#Move-in ready homes Painted Prairie CO

[inboundremblog]

Painted Prairie Homes for Sale: Discover Colorado's Award-Winning Community

Credit: Image by Leah Celler

Painted Prairie Homes for Sale: Your New Beginning

Aurora, Colorado's fast-growing community known as Painted Prairie, draws attention at the national level after recently bagging the National Community of the Year title during the N.A.H.B. awards of 2022.

Neo-traditional design, explicator spatial organization, and flexibility of housing options are all within Painted Prairie homes for sale, offering an incredible quality of life that would be ideal for the Colorado environment.

It will suit those seeking new types of architecture, comfortable and safe dwellings that differ from old-fashioned houses but are friendly to the environment and encourage interaction with nature.

Attributes of Exquisite Homes

Perhaps the most conspicuous attribute of Painted Prairie Homes for Sale is its master planning, which has been pissed by some of the best brains in urban planning.

Peter Calthorpe, an urban planner, designed the community's architectural elements with the assistance of Mark Johnson of Civitas Denver.

Taken together, they delivered a neighborhood in Aurora that is not only geographically harmonious with the land on which it was built but also urbanistically novel and innovative, using best practices that promote social interaction, sustainable living, and practicality.

Painted Prairie's design integrates living, working, and play zones, seeking to allow people to live, work, and have fun all within the area. It encompasses parks, greens, and a Town Center, which reflects the spirit of the community with its focus on contemporary Colorado.

Stunning Views and Natural Beauty

What almost everyone in Painted Prairie loves about Painted Prairie is that the community is within a beautiful natural environment.

Found at the foothills of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, many residents of this state are blessed with gorgeous sunrises and sunsets with beautiful colors in the sky.

They create that serenity and pristine environment that sums up the concept of life in Colorado.

This community has been highly commended for its ample parking facilities, where people can access recreation space, green areas, or places to be in nature and develop relations with people around them.

The parks are just a bonus haven within your compound, perfect for walking, jogging, and resting.

The Town Center

Apart from providing residential units, Painted Prairie has a much bigger vision. A proposed development for the Town Center is to extend it to 55 acres to give the residents myriad utilities. Upon execution, the Town Center will highlight:

Health and Wellness Facilities: The fitness clubs and all-inclusive healthcare buildings in the heart of the town will eventually cater to all your health and fitness needs.

Local and Global Dining: Tenants can shop for foods of their preferred tastes, including local dishes and intercontinental foods.

Farmers Market: The neighborhood will have a varied farmers market, including freshly ready foods and locally made yields, to support the tenants' interaction with farmers and sellers of various products.

Collaborative Workspaces: An instance is people working from home or owning their businesses, who will find the collaborative working space in the Town Center comfy and convenient.

Boutique Hotels: For sightseeing, guests can catch a glimpse of this Painted Prairie through its excellent line of boutique hotels, each with a motif of the locality.

To achieve this, amenities are provided to help ensure residents feel connected. Therefore, Painted Prairie is a community founded on relationships within spaces, experiences, and facilities.

Housing Options for All Lifestyles

Housing choices are one of Painted Prairie's most vital points, from mid-rise apartment units to city homes.

When the community is fully developed, there will be about 3400 homes, from starter homes for beginners, family homes for young families, and homes for older people. The housing options include:

Paired and Single-Family Homes

These homes are ideal for families, first-time homeowners, or anyone who wants to own a single house with the unique features of a chic home and common grounds.

Multi-Family Homes and Townhouses

New product types for multi-family structures, stacked flats, and townhouses will offer even more excellent choices to those seeking low-maintenance or lower-cost houses.

Customizable Floor Plans

Over 30 different types of floor plans are available to ensure each tenant can find the one that suits them best. Whether you need more bedrooms, a home office, or more open space, all houses meet various needs.

These homes are being built by some of the best builders in the industry today, and every home is built with great detail and immense care, quality building materials, creative architectural techniques, and sustainability considerations.

Prop buyers can look forward to incorporating design elements that will financially help reduce energy consumption, modern home automation systems, and the ability to opt for a home design that directly reflects the buyer's personality.

World-Class Builders at Painted Prairie

The vision of Painted Prairie has been able to lure some of the most renowned builders in the country to develop it. Every company has its way of coming up with a home, which makes the homes in Painted Prairie lovely and firm. Some of the notable builders involved in the project include:

David Weekley Homes

KB Home

Epic Homes

McStain Neighborhoods

Meritage Homes

These builders are targeted based on codes, standards, artistic quality, energy efficiency of the buildings, and satisfactory work. The two offer different design styles and plain and beautiful house designs to meet the demand of anyone who wants to have a house built.

A Community That Is Both Sustainable and Forward Thinking

Organizational sustainability is one of the project's features and one of its most necessary components. It has also encouraged energy savings in homes, reasonable landscaping in neighborhoods, and environmentally sensitive infrastructure within the community.

Sustainability also extends beyond the houses at Painted Prairie. Ju-walking paths, bikeways, and a bus stop are nearby to reduce car use.

