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I live in rural Montana and our town has many kit homes. My house was remodeled by the former owners and they found a 1914 calendar sealed in one of the walls upstairs. The house was built outside of town on a farm and moved into town and put on a new foundation in 1987. Many of the original components including the front door and woodwork are original. The front porch was rebuilt using the original roof. I'd like to know which company built the house. I found a piece of woodwork in an attic under the eaves with this handwritten in pencil on the back: "8310 5 pieces--50 ft." I have searched the catalogs on line and find components of Alladin homes, and similarities to Fancher homes, but can't quite find the actual one. Can anyone help?

I live in rural Montana and our town has many kit homes. My house was remodeled by the former owners and they found a 1914 calendar sealed in one of the walls upstairs. The house was built outside of town on a farm and moved into town and put on a new foundation in 1987. Many of the original components including the front door and woodwork are original. The front porch was rebuilt using the original roof. I'd like to know which company built the house. I found a piece of woodwork in an attic under the eaves with this handwritten in pencil on the back: "8310 5 pieces--50 ft." I have searched the catalogs on line and find components of Alladin homes, and similarities to Fancher homes, but can't quite find the actual one. Can anyone help?[/QUOTE]

The 8130 you found on the board is obviously an order #, which means the material could have been shipped from a mail-order catalog company (Sears, Montgomery-Ward, Gordon-Vantine, Harris Brothers were the largest) but I don't recognize the design. It may be that your residence is a plan book house (Garlinghouse, Radford, Keiths were the largest) but built of mail-order lumber. If you find any other information such as shipping labels let us know - there are several mail-order housing experts on this site.

Rose Thornton wrote us a nice article on things to look for: How do I Know if I have a Kit House?

The article is about Sear homes but the same things are true about the other manufacturers.

Happy hunting.

Lauren

Like Dale, I don't recognize the design as being a kit home with which I'm familiar. Part of the problem is, these front-gabled, story-and-a-half homes are so popular and so ubiquitous that identifying them as a particular model of kit home is quite difficult!

As I said in another post, 80% of the people who think they have a Sears kit home are wrong. Sometimes it turns out that these folks have a kit home from another company, and sometimes it's just that all the building materials were ordered from a mail-order business like Sears Roebuck, and were shipped in on the train. But to be a kit house, it needs to have both building materials and blueprints from the mail-order company.

Lastly, there were many small regional companies offering catalogs with kit homes. It could be from one of these companies, too.

Rosemary Thornton
www.uglywomansguide.com
author, The Houses That Sears Built