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wrote:
I have a modest 90yr. old Craftsman bungalow that I have owned for
over 15 years. I recently bit the bullet and took the time (months!)

Funny you should post this. Did you see today's Wall Street Journal
article on Craftsman homes? In case you missed it, here is an excerpt.

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Historians and Fans Are Racing to Catalog Homes Sold by Sears

Marilyn Raschka spends many of her weekends driving around unfamiliar
neighborhoods, knocking on doors and talking her way into strangers'
basements. Once downstairs, she breaks out her flashlight and shines it
along exposed beams, hunting for a letter and some numbers that are each
no bigger than a thumbprint.

The 61-year-old resident of Hartford, Wis., is part of a small cadre of
historians and passionate amateurs on a mission to identify and protect
homes made by Sears, Roebuck and Co. About 70,000 to 100,000 of them
were sold through Sears catalogs from 1908 to 1940. Distressed that the
houses are falling victim to the recent boom in teardowns and
renovations, their fans are scouring neighborhoods across the country,
snapping pictures and sometimes braving snakes and poison ivy to poke
around basements and attics for the telltale stamps that mark the lumber
in most of the catalog homes. Because people can be shy about the state
of their basements, Ms. Raschka brings along photos of her own messy
cellar to persuade them to let her in.

Precut houses ordered from a Sears catalog were shipped by boxcar in
30,000 pieces -- including shingles, nails and paint -- and assembled by
a local carpenter or by the buyers themselves. Styles ranged from the
elaborate, nearly $6,000 Magnolia, to the three-room, no-bath Goldenrod,
sold in 1925 for $445. (Outhouses sold separately.) One of the larger
Sears models, constructed in Takoma Park, Md., sold last year for about
$900,000, according to a local real-estate agent.

The homes caught on as the U.S. population grew and Americans began to
move away from crowded city centers. Their popularity also was driven by
the rise of company towns. In Carlinville, Ill., for example, Standard
Oil ordered homes for its mine workers, 152 of which are still standing.

Sears also encouraged sales to families with steady wages but little in
savings by financing up to 100% of some of the homes. But many
homeowners were forced to default during the Depression, and sales came
to an end in 1940.

Like some of the die-hard hunters, Ms. Raschka herself lives in a Sears
home, a 1928 Mitchell model. "My passion is to find my house's long-lost
sisters and brothers," she says.
......
In the guide she published, "Finding the Houses That Sears Built,"
Rosemary Thornton warns that "some homeowners become quite upset when
they discover someone is parked outside, staring at their home," and
suggests leaving the car running in case you need to leave in a hurry.
There's a section in her book titled "Law Enforcement Officials" that
says, "Police don't care about Sears homes and when you're
explaining,...less is more."

It's difficult to know how many Sears homes are left. Sears doesn't have
sales records, and while interest in catalog homes is growing, many
people still don't know they are living in one. In addition, identifying
a Sears isn't like spotting a steel-paneled Lustron, the ranch houses
built to ease the housing shortage after World War II. The hundreds of
styles Sears offered varied widely, and many of the homes have been
altered over the years. Further complicating matters, a handful of other
companies, such as the Aladdin Co., of Bay City, Mich., and Gordon-Van
Tine Co., of Davenport, Iowa, produced mail-order homes closely
resembling Sears models.

Even if a house does match a picture in an old Sears catalog, it could
be a later rip-off by a local builder -- or a popular style that Sears
emulated in its designs. Inside the house, hints like Sears-labeled
woodwork can also be misleading, because Sears sold such things
separately. One way to tell: a stamp of a letter and a three-digit
number on beams, which were marked to facilitate assembly.

Measuring the space between studs, or support posts, can be another clue
in verifying a Sears home, especially in an area with a lot of Sears
imitations, according to Kathryn Holt Springston, a 53-year-old
semiretired social historian with the Smithsonian Institution. The studs
of older non-Sears houses in the Washington, D.C. area are often 22 to
24 inches apart, she says, compared with about 15 inches in Sears
models. When she spots what she thinks might be a Sears home in the
Washington area, she asks to be let into the house, and then straps on a
headlamp and looks for exposed studs in the attic, closets and basement.
Ms. Springston has ripped up floorboards and sometimes uses a metal
detector to find nails in studs in the walls. She says she crawled
through poison ivy in one abandoned home and once encountered a snake in
someone's basement. (She measured anyway.)

-end excerpt-