Mixed incomes and diverse housing stock prevent the degeneration of the community's quality, which is enabled by the diversification of income ranges in the community.

Living in Painted Prairie: A Lifestyle Like No Other

Potential residents seeking to buy or rent homes in Aurora, Colorado, should check out Painted Prairie if they want an excellent place to live.

It has the location you wish for, the beauty you need, and a neighborhood all about your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. With its efficient design, unbelievable location, and choice of houses, Painted Prairie is a promising district in the Denver metropolitan area.

Check out the advantages of https://movetoaurora.com/aurora/painted-prairie/ on our website.

Explore the array of Painted Prairie homes for sale in Aurora. Enjoy innovative design, amenities, and stunning views in a fast-growing neighborhood.

[sweetsmellosuccess]

TIFF 2020: Days 5 & 6

Films: 5

Best Film of the Day(s): New Order

Good Joe Bell: Or, The Education of a Straight White Father. What Reinaldo Marcus Green’s film lacks in depth, it tries hard to make up for with earnestness. Mark Wahlberg plays the real-life father, who was in the process of walking across America in honor of his gay son, who committed suicide after being badly bullied in his smalltown Oregon high school, before he was accidentally hit on the road and killed in Colorado, six months into his planned two-year sojourn. The story is cut up between the present, with Joe on the road, doing terse speaking engagements (as Wahlberg plays him, the taciturn Bell isn’t much for public speaking), at local high schools and churches, and flashbacks to the past, as his son, Jadin (Reid Miller), attempts to get through his high school experience while being the subject of bullying, both in-person and via the Internet, until he reaches his breaking point. The message is certainly resonant, and Miller plays Jadin with the right amount of heartbreaking pathos, but Green’s film feels unnecessarily mechanized in order to put Joe front and center of the story (using a hallucination of Jadin at the beginning, which allows Joe to interact with him feels more than a little manipulative). Bell, with his quick temper, and impatience for anything that’s not directly to do with him, is a reasonable stand-in for exactly the type of straight white male who should be watching the film (but more than likely won’t). Wahlberg is gifted at playing this sort of character, who wants to have the full attention of everyone any point in time he chooses (“Did you hear what I said?” he asks incredulously after making an announcement and not receiving the proper praise for it). He’s a complicated dude, which the film alludes to without entirely capturing: He’s ready to fight at a moment’s notice, but shies away from directly confronting any of Jadin’s tormentors; has the good intention to take action to draw attention to the problem, but doesn't seem the least bit prepared to give a speech that really makes an impact (one detail the film does make work: His manner of saying “I love you” to his wife or sons, but only as a way of getting them to say it back to him). Connie Britton plays Lola, Jadin’s mother, a largely thankless role as the nurturer of the family, loving both her sons (Jadin’s brother Joseph is played by Maxwell Jenkins), and staying supportive no matter their father’s attitude. Near the end of his journey, as Joe begins to see the true folly of his ways, he meets a Sheriff (Gary Sinise), whose oldest son is also gay, which allows the two men to sit on the front porch of the sheriff’s house and contemplate the ways in which their lives didn’t go as expected. It’s clearly meant for the kick-ass Wahlberg audience (as Jadin says earlier in the film, they’re the actual problem), but I very much doubt they will be heading in droves to see it.

New Order: Meet the new boss, only in Michel Franco’s damning portrait of a society locked forever in cycles of oppression, revolution, and new oppression, it makes no difference who you are, what your belief system is, or whether or not you subscribe to a moral set of ethics. After an ominous opening montage of imagery largely taken from the film to come, we shortly begin at a resplendent wedding held at the city manse of a wealthy businessman for his daughter, Marianne (Naian Gonzalez Norvind), and her betrothed, Alan (Dario Yazbek Bernal). As Marianne’s mother, Pilar (Patricia Bernal) happily secrets away the envelopes carrying the new couples’ gift money in her safe, and rich and powerful families co-mingle, the distant danger of a furious revolution, lead by violent rioters raising up against the economic disparities of the city, seems at first to be light-years away. Until it isn’t. As rioters infiltrate the house, with the help of an insider, chaos reigns and bullets fly. The next morning, many people have been shot, the house has been utterly pillaged, and Marianne has been taken hostage by a rogue group of military, who snatch up wealthy-seeming refugees and hold them for ransom at an undisclosed outpost. By film’s end, Franco, working from his own screenplay, leaves no man, woman, or child unmarked. The wealthy are callous and vain, the rioters bloodthirsty and cruel, the hostage takers unbelievably greedy and horrible, and the righteous vanquished by further corruption at even higher levels of power. It’s a bit like the ending of a Coen brothers picture (Burn After Reading comes to mind), in which all loose ends are closed, and few, if any, people are any the wiser for it; only, there’s nothing the least bit arch in Franco’s thrown gauntlet: We aren’t spared the worst of it by indelible Coens’ proxies. We are all to blame, it would seem, and it has nothing to do with original sin: Our conniving, violent nature will undo any and all attempts to curb it. Insatiable avarice is our continual undoing, washing over us like the green paint the rioters hurl at passing cars and pedestrians, marking them as the enemy. In Franco’s thunderous film, nobody emerges unscathed; we’re all set on fire.

