I have always been fascinated with houses and architecture. Growing up I lived in a house that had dark wood beams across the ceiling, a wood burning fireplace, and built in wood cabinets. Recently, my mother told me that she thought our house may have been a Sears house. To back up her claim, she sent me a photo of a Sears house that looked a lot like our house. I was astonished at how alike the two houses were, in appearance and layout, so I started digging deeper. Unfortunately, my parents no longer live in the house I grew up in, so I couldn't go back to the house to find evidence that it was a Sears house. I do know that, at some point before we moved into the house, it was remodeled by adding a second story. In spite of the remodel, the first floor layout is almost identical to the layout of the Sears house. Below is a picture of the Belmont, including the layout. This is the Sears house that my mother thought looked like our house.
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| Picture is from Honor Bilt Modern Homes, Sears & Roebuck Catalog, 1921. Taken from the Internet Archive. |
Here is our house, or was our house. After I graduated from high school in 2000, my parents moved out of the house. The images below are taken from Google Maps, 2013. The house faces east.
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| North east view. The circled beams are not original to the structure. |
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This is what our house originally looked like
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| Here is a not-to-scale layout I drew of our house. It is very similar to the Belmont layout |
So, there is really no way for me to prove I lived in a Sears built house. Sears used similar architectural styles that were popular at that time, so it is possible that Sears used a style very similar to our house to make the Belmont model.
If you are curious if your house is a Sears or Aladdin built house, here are some resources you can use to find out. Also, I have made a list of some of the houses with pictures and layouts. You can browse the lists by clicking the tabs on this page for either Sears or Aladdin houses.
Sears and Roebuck house resources:
Aladdin house resources:
