really looks like the old girl. I mean, look. Just look at her.

They could be twins. But all the other details are off. Plus that pesky all-Sears interior.

Then there is the Cadillac, which really looks like a similar plan, and is even 28 feet wide. But the room sizes are all wrong. All of them. It so close to right but it's not.

This concludes the selections from the Winterthur Museum Library (courtesy of archive.org).

There are no Sears Home Catalogs or Gordon Van Tine Ready-Cut catalogs earlier than about 1920 on the Internet Archive. I have compared the 1920s GVT 548 with my house and while there is a superficial resemblance, they are far from the same house, the 548 is too narrow and has the wrong plan. Likewise for the 1920s 533.

I also have several Aladdin and Sears catalog reprints, plus The Houses That Sears Built and Houses By Mail and have voraciously read everything Sears and kit home related I can find online, and I can tell you that I have not yet found a precisely similar house. I am at a loss and I would be deeply grateful to anyone who might be able to point me to one.

Research: A resource for kitchen restoration

The Kitchen Plan Book, 1920 Published by Hoosier Manufacturing (the cabinet people!) is available at the Internet Archive's online texts archive. It is a free download, or you can read it online. It's the collected best submissions from a kitchen design contest, and shows a fantastic variety of kitchens from classic mid-late 1910s bare-bones rooms with wood stoves to ultra-modern, deluxe, fitted kitchens that would not look out of place in a modern home.

Here are a few excerpts:

This one is for a small kitchen not unlike ours. I want built in everything, like this little kitchen has.

I especially love this one, though it's for a much more architecturally interesting house, with an octagonal kitchen. It looks like something you might find in a new house with a modern fitted kitchen.

Advice, if you want to download it: remove the extra periods from the filename, or your pdf reader will tell you it's a corrupted file.

If you want to get a hard copy of an earlier one, American Bungelow has their reprint of the 1917 edition of the Kitchen Plan Book (all different designs from this one, different year's contest) on sale, half price.

Books!

Ah, a box of research materials arrived today. The other should arrive tomorrow. So far, no love, but I'm sure I'll be popular with the local historical societies if I share these.

I'm going to go roll in my books now. Detailed reviews once I've pawed them all - I'll let you know what they tell me about this place.

Reading: Plus ça Change...

Houseblogging isn't new. It's just the medium that's new. Writing humorous (or simply sarcastic) essays about attempting to do things has been around for ages.

Last night I read a short essay entitled Down With the Restoration! about how sickening those perfect-scenario remodelling articles can be. It was written by S.J. Perelman in the 1930's. Another piece of his that I highly recommend is Insert Flap A and Throw Away, about trying to build something from a kit.

This morning I was talking to my mom about it, and she suggested I read Please Don't Eat the Dasies, which is (unlike the film) actually mostly about the Jean Kerr's life in her enormous rambling house, while they are renovating it. It's from the 1950's. Of couse, now that I'm intrigued, we can't find our copy.

Any other recommended readings about living with any sort of restroation or DIY? I'm now dying to know if there's more.

How We Came to Rootabaga Country

As a little girl in coastal California, I fell in love with Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories. I loved the open plains dotted with little towns, full to the brim with fields of corn and wheat and beans and squash, with barefooted children in overalls running home from school to help with harvest. I loved the magic of that wonderful fairytale land, with its oddly named towns and strangely named people. The funny stories as well as the sad ones have resonated with me in a way I can't even really express. I've been dreaming of this place that was like Oz, but more real, nearly my entire life.

Four years ago, my mom bought a house in southern Illinois, which is also called "Egypt" for its grainbasket reputation (and possibly where that famous term -too rude to mention here- for the middle of nowhere originated). We're from here, semi-originally (at least since the middle of the 19th century), and Mom has always wanted to move back to where her mom grew up. So she did - she fixed up and sold our little farm on the Mendocino coast, packed up everything and trucked it across the country, doing it all ourselves, because we are those sort of people.

Mom's house is a massive, crumbling pile of bricks, surrounded by trees, on the edge of a town with a name that's truly unique - it was named after a town in Scotland, but we spell it differently. There is no other town with this exact name, and the whole place is full of towns with odd names: names of foods, names of people, grand and ambitious names, and names that seem like they were just nicknames for a spot in the road until someone painted a sign to hang on the way into town. This end of the state has a couple of big interstates, but mostly it is cobwebbed with tiny rural highways, graveled roads, narrow cuts that were clearly made for a Model T to pass another Model T, and you sometimes feel that you are goign back in time as you drive down a little road with a cornfield on one side and little green hill with a little white frame house on the other.