Wildfire: It’s a hoary Hollywood staple to substitute individuals as emotional stand-ins to capture the direness of historic catastrophic events, scaling everything down so we care more about the couple in star-crossed love than the war going on all around them. In Cathy Brady’s Irish drama, however, a pair of sisters are reunited after a year’s absence in the North Ireland bordertown in which they grew up, products of the uneasy peace, post-Troubles, in which everyone is meant to get along as one country, though hard feelings still abound. Kelly (Nika McGuigan) returns to the staid home of her sister, Lauren (Nora-Jane Noone), after taking off on her own the year before, and, by all appearances, living as a vagabond. Initially thrilled to have her sister back, Lauren is also still angry with her for taking off suddenly and not making any contact since. When the girls were little, their father was killed in a political bombing, and their mother might have committed suicide as a result (the car accident that killed her was, apparently, suspicious). Left to their own devices, then, they developed a fierce protective shell against any outsiders, including, it turns out Lauren’s increasingly concerned husband (Martin McCann), and longtime family friend Veronica (Joanne Crawford). The film changes gears when Lauren finally accepts Kelly again, and the two reform their partnership as intense as it was before. As the film points out, in a real sense, they are all each other truly have in the aftermath of their tragic childhood. The film clicks better into focus as well in its final act, when the sisters are reunited against all comers, and the world around them is better revealed for what it is: They represent the schism still very much a part of their community that no one else wants to see. Instead, people hang about in bars, or at work, nursing the bitternesses and hurts of the Troubles in private, and putting their public energy to getting along. Kelly, with her wildnesses and significant impulse control issues (trying to teach a young boy how to hold his breath underwater is, perhaps, not best accomplished by holding him down until he begins to panic), is at least honest with her feelings, open to her various wounds, and refusing to put the past behind them. Their mother gets referred to as “crazy” in the town’s estimation, but it’s more likely she, like her two daughters, represents the clear-eyed view of someone who refuses to live in denial.

Concrete Cowboy: Philadelphia as an open prairie has a nice vibe, and Ricky Staub’s film about a troubled teen who mother takes him from Detroit to where his father, an urban cowboy, lives in North Philly in hopes to setting the kid straight, is made with genuine care and gets solid performances from its mixture of professional and amateur actors. If this sounds like faintly damning praise, it’s only because despite its strengths, it still feels like a great set-up in search of a suitable story. Based on the real-life Fletcher Street stables (and the novel from Greg Neri), in which locals on the rough streets of the city shelter and take care of a group of horses for the sheer love of riding, the story follows the difficult maturation of Cole (Caleb McLaughlin), a decent enough kid, but searching for his place in the world, and the tough-love tactics of his dad, Harp (Idris Elba), a longtime cowboy, who hasn’t been in his son’s life in more than a decade. Cole starts out hating everything about his new situation, from Harp’s barebones lifestyle (not only are the cupboards empty, and the fridge filled with nothing but Coke and Bud Light, Harp keeps one of his horses in the living room, sharing it with his son), to being forced to muck the stalls out at the stables to earn his chance to ride, takes up with an old friend, Smush (Jharrel Jerome), a charismatic kid caught up in the drug life. Naturally, Cole’s choice comes down to which sort of life he wants to have, his father’s hardscrabble but honest approach (made more attractive when Cole develops a bond with his own horse, Boo), or Smush’s push for increased market share and more money to buy his own piece of land out West. Shot on location in North Philly, and around the city  —  one shot, in which Cole sits astride boo in full silhouette against a mottled purple sky, the lampposts standing in for saguaros, hits just the right note -- Staub’s film has a properly gritty texture, and the use of some of the real Fletcher cowboys adds further verisimilitude, but the story moves predictably enough, beat-by-beat, that it doesn’t hit with the potency it might have been capable of with a less predictable narrative arc.  

In a year of bizarre happenings, and altered realities, TIFF has shifted its gears to a significantly paired down virtual festival. Thus, U.S. film critics are regulated to watching the international offerings from our own living room couches.

[jodybouchard9]

Denim and Dropcloth? Utility Fabrics Are the Latest Trend in Durable Decor

Dmytro Loboda/iStock

The phrase “utility fabric” doesn’t exactly have the cozy connotations of “cashmere blanket��� or the sheer decadence of “silk sheets.” But don’t let the moniker deceive you—these oft-overlooked fabrics can add pops of visual interest throughout your home. Best of all, they’re inexpensive and as durable as the day is long.

Yep, we’re talking about burlap, dropcloth, grain sacks, denim, and more—and these utility fabrics are ready to make the leap from workaday duties to a starring role in your home decor.

“These tough pieces are a great deal for the money and can be picked up at Lowe’s, Home Depot, and on Amazon,” says Jeanine Boiko, a home blogger at Okio B Designs and a real estate agent with Exit Realty Gateway in Wantagh, NY.

And let’s be honest: Your home takes a beating from kids, pets, and guests of all kinds—so why wouldn’t you incorporate utility fabrics wherever possible? (Especially in the most trafficked areas, where sticky fingers tend to graze.)

