Vince Staten: The House The Newspaper Built

About 15 years ago, while cleaning out her parents’ house, Mary Porter found an old Kingsport Times-News envelope postmarked 1960 and addressed to her late father, Edward Gustafson. Inside was a brochure titled “House of the Week Study Plan: X-94.” Knowing that I was always looking for things to write about in my Times-News column, Mary passed it along, thinking I might find it interesting. She was right.

But alas my time as a columnist ran out before I ever got around to writing about Ed Gustafson’s House of the Week plans. But since my retirement, I’ve been revisiting ideas I never had time to explore, posting what I call Columns I Never Got Around To on my blog. And this week, I found myself staring at that house plan ordered 65 years ago - a relic of a bygone era when newspapers helped people build homes, literally.

I remembered those Sunday features well - weekly stories showcasing “dream homes” for the aspiring homeowner.

Apparently, House X-94 had caught Ed Gustafson’s eye enough that he sent away 50 cents for the study plan. He never got around to building the “Big Family House in a Small Package” as the newspaper described it, and the house Mary was cleaning out turned out to be the same address on the envelope, the house her parents moved into on Morningside Circle in 1943.

For decades, newspapers featured house plans every Sunday, catering to every dreamer with a hammer and a plot of land. Some weeks, the featured home was a cozy cottage, perfect for newlyweds or retirees. Other times, it was a stately two-story meant for a growing family, or a “rambling ranch,” as they often called them, full of sliding doors and picture windows looking out onto a generous backyard. Each rendering was accompanied by a glowing description of the home’s merits - how the kitchen was “perfect for modern living” or how the open floor plan allowed “for easy entertaining.”

At the bottom of the page was a small coupon.

For a low price – by 1960 it was 50 cents - you could send away for a “study plan” - a small-scale blueprint that included a materials list, giving you a rough idea of what your dream home might cost. And if you liked what you saw, another form allowed you to send off for full blueprints - detailed construction documents that could be had for the princely sum of eight or ten dollars.

It seems quaint now, in an era where house plans can be downloaded with the click of a button, but at the time, these newspaper house plans fueled a building boom across the country. The concept wasn’t new - the earliest versions of “House of the Week” articles appeared in the 1900s and 1910s - but the golden age of newspaper house plans was in the 1950s through the 1970s, when homeownership was an essential part of the American dream.

These plans were perfect for ambitious young couples, the kind who weren’t afraid of rolling up their sleeves, enlisting the help of handy relatives, and spending nights and weekends hammering their future into existence. They were for families stretching a dollar as far as it would go, for people who had land but needed guidance, for folks who dreamed of four walls and a roof that belonged to them.

No architect with a sophisticated portfolio. No draftsman hunched over a drawing board. No high-powered real estate firm guiding the process. Just a Sunday feature, a clipped coupon, and a few dollars sent through the mail.

And yet, somehow, it was perfect.

I don’t know when newspapers stopped running house plans. Maybe it was when home design became more complex, or when buyers preferred pre-built developments over custom construction. Maybe it was when the Sunday paper itself began to shrink, losing pages and sections to the digital age.

But every now and then, when I see an old newspaper tucked inside a flea market bin, I thumb through it to see if, somewhere in those yellowed pages, there’s a house waiting to be built.

All it needs is a dreamer, a hammer, and maybe a little pocket change.