Two years ago, we moved here. I loved the snow in winter, the silence of it as it fell on everything like an insulating blanket. I was enchanted by the burgeoning life of spring, little frogs leaping in the growing grass and the awakening of the bees. Then we suffered through an oppressive humid summer accompanied by the stressful yet lazy songs of cicadas, and went on into a changeable autumn, not unlike this one, that runs hot to cold, punctuated by rainstorms that blot out everything around us.

There is so much green here, so much life, it is like places farther down the great rivers, but not so dripping with sweat. This country is all about the growing of things, and a little of the taking of things out of the ground. It's slow and quiet, gentle and neighborly. No high-speed city life is here - you have to drive to St. Louis for that, as well as any unusual shopping needs. The fastest, or slowest, thing around here is often the train.

A few weeks ago, I realized I had come to Rootabaga Country, or a part of it, or somewhere nearby. I think it might have been when I was working on the historical society website, organizing hundreds of old photos in the archive, and I found myself staring into the faces those same little kids in their overalls, looking ready to run home to cut the corn down, or bring in the cows. It might have been when I walked my little boy to school along a gravelled drive for the first time.

Maybe it was really the day I saw the dragonflies dance in the fading autumn sunlight last year, or when I saw the bees break off to go somewhere new. It might have been the day I found a large praying mantis sitting neatly on my lampshade - they always sit neatly - delicately eating some little bug. Possibly it was the day I looked out the back to see the woodchucks - three of them - eating the fallen persimmons and apples in the grass. Or, really all of these things and many more.

I'm in love with this place. It's easily as magic as any I read about as a child, and the people, well, they aren't any less interesting or freindly.

I think we might stay.

I must be psychic.

Many months ago, I wrote this:

There's a sag in the diningroom, at the join between the bay and the original construction. Things Must Be Done About This, as it is just sort of hanging in space. I see beams in my future, and screwjacks, and pain.

Wow, was I ever right. Last night we pretty much rebuilt the dining room wall where it meets the bay addition. There were beams, and jacks, and pain. My back hurts, and I bet K's head hurts. The planned posts are in now, and the look as nice as I thought they might, even without the mouldings and with unfinished walls.

We used 2 boxes of screws, and we are going to use more when we finish the job. We spent 50 bucks on securing hardware to prevent wigglyness today.

As an aside, while I LOVE visiting the hardware store, I HATE how it eats up a whole day. I also hate how money flits swiftly from our wallets seemingly by our very presence in the store.

It's the price of our passion, I suppose. The house, she demands it, and we must obey.

Also, StuccoHouse noticed that we were mentioned in print. I am shocked, honestly, that anybody reads this at all. It's nice to know that somebody reads from time to time, but I've been just sort of madly raving into the ether for months now.

Renovating the Blog

I'm thinking that, now we have accomplished something (Power! Which means we can turn on the gas soon - Hot Water!) and are approaching done-ness on several others, it may no longer be simply depressing to have a project tracker widget on here. So I might just add one. One of those bars will be labelled "moving in" as I think it will take us a few weeks to really get settled.

Also, I was watching HGTV and the DIY network and thinking (this gets dangerous, what with the smoke pouring from my ears and all) about doing a weekly how-to feature on here, just give me something to do while feeding BabyJames other than watching tv. It would be more of a "how I did this" with step-by-step instructions for those who might be facing the same things. Like how to live with (or just plain refinish) old steel kitchen cabinets, doing a successful wall application of stickytiles, or faking a built-in. Stuff like that. The temporary stuff, the superficial stuff, the decorative stuff.

In other news, DOver books emailed me that they've got some new Architecture books out. Go take a look. I've already spotted at least four that I want, and only one that I need. And they've got a 25% off sale on as well.

More Inaction & some book nerditude

Well, this week has so far been mostly taken up with non-house time commitments - doctor's appointments, historical society meeting, grocery shopping. However, a couple of good things came of it.

First, we now own a copy of the Schoolhouse Electric catalog. WOW! We definitely want to upgrade to some of those fixtures in the future. Lots of them are perfect for our house.