Here’s how you can use these hardworking fabrics at home.

Burlap

Photo by Rubyellen Bratcher 

Burlap is a favorite for designers who want to infuse a home with a farmhouse-chic vibe. This material, which comes in varying shades and textures, takes well to fabric paint and stencils to create place mats, shower curtains, valances, and table runners.

A word of caution, though: “Burlap can have a smell to it, so it’s best to air it out before using it inside,” Boiko says.

Want to DIY a bulletin board to hold takeout menus and calendars? Add padding or foam to a piece of plywood and cover it with burlap and decorative ribbon in a crisscross pattern, says Karen Gray-Plaisted of KGP Design Solutions.

You can also lay strips of burlap in picture frames and use pushpins to attach photos inside, suggests Sarah Hollenbeck of Offers.com.

Or take it outside: “Wrap burlap around your outdoor potted plants for a minimalist look,” she says.

Dropcloth

Photo by Mustard Seed Interiors 

This sturdy, neutral fabric looks like linen, but is only a fraction of the cost. Pick it up at the hardware store to upholster furniture, hang as curtains, or craft a sink or bed skirt.

“This material is coarse, so bleach it first to soften it up,” says Boiko, who turns dropcloth into pillows.

Jason Oliver Nixon, co-founder of the design firm Madcap Cottage, installed dropcloth curtains in his Brooklyn basement.

“It was a great, inexpensive way to bring utilitarian style to a hardworking space,” he says.

Dress up the dropcloth with inexpensive grosgrain ribbon trim, he adds—your tailor or seamstress can layer this into the mix easily.

Dropcloth can also be draped over a gazebo or pergola, offering protection from the sun and rain, Hollenbeck notes, and can be used to cover all-weather cushions.

Muslin

Photo by Prairie Home Styling 

This lightweight cotton is usually an afterthought in the fabric world, reserved for cutting out sewing patterns. But because it takes well to dye and stamp patterns and is easy to piece together, DIY homeowners use it everywhere.

Put muslin to work on slipcovers for chairs or as a casual shower curtain in the kids’ or guest bath.

Denim

Photo by Rentfrow Design, LLC

Got teens? These kids lounge all over the home, so covering furniture with denim (or its softer cousin, chambray) is a smart move. A wardrobe workhorse, this material wears well and washes up easily, making it a prime candidate for bench covers, place mats, pillows, and rugs.

Grain sacks

Photo by Dreamy Whites 

Typically off-white, with a red or blue stripe or the name of a farm, grain sacks are coveted flea-market finds for their vintage appeal.

“One of my friends grew up on a rice farm and used the grain sacks as pillow covers, which fit in nicely with a relaxed, bohemian style,” recalls Drew Henry of Design Dudes.

Grain sacks make for excellent chair cushions, tote bags, and stair runners, too. Not handy with a sewing machine? Wayfair has a wide selection of grain sack pillows to brighten beds and couches.

Linen

Photo by Honka UK Ltd 

Nope—we’re not talking about fancy linen here. Instead, seek out the less expensive variety at home goods and fabric stores. Breathable and durable, linen is best in the bedroom (duvet covers, shams, window treatments), but keep in mind that wrinkling is a factor with this material.

Ticking

Photo by Schroeder 

Durable ticking is a cotton or linen textile known for its simple stripes with a tight weave. It’s usually used to cover mattresses and bed pillows to prevent down feathers from poking through. But you can use this fabric elsewhere!

It’s perfect for a French country kitchen (window panels, breakfast bench cover) and in kids’ rooms, used as bed skirts or covering comforters and headboards.

The post Denim and Dropcloth? Utility Fabrics Are the Latest Trend in Durable Decor appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.

[mcmansionhell]

The Mail Order American Dream: An Introductory Guide to Identifying Kit Houses

Hello Friends! Today I will take a break from typical McMansion fare to talk about one of my most requested topics: mail-order houses and how to identify them. 

NOTE: This is a long article - for those who wish to open in browser/new tab, now is the time to do so! 

So, let’s get started: 

Ok, let me get this straight: you could order a house by mail? When was this even a thing? 

Before the turn of the 20th century, the detached urban or suburban single-family home was primarily the realm of the upper classes. The lower and middle classes were relegated to townhouses, tenements, or lived and worked in rural, agrarian settings. 

The new processes of mass-production meant that the overall cost of homebuilding, along with everything else, was greatly reduced, enabling those in the middle class to purchase and build homes. The invention of the horse-drawn streetcar in 1853, followed by the electric streetcar in 1888, meant that middle-class families could now expand outwards into the first generation of suburbs, the streetcar suburbs.

The streetcar suburb of Friendship, PA. Public Domain

Enter the kit house: a home you could order from a catalog, and have shipped via rail to your building site. Before kit houses, many homes were built from pattern books: collections of house plans with blueprints for skilled contractors and carpenters to follow. 

