Health & Fitness
A Sears Catalog House
Realtor Scott Kelly of Baird & Warner shares his family's struggle with cabin fever, and reflects on the changes in housing sizes over the past century.
My family and I are fighting cabin fever. We moved to Evanston from Colorado about 6 months ago and rented a small-ish house to live in while we search for a permanent home to buy here. There’s lots of talk in real estate circles about home prices these days, but in our house the talk focuses on this one thing: Space.
When you look at housing trends, not just year-to-year, but decade-to-decade and even century-to-century, house prices aren’t the only thing that have increased a lot. House sizes have also increased — a lot.
A perfect example of a smaller house from the past can be found in a Sears Catalog House now for sale at 2225 Noyes Street in Northwest Evanston (see photo above). In the mid-1800′s, house sizes in the urban areas of the Midwestern United States were often only 400 square feet. By the mid-1900′s, the sizes of houses here grew to almost 1000 square feet. Take into account the larger family sizes of that era and think about how our ancestors lived in what most of us today would consider very tight quarters.
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Today, Evanston houses are typically larger than 1000 square feet (often far larger), especially when square footage is added lower level/basement and upper level/attic spaces. And while many of us are now fighting cabin fever, let’s be thankful that our standard of living is much better than so many generations who have gone before us.
Find out more about Scott at Baird & Warner or his real estate blog.
