This once-lovely Sears Whitehall is in a small town in southwestern Illinois. In its happy days, it was a lovely home with clapboard siding (all cypress), probably painted a bright white with tasteful colors or the trim and shutters.

And then one day, someone thought it’d be a swell idea to wrap this fine old house with faux-logs. Sadly, this Sears Home has lost much of its value, due to this insensitive remodeling job.

This 1920s Sears Home does not look good dressed in faux logs

And then there’s this once-lovely Westly, now dripping in plastic and other PVC-based products. There’s so much that’s wrong with this house, I’m not sure what to say. However, I can say that it’s value as a historic structure is mostly lost. What a pity.

Poor little house. If this were a dog, we'd put it out of its misery.

This is a Sears Argyle, and before the "remodeling" work was done, this was a darling Sears Argyle.

To learn more about Sears Homes, click here.

Take a look at this “modern” tub. The picture below is from a 1925 American Builder, a very popular trade magazine of that era. Now I suppose on the face of it, this “combo unit” is a swell idea but c’mon, really?

The best part of a hot shower is relaxing and letting your mind drift away to a happy place. In this shower (see photo below), you’d darn well better keep your mind on the task at hand. It’s hard to imagine that any builder ever thought that this was a swell idea. And more to the point, if such a thing were offered today, it’d come with enough bright-red legally-worded warning labels to wallpaper the most spacious bathroom.

Speaking as someone who loves old houses, I’d love to know - anyone ever see one of these in real life in residential construction? Apparently, there were 60 of these put into the Mira Mar Hotel in Chicago, Illinois on Woodlawn. A quickie search on Google shows that the hotel was still in business in 1951, but I couldn’t find any more information.

Ad from a 1925 architectural magazine

A closer look at the tub/shower

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