The kit house, a product of mass-production took the pattern-book concept even further. For each kit house, every piece of lumber, siding, doors, windows, columns, etc. were produced to exact precision in a factory, numbered for easy assembly, and sent to the site by rail and delivered to the lot via cart or truck. 

Instruction Manual for a Sears Ready Cut Home. Public Domain. 

The house was assembled in a paint-by-numbers sort of fashion, with detailed instructions on putting the pieces together. Many kit houses could be assembled within a couple of weeks by a lone carpenter, making the labor costs more affordable to the burgeoning middle class.

Kit houses were incredibly popular among not only the new suburbanites, but also corporations, who bought and built the kits en masse for their company housing.

General view of company-owned mill village - Highland Yarn Mills - High Point, North Carolina, 1936. US National Archives, Public Domain. 

Kit houses were at their peak popularity during the years 1908-1930. The Great Depression reduced the number of kit houses (and everything else) dramatically, and many kit house manufacturers ceased production during this time. Still, several companies persisted into the 1950s and 60s. The last kit house company to cease catalog circulation was Liberty Homes in 1973. 

Kit houses fell out of popularity in the 50s and 60s due to competition from development companies, who constructed entire neighborhoods en masse via teams of construction workers. The DIY aspect of the kit homes was no longer desirable in a fledgling technological era, where fewer individuals were skilled in the building trades.

Many kit houses are still standing today and continue to make wonderful, durable, desirable homes; and they’re easier to find than one might think. 

A Brief Guide to Identifying Kit Houses: Introduction

For the purpose of this guide, I will be using a location I am very familiar with: Greensboro, North Carolina (where I went to college go Spartans woo). During the 4 years I lived in Greensboro, I was obsessed with meticulously cataloging the kit houses in the area after living in one (a 1923 Sears Westly.) 

Identifying Kit Houses Step 1: The Three Common Site Locations

One of the easiest ways to begin one’s search for mail order houses is knowing where to look in the first place. Kit Houses are most commonly found in these areas:

1.) First Generation Suburbs (Streetcar and Railroad Suburbs) (1906-1930)

These are the first ring of suburbs, made possible by the streetcar. However, until the burgeoning railroad suburbs began to develop in the 1890s, most houses in the inner-circle of this area were pattern book houses rather than mail order houses. The expansion of the railroad in the 1900s enabled more kit houses to be shipped to new lots.

Streetcar and Railroad suburbs can be easily identified as being outside the city center. The streets are almost entirely in a grid formation. Kit houses from this period were built from approximately 1906-1930. 

2.) Company Housing (Near Industrial Sites) (varied)

Many kit houses were built as company housing for industrial sites. Industries where this was common include textile mills, energy production, steel mills, coal mines, and large factories. 

In the case of Greensboro, NC, many Sears houses were built outside of the textile mills that used to employ the vast majority of the population before the 1980s. In this example, White Oak Mills, a textile company employing mostly African American workers, can be seen with its remaining company housing. 

The ages of these kit houses are closely linked to the age of the industry they serve. 

3. First Generation Automobile Suburbs (1915-1940)

These are the suburbs that sprung up when the car became wildly accessible to the middle class around the year 1915, and developed until the end of WWII. These suburbs are also relatively close to either industrial areas or the city core, and can be recognized by their more curvilinear streets. 

The main difference between the first generation and the second generation of auto suburbs, is that the 1st generation was not subject to the Federal Housing Administration’s community guidelines, which encouraged cul-de-sacs, dramatically curved streets, and dead ends to deter thru-traffic. 

Homes built in these neighborhoods date mostly from the late 1910s through the 1940s. 

Step 2: Common Kit House Architectural Styles

Most mail-order houses fall under a certain number of architectural styles popular during the time they were constructed. 

The earliest mail order houses came from the Aladdin Homes Company, whose first catalog was issued in 1906. Houses built before 1906 were most likely pattern-book houses or were designed by an architect. Kit houses didn’t become commonplace until 1908, when Sears Roebuck & Co issued their first catalog of Ready-Cut Homes. The houses from this period are often difficult to distinguish from their pattern book counterparts, but it can be done! 

Queen Anne Style

This ornate style of architecture popular during the mid-late 1800s was often too expensive and detailed for kit house production; however, early kit houses can be found in a more paired-down interpretation of this style. By the time 1920 rolled around, most kit homes had moved past the Queen Anne into other architectural categories; however, some catalogs include them up until the late 1920s. 

More ornate examples:

Note the ornate turret.

This example from Sears features a gambrel roof with a gambrel cross-gable, and is a blend of the Queen Anne and the contemporaneous Shingle styles. 

More Commonplace Examples:

Sears Modern Home No. 115 (1908). A simple layout with ornate wooden details. Simple plans like this are sometimes referred to as being of the so-called Farmhouse or National styles, though these names often refer to types of vernacular architecture in the professional literature. 

Note the second story window on the Harris Home in the bottom left corner: this window configuration was very common on Queen Anne and Shingle style homes. 

American Foursquare

I would wager to say that of all the house plans dating before 1930, the majority of those built were American Foursquares. There are so many different variations of this simple plan that it is almost impossible (with a few exceptions) to tell one from the other from the exterior alone. 

