Ready-Made House Costs $500 (Oct, 1937)
Filed under: Architecture — @ 12:27 am
Source: Popular Science ( More articles from this issue )
Issue: Oct, 1937
Buy on Ebay
Source: Popular Science ( More articles from this issue )
Issue: Oct, 1937
Buy on Ebay
Ready-Made House Costs $500
Equipped with a stove, refrigerator, window screens, dining table, couch, and other home accessories, a new type of prefabricated house costs less than $500. Designed as a first unit to which later additions may be made, the factory-built structure includes living room, dinette, and kitchen, with folding beds for four people.
What a change: nowadays those windows would cost more than $500 each.
And I can’t imagine how how bitterly cold that place would get in the winter. I don’t see how a furnace or even a woodstove could fit in there, and there certainly isn’t any insulation like there would be in a log or sod house. People would die in droves during the first winter, either from the cold or from CO from a heater.
Maybe they were only used in extreme southern Florida?
Comment by Blurgle — November 22, 2007 @ 3:24 pm
Things had changed in the other direction on the timeline too; when my house was built in 1900 it enclosed 1600 sq feet (expanded later to over 2000), was built out of heart pine and came with 6 gables, a tin roof, and a covered porch. On it’s half acre lot it sold new for $1000.
It still sports the original roof.
The pine was considered to be “low end” in those days but because of its high content of sap acted as its own deterrent to termites. That’s how so many of the “cheap” houses like mine survived and the nice ones made of oak crumbled away.
I’ve often wondered about the heating in an old house like mine, it has three small fireplaces for burning coal and a flue in the kitchen for a wood stove. When it was built there was no insulation other than an inch of siding board, 4 inches of dead air, and an inch of wallboard inside and before I renovated it, the place got COLD!
Those folks were made of sterner stuff than me!
Of course the lack of heat probably was low on the list of complaints, particularly when considering there was no indoor plumbing in the house until 1922.
Comment by Neil Russell — November 22, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
What’s the size of that structure? Maybe, 8′ by 20′? If so, that’s 120 square feet. Four folding beds? It would be inhuman for four people to live in that small box.
Comment by Mike Brisendine — November 23, 2007 @ 6:39 am
That sould be 160 square feet. Sorry.
Comment by Mike Brisendine — November 23, 2007 @ 6:41 am