Next, I'm an enormous book nerd. I used to be a bookstore employee, prior to finally becoming a professional graphic artist about 10 years ago. So, in that vein, here is my book geekery for those who care to read it:

Dover Books offered me a Presidents' Day discount coupon ( I saved a whopping 10 bucks, but I had wanted to get some more books for a long while now) and I took advantage of it to buy some references.

• The 1912 and 1915 Gustav Stickley Craftsman Furniture Catalogs


This was mostly purchased for the purpose of getting a better idea of the overall look of a furnished Craftsman house. I might keep it, but I may also donate it as I already have a much more practical reference for building my own repro furniture.


• Aladdin "Built in a Day" House Catalog, 1917


I bought this, just in case my house might be an Aladdin, since Rosemary Thornton can't pinpoint it as any particular Sears kit model. So far, I've determined that it clearly isn't an Aladdin, either (all the hardware/details being Sears items is a big giveaway there). However, this catalog shows several light fixtures identical to several that are reproduced by Schoolhouse Electric. If you have an Aladdin, they are definitely the company to get your replacement fixtures from!

Since I've answered my own question, this catalog will probably get donated to the local library. There are probably at least a couple of Aladdins around here, since they were the other major manufacturer of kit houses in this region.


• Easy-to-Make Arts and Crafts Lamps and Shades


I bought this out of curiosity, and I may actually be getting quite a bit of use out of it. The instructions are for making lampshades (and building lamps and light fixtures) out of cheap, lightweight materials. Very Sexy. Chris has been inspired.


• Arts and Crafts Designs


I bought this as I have several other Dover Pictorial Archive books from the Art Nouveau and Arts&Crafts periods. I was hoping it would have new things. Unfortunately, no. Most of the things in it are redrawn from other sources, all of which I have. However, if you want a nice cheap general design ref and can only afford one, it's worth it. This is going to the library, too.

Since I am reviewing books here, let me list several (also Dover books) that I already own and like:

• Making Authentic Craftsman Furniture: Instructions and Plans for 62 Projects
  

I LOVE this book. It's great, and if you have the basic skills and tools, you can make great stuff using the diagrams. It's what I'm using to help me plan my built-in buffet (an eventuality).


• Authentic Designs from the American Arts and Crafts Movement

This is a nice reference, but mostly really useful for graphic artists and ceramicists. I like it, and it has many of the designs that are redrawn in Arts and Crafts Designs.


• Art Nouveau: An Anthology of Design and Illustration from "The Studio"

Art Nouveau, of course, but I am as much in love with this style as I am with the Arts&Crafts style (which was both a companion and a reaction to it). Lots of great stuff in here :)


• Art Nouveau Animal Designs and Patterns: 60 Plates in Full Color

In addition to having fabulous designs in it (this is the book from which one of the small historical wallpaper companies drew its lavendar and green bat wallpaper), this book is a great color reference, and while it's title says it's Art Nouveau, it clearly demonstrates the stylistic flow from Art Nouveau to Arts&Crafts and finally showing the beginnings of Art Deco. A great reference for anyone who loves these styles.


• A Treasury of Art Nouveau Design & Ornament

This one has lots of designs suitable for making stencils or wall murals from, if you are at all ambitious. Also a great all around graphic reference.

And, finally, some I'd like to get:

• Limbert Arts and Crafts Furniture: The Complete 1903 Catalog


I just want to get a copy of this because I like the odd combination of basic and wacky that is embodied in this furniture.


• Arts and Crafts Stained Glass Coloring Book


See, I'm a big kid, and I love coloring books. I can't come up with a better excuse.


• Arts and Crafts Stained Glass Pattern Book


I'm not a glass craftsperson, but I have a friend who is. I really just want to give her this.


• Floral Stained Glass Lampshades


I do, however, have a better excuse for this one. I might be able to adapt the designs to the Easy-to-Make Arts and Crafts Lamps and Shades instructions. I can dream.


• Arts and Crafts Furniture: The Complete Brooks Catalog of 1912


This is just me wanting to have every available reference. Greed, plain and simple. ;)


• Stickley Craftsman Furniture Catalogs


I just want to see this one. If I buy it, it will probably end up in the library too.


• Craftsman Homes


• More Craftsman Homes


• Craftsman Bungalows: 59 Homes from "the Craftsman"


These are fairly obvious. I want to find a house plan like my house. It might be in one of these books. Ah, if I had disposable income!

Well, also, there are lots of interior images in these books which might be useful in my renovation. But I really don't need to be buying these books :)