Foursquares are essentially boxes, with pyramidal roofs and a central porch. The house may or may not include a dormer, which is usually a shed dormer (on front of the above house) or hipped dormer (seen on the side of the above house.) The style was popular until around 1930, when the Great Depression greatly slashed the size of new homes being built. 

Foursquare houses often incorporate architectural details from contemporary styles. The earliest Foursquares show Queen Anne influences. Houses built after 1912 start to show early Craftsman influences. 

A.) The Sears Chelsea (1908-1922) was one of Sears’ most popular models.  B.) Note the exposed rafters beneath the eaves; shows early Craftsman influences. C.) Note the finials (pointy bits on top of roof) = very Queen Anne. D.) A relatively style-neutral American Foursquare. 

Earlier Colonial Revival

“Colonial” is one of those architectural terms that has been bastardized until the end of time. The style this is referring to here is the “Colonial Revival Style” which reached the apex of its popularity in the 1920s-50s, and is one of the longest-running popular architectural styles. These houses are modeled after early historical American and British homes. 

Dutch Colonial Revival houses are the easiest to identify, thanks to their gambrel (”barn”) roof. These often intersect with Queen Anne, when they are front-gabled, but side gabled examples (see below) are almost always Colonial Revival. 

Colonial Revival houses are almost always side-gabled like the ones above, and commonly feature side porches, porticos, and shutters. Early Colonial Revival houses from the 1910s are sometimes difficult to discern from the more simplistic Queen Anne styles seen earlier. 

Early Bungalows

Technically, the construction term ‘bungalow’ refers to a 1 or 1.5 story house. However, when most people talk about bungalows, they are referring to those built in the Craftsman or Prairie traditions, which will be explained later. The Bungalow originated in California as affordable, charming working class housing. 

Proto-Craftsman Bungalow from the 1911 Sears Catalog. The brackets (sometimes called bracing, though this is a construction term) beneath the eaves (overhanging roof) are simple. The roof pitch is not low, and the house is front-gabled with simple geometry. The porch columns are influenced by the Shingle Style. 

Craftsman Bungalows (1910-1940s)

This was the age of the first generation Craftsman bungalows. The style, popularized by the Craftsman pioneers Greene & Greene, whose 1908 Gamble House was hugely influential in the homebuilding industry. The first Craftsman-influenced bungalow kit house was the 1910 Aladdin Oakland model, inspired by the work produced by the Greene Brothers and others in California. 

The first Sears Craftsman bungalow was the Sears Modern Home No. 191, which first appeared in the 1912 Catalog. 

Craftsman style-bungalows are easy to identify:

Note the progression of ornamentation from 1915 to 1920:

“Two-Story” Bungalows

One of the most popular types of kit homes! Sears has some famous models, most notably the Westly.

Sears Westly (1913-1929)

Craftsman-Influenced American Foursquares

The Craftsman style was infectious, and spread quickly to American Foursquare houses. Examples below:

Prairie Style American Foursquares

However, it was the Prairie Style, popularized in Chicago by Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries that was easily incorporated into the simplicity of the American Foursquare. 

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ingalls House (1909) by Teemu008 (CC-BY-SA 2.0) 

Prairie-Style houses are characterized by their low-pitched hipped rooflines and wide, overhanging eaves. Unlike the Craftsman style, Prairie-style eaves are enclosed, with no ornamental brackets or rafters. 

While Craftsman-style houses and bungalows remained popular until the late 30s, the 20s represented a more streamlined era of house design, with the Colonial Revival style becoming more and more popular. 

English influences, such as the Tudor style were present in new Revivals, and a fascination with Spanish Colonial architecture resulted in some rather strange interjections. 

English Arts & Crafts Revival (relatively uncommon)

The “Parkway” by Montgomery Ward (Wardway Homes) - a Mail-Order Tudor Revival design. 

The Small 20s Cottage

These cottages are often a blend of Craftsman and Colonial Revival. The Sears Crescent (below, 1922) was one of the company’s most popular models. 

Spanish Colonial Revival (relatively uncommon)

These styles were a short-lived phase during the 1920s and early 30s. They can be found all over the country, despite their idiosyncratic nature. 

Colonial Revival 

Though Colonial Revival houses had been established early in the kit house oeuvre, they were mostly overshadowed by the Craftsman-style houses which dominated the 1910s and early 20s. The Colonial Revival was in full swing in the 20s and 30s, where it often mingled with existing styles for some interesting combinations. 

Minimal Traditional 

After the 1929 Stock Market Crash, home sizes shrunk dramatically. A new style emerged, called the Minimal Traditional, which became the predominant style for most new housing stock in the 1930s and early 40s. It would outlive the Sears Catalog, which ceased circulation in 1940. 

Minimal Traditional houses were highly influenced by both Hollywood’s Storybook Houses, the Colonial Revival style, and the Tudor Revival Style from which it borrowed its steeply pitched front-facing gables. Often included in this style are the “English Cottage” and Cape Cod Styles.

Lewis/Liberty Homes, Catalog, 1935. 

Late Kit Houses, 1940s. 

