Pacific Ready Cut Homes

July 30, 2010 rosethornil 1 comment

In the early 1900s, Montgomery Ward’s offered kit homes through mail order catalogs, as did Sears & Roebuck. In addition to Wards and Sears, there were several other national companies selling kit homes through mail order. And in addition to those national companies, there were countless regional companies, and one of the largest “regional” companies was Pacific Ready Cut Homes.

This Los Angeles-based company sold about 40,000 kit homes during their 32 years in the kit home business. Dale and I made several trips to the West Coast to hunt for real-life examples of Pacific Ready Cut Homes and found entire neighborhoods populated with these darling bungalows.

Nationwide, we’ve found that 90% of the people living in kit homes did not know what they had until we knocked on their door and told them. In the case of Pacific Ready Cut Homes, that number was closer to 100%. In fact, I don’t remember finding one person that knew what they had.

In June 2006, the Los Angeles Times did a feature story (front page in a Sunday paper!) on our work on Pacific Ready Cut Homes and slowly but surely, people are learning more about this fascinating chapter of California’s architectural history. Dale and I have published a book on Pacific Ready Cut Homes and it includes a full reprint of the 1926 Pacific Ready Cut Homes catalog.

On a final note, there’s a row of two dozen Pacific Ready Cut Homes in Beverly Hills! To read the full article in the Los Angeles Times (June 2006) click here.

To read about the Pacific Ready Cut House that Walt Disney purchased and built click here.

If you’d like to see pictures of Montgomery Ward Kit Homes, click here.

Is your house a kit home from Pacific Ready Cut? Start by looking around for these blue grease pencil marks. This mark was found on a built-in buffet drawer in a Pacific Ready Cut Home in a Los Angeles suburb. The four digit number is the home’s model number. The number was scribbled onto lumber at the mill to make sure pieces and parts stayed together for shipping,

From a 1919 catalog, this shows the original image of the house as it was originally promoted. Dale and I memorized a couple hundred of these designs and then went driving on the streets of LA to find the houses!