7 ms·

> Sears promised that a buyer with only rudimentary skills could assemble a kit home in 90 days. People used to be handier than they are today. I don't know an

• dannyw 8y ago
  I mean, it probably was a lot easier too, with less complicated plumbing, fire code regulations, wiring, etc.
  • redshirtrob 8y ago
    I doubt plumbing or electrical are any more complex now than they were 80 years ago. The principles haven't changed. What probably is more complex is dealing with permitting and inspections, which you alluded via fire code regulations.
    • justin66 8y ago
      This is sort of half true. Ancient knob and tube wiring is undeniably much, much simpler than what we have today, and you could teach anyone who ever worked with their hands to install it pretty quickly. It wasn't simple in an inspiring "simplicity is beautiful" way, but rather in an "oh my God we are all about to die in a fire" way. Doing things correctly according to modern wiring safety code is something that requires a lot of knowledge, and a person could curse regulation and so on while learning all of that, but using all the modern tools would require a lot of knowledge regardless. There are dozens of parts in a standard electrical installation that simply didn't exist when it was just knobs and tubes.
• pjmorris 8y ago
  If there are old kits out there, or if the parts could be made from the old kit plans, we could try it out and see how people would do today.
• tcbawo 8y ago
  Now there's a reality TV show!
  • EADGBE 8y ago
    Nah, too real.
• CalRobert 8y ago
  I would, until the neighbors started threatening to sue me in planning meetings and the local authorities demanded $30,000 of architect's drawings and then I was told I had to have two parking spaces for some reason and that my house was too small for any decent individual.
  • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    That's to be expected when you live in a "nice" neighborhood. By being industrious and efficient and building outside the box you violated the norms of the community and they take issue with that.
    • WorldMaker 8y ago
      Which is the biggest shift from when Sears catalog homes were most sold: most of the were clustered together in neighborhoods where that sort of kit home, or similar DIY projects, were precisely the norm. Most major cities you can sort of tell which ones were the "Sears catalog neighborhoods". (It's funny now how some of those very neighborhoods have grown increasingly conservative in their old age by nature of gentrification and often being closer to urban centers than the exurbs that replaced them in people's minds as "suburbs".)
      • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        >It's funny now how some of those very neighborhoods have grown increasingly conservative in their old age by nature of gentrification and often being closer to urban centers than the exurbs that replaced them in people's minds as "suburbs". Yeah, no. It's not that simple. In the US the liberals tend to generally be more in favor of government management of what you do on your own property because of how the existing battle lines are drawn with regard to big government/regulation vs small government/deregulation. The situation is flipped in SV where the slightly older and slightly less left leaning/liberal existing property owners want slightly more regulation (specifically zoning) than the slightly more liberal and slightly younger renters. Rights of property owners isn't really a specific part of either party's platform. Desire for government micromanagement of what you do on your own property follows wealth much more closely than any ideology. A bunch of rich conservative jerks in a suburb of NYC will agree with bunch of rich liberal jerks in a suburb of SF when it comes to using regulation to prevent people from building things they don't want to look at.