The 1940s were the period during which most mail order home catalogs ceased circulation, (mostly because of the halt of home construction during WWII) though mail order homes continued past this point.  The 1940s kit houses mostly kept in line with the Minimal Traditional style, as these plans were convenient as they often fit within the FHA’s square-footage limitations for new home purchases under the GI Bill after WWII. 

Page from the last Sears Mail-Order Home Catalog, 1940

Identifying Kit Houses Step 3: Manufacturers & Individual Models

The truth is, finding exactly which kit house you’re looking at is insanely difficult, simply because there were so many companies operating simultaneously, copying one another, and working within the same stylistic framework. Luckily, there are many great resources available online just for this purpose. 

General Resources:

Sears Homes.org - a seminal blog on tracking down mail-order houses from all manufacturers. 

The Daily Bungalow - a Flickr collection of primary resources related to mail-order houses. 

Antique Home.org  - a great website with tons of house plans and catalog scans.

Antique Home Style - another great kit home catalog website

Sears Houses References:

Sears Archives - pictures of houses/chronology from Sears

Sears Houses at the Arts & Crafts Society - a catalog of images & how to identify a Sears House

Aladdin Homes Catalog Archive 

List of Kit House Books I own via Amazon.com

How to Narrow Down the Impossible

Step 1: Where are you?

Many kit house manufacturers worked in regional areas. For example, Pacific Ready Cut Homes served the Pacific Northwest and California. First check to see if there are any regional kit home manufacturers in your area. For example, Southern Pine Co. served the Louisiana area. Some manufacturers, such as Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, served the entire US. 

If you are near a factory or industrial area, check to see what resources you can find online about said industry and the way of life of those who worked there. 

If you have a specific address, try searching Public Records for the original documents/owner history. Why? There is a list of mortgage co-signer names associated with Sears Roebuck & Co. as well as other companies for each certain location and a certain time period. A little digging can answer a lot! 

Step 2: What Style is It?

You can tell a lot by a house’s shape and style, as per this guide. A quick search of any of these online databases can help a lot, especially in the case of later kit houses - as the years go on, the smaller the pool of examples you have to choose from becomes. 

Step 3: The Devil is in the Details

Okay, you’re still stumped. Now it’s time to do the dirty work. Are there any idiosyncratic features that stick out to you? If it’s a foursquare, does it have Prairie windows? If it’s a 2-story craftsman bungalow, do the columns match the Sears Westly’s? 

Step 4: Start with Sears

A fatal mistake of kit house detectives is to assume that all kit houses are Sears houses. However, many kit houses are Sears Houses. Picking up a guide such as “Houses by Mail” can help complete a quick search for a Sears house before broadening the escapade to include companies whose records are less extensive. 

If it’s not a Sears house, another good idea is to start with Aladdin, whose entire circulation of catalogs is available in a database listed in the Reference section. 

Step 5: Compile a List

Take a picture of the house you’re searching for, and put it in an online document with pictures of house models that look similar. If you know the date of the house, this becomes a lot easier. Use the process of elimination to whittle it down to a few choices. 

Identifying Kit Houses: Easiest to Hardest

Easiest to Identify:

Houses built after 1940

Spanish Colonial Revival/Pueblo Style houses located outside the Southwest

Prairie Style houses (excluding Foursquares)

Non-Craftsman or proto-Craftsman Bungalows (built 1908-1915)

English Arts and Crafts Revival houses (note: most Tudor Revival houses were designed by architects; Tudor elements are common on Minimal Traditional houses, however.)

Front-Gabled Gambrel Roofed houses: these were popular only until around 1920, giving them a small time window. 

Foursquare Houses with Bay Windows - these were a thing only from around 1908-1918

Medium Difficulty:

Side-Gabled Colonial Revival (not Dutch Colonial) 

Minimal Traditional houses (narrow time range of 1925ish-1940s)

Minimal Traditional crossed with Dutch Colonial

American Foursquare with Front-Gabled Dormer - these were very rare, but every company seems to have one or two of them. Easy to narrow down if you’re willing to dig.

Houses featuring cascading gables - these were relatively uncommon.

Colonial Revival Houses with a Saltbox Roofline 

Difficult but Not Impossible to Identify:

Dutch Colonial houses built before 1915

Imitation Stick-Style Queen Anne Houses (note the roofline)

Queen-Anne kind of weird Farmhouse-style houses built 1914-1915 (it’s usually one of these I’m dead serious)

Non-bungalow houses with 2+ dormers on the front facade

Hipped-roofed bungalows without dormers

Craftsman houses with “Oriental” influence (their words not mine)

Queen Anne Houses built before 1920. 

Impossible to Identify (without a date)

American Foursquares. Seriously, don’t even attempt this without a build date. They all look the same. 

Craftsman Bungalows. Seriously. 

2-story Craftsman Bungalows

Dutch Colonials built after 1920. 

Anyways, that’s it for kit houses. IT TOOK ME 3 DAYS TO WRITE THIS AND I AM VERY TIRED. Please feel free to send me an email if this guide helped you in any way. I hope you all enjoy it. Meanwhile, if you live in a state whose name starts with A, please email me neighborhood suggestions for Dank McMansions! 

