MAIL ORDER HOUSE PLANS

One of my favourite parts about planning a novel is designing my characters’ homes. This is a tool I’ve used almost as long as I’ve been writing. I like knowing if the characters live in larger than life mansions or little one story bungalows. Not only does it help me visualize how the characters move from room to room, it also gives me a clear picture of the lives they lead. Before I begin writing their story, I love to imagine what it would be like driving up to their home for the first time, and how it would feel walking through their front door.

I think my love of house planning began sometime in grade four, when my teacher asked the class to draw a blueprint for our dream house. She gave no further instruction, and so I, along with a classroom full of eager students, drew up a design for the kind of house I thought I would love to own. It was fully stocked with the usual rooms, like a kitchen, dining, and living room. There was a games room in the basement, and five bedrooms, one for me, one for my parents, and one for each of my brothers. There was an indoor pool, hot tub, library, and at least three bathrooms.

It was a real dream home all right. My teacher decided to share some of the imaginative ideas each of us had, like the hockey rink, the slide from the attic to the basement, or in my case, the dumbwaiter (thanks in part to Harriet the Spy). My teacher was also quick to point out the major flaw in most of our designs.

She looked across the classroom, full of delighted students still sharing ideas with one another, and asked, “Where are you going to wash your clothes?”

As it turned out, all but one of us were so busy thinking up the “important things” that we forgot to add the laundry room. It seemed so simple that I had completely overlooked it, and this exercise always stuck with me. Now, no matter how interesting or out of this world my house plans may seem, I always try to remember that every home needs practical rooms to go along with the extravagant.

My earliest designs for characters’ homes were just as elaborate as the school assignment. Characters lived in fantastic dwellings with all the bells and whistles. Over time, tools like Planner 5d were wonderful assets for helping me with these designs. Not only could I design a house, I could plan the layout of the furniture as well. As my stories became less fantastical and gripped in more in the past, I struggled to create realistic homes. I’d lived in old houses before, and had a basic idea of some layouts, but these buildings had been updated over the years and weren’t the best reflection of bygone eras. I began to wonder what a new house would have looked like in the 1940s. How many bedrooms were there? How big was the kitchen? Most importantly, where was the laundry room?

These many questions, and the desire to plan out realistic houses, lead to my discovery of the forgotten world of Mail-Order Houses. An early nineteenth century version of what we know today as modular and prefabricated homes, mail order houses experienced their heyday as one of the leading suppliers of homes to both Canada and the United States during the years leading up to the First World War. Customers could search through pamphlets of house plans, provided by companies like Sears-Roebuck and Eaton’s. Once the plan and desired materials were chosen, customers would have precut lumber, building supplies, and instructions shipped directly to them.

Though the industry faded away after WWII as a result of declining materials, many of the old houses remain standing today. Something else that remains are the old blueprint booklets, containing images, descriptions, and even prices for these once desirable homes. Not only are these books wonderful resources for social history buffs, they are amazing resources for writers who like to visualize characters’ surroundings as they craft their stories.

Much like choosing a house in real life, I’ve spent countless hours searching through these archives in my attempt to find the perfect, or in some cases, imperfect home, for my characters. Sometimes the story calls for a place that is too small or too old for my character’s tastes, and these booklets are the perfect place to find a variety of era appropriate homes. Once I find the right house, I usually prefer to use it as the blueprint for my own plans, where I have the freedom to add colour and design to the image for future reference.

Perhaps it would be unfair to call these blueprint searches distracting, but there are times when I don’t exactly achieve my initial goal of finding a house for the story I am planning. Instead, I come across images of buildings that make me wonder who else might live there. As I seek to answer this question, new characters are brought to life, inspiring their own stories, and leading to the creation of yet another world outside the one I already know.