If you like this post, and want to see more like it (plus get sweet access to behind the scenes stuff), consider supporting me on Patreon! Not into recurring donations? Check out the McMansion Hell Store - 30% goes to charity.

Any photos used in this post are in the public domain unless otherwise noted. 

[bestforlessmove]

Denim and Dropcloth? Utility Fabrics Are the Latest Trend in Durable Decor

Dmytro Loboda/iStock

The phrase “utility fabric” doesn't exactly have the cozy connotations of “cashmere blanket” or the sheer decadence of “silk sheets.” But don't let the moniker deceive you-these oft-overlooked fabrics can add pops of visual interest throughout your home. Best of all, they're inexpensive and as durable as the day is long.

Yep, we're talking about burlap, dropcloth, grain sacks, denim, and more-and these utility fabrics are ready to make the leap from workaday duties to a starring role in your home decor.

“These tough pieces are a great deal for the money and can be picked up at Lowe's, Home Depot, and on Amazon,” says Jeanine Boiko, a home blogger at Okio B Designs and a real estate agent with Exit Realty Gateway in Wantagh, NY.

And let's be honest: Your home takes a beating from kids, pets, and guests of all kinds-so why wouldn't you incorporate utility fabrics wherever possible? (Especially in the most trafficked areas, where sticky fingers tend to graze.)

Here's how you can use these hardworking fabrics at home.

Burlap

Photo by Rubyellen Bratcher 

Burlap is a favorite for designers who want to infuse a home with a farmhouse-chic vibe. This material, which comes in varying shades and textures, takes well to fabric paint and stencils to create place mats, shower curtains, valances, and table runners.

A word of caution, though: “Burlap can have a smell to it, so it's best to air it out before using it inside,” Boiko says.

Want to DIY a bulletin board to hold takeout menus and calendars? Add padding or foam to a piece of plywood and cover it with burlap and decorative ribbon in a crisscross pattern, says Karen Gray-Plaisted of KGP Design Solutions.

You can also lay strips of burlap in picture frames and use pushpins to attach photos inside, suggests Sarah Hollenbeck of Offers.com.

Or take it outside: “Wrap burlap around your outdoor potted plants for a minimalist look,” she says.

Dropcloth

Photo by Mustard Seed Interiors 

This sturdy, neutral fabric looks like linen, but is only a fraction of the cost. Pick it up at the hardware store to upholster furniture, hang as curtains, or craft a sink or bed skirt.

“This material is coarse, so bleach it first to soften it up,” says Boiko, who turns dropcloth into pillows.

Jason Oliver Nixon, co-founder of the design firm Madcap Cottage, installed dropcloth curtains in his Brooklyn basement.

“It was a great, inexpensive way to bring utilitarian style to a hardworking space,” he says.

Dress up the dropcloth with inexpensive grosgrain ribbon trim, he adds-your tailor or seamstress can layer this into the mix easily.

Dropcloth can also be draped over a gazebo or pergola, offering protection from the sun and rain, Hollenbeck notes, and can be used to cover all-weather cushions.

Muslin

Photo by Prairie Home Styling 

This lightweight cotton is usually an afterthought in the fabric world, reserved for cutting out sewing patterns. But because it takes well to dye and stamp patterns and is easy to piece together, DIY homeowners use it everywhere.

Put muslin to work on slipcovers for chairs or as a casual shower curtain in the kids' or guest bath.

Denim

Photo by Rentfrow Design, LLC

Got teens? These kids lounge all over the home, so covering furniture with denim (or its softer cousin, chambray) is a smart move. A wardrobe workhorse, this material wears well and washes up easily, making it a prime candidate for bench covers, place mats, pillows, and rugs.

Grain sacks

Photo by Dreamy Whites 

Typically off-white, with a red or blue stripe or the name of a farm, grain sacks are coveted flea-market finds for their vintage appeal.

“One of my friends grew up on a rice farm and used the grain sacks as pillow covers, which fit in nicely with a relaxed, bohemian style,” recalls Drew Henry of Design Dudes.

Grain sacks make for excellent chair cushions, tote bags, and stair runners, too. Not handy with a sewing machine? Wayfair has a wide selection of grain sack pillows to brighten beds and couches.

Linen

Photo by Honka UK Ltd 

Nope-we're not talking about fancy linen here. Instead, seek out the less expensive variety at home goods and fabric stores. Breathable and durable, linen is best in the bedroom (duvet covers, shams, window treatments), but keep in mind that wrinkling is a factor with this material.

Ticking

Photo by Schroeder 

Durable ticking is a cotton or linen textile known for its simple stripes with a tight weave. It's usually used to cover mattresses and bed pillows to prevent down feathers from poking through. But you can use this fabric elsewhere!

It's perfect for a French country kitchen (window panels, breakfast bench cover) and in kids' rooms, used as bed skirts or covering comforters and headboards.

The post Denim and Dropcloth? Utility Fabrics Are the Latest Trend in Durable Decor appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.