Schadenfreude. Who’s ever heard of it?

It’s a German word that means delighting in the misfortune of others. I had never heard of this word until I was doing some research for my book The Ugly Woman’s Guide to Internet Dating: What I Learned From 70 First Dates. Before this, I’d heard it described as “The Crab Theory.”

Put one crab in a five-gallon bucket and Mr. Crab will do everything in his power to scale its smooth wall and crawl out of that bucket. Put two or more crabs in a bucket and when one starts to climb up, the others will grab him and pull him back down into the bucket. Unfortunately, humans sometime exhibit the same tendencies as crabs.

In my own life, I’ve struggled mightily with envy, and I’m sorry to say that too many times, I had a decided leaning toward the crab/schadenfreude side.

And then one day, I read a story in the Christian Science Sentinel about a woman who’d spent a lifetime cultivating the habit of gratitude. She said that her mother had taught her to feel sincerely joyous and grateful for the good things that happened in other people’s lives, and to take it as a personal promise from God that, if it happened for them, it could happen for her, too.

The Buddhist have a word for this: Mudita. It’s the practice of finding joy in other people’s success and happiness.

The fact is, we’re all cracked pots and fallible and prone to foibles and missteps and mistakes and even lapses in good judgment. Who among us hasn’t lost our temper and said something we deeply regret? Who among us hasn’t surrendered to temptation when we could have done better? My point is, maybe the real need is to stop staring so hard at other people’s sins and take a better look at our own shortcomings and work on improving those.

Maybe we need to stop cultivating the habit of schadenfreude and work on mudita.

Last week, I spent countless hours bundling up the children and getting them ready for their new homes. Shipping books is a lot of work and time-intensive, and standing in line at the Milan Station (Norfolk Post Office on 38th Street) is a foretaste of hell, but…

It sure is fun to think about this book - Montgomery Ward’s Mail-Order Homes - leaving home to be enjoyed by others. Dale Patrick Wolicki and I spent five years researching and writing this book, and it’s new research on a new topic. As I’ve told my husband and my friend Dale many times, this book will still be in use as a reference work many years after we’re all gone from this earth.

If you’d like to learn more about Wardway Homes, click here.

If you’d like to give your friends and relatives the perfect Christmas present, click here.

And if you’d like to support your local library by donating a copy of Wardway Homes, click here.

Sears Homes were the most popular kit homes and were sold right out of the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalog in the early 1900s. More than 370 designs of kit homes were offered - everything ranging from Arts and Crafts bungalows to foursquares to Colonial Revivals. These homes came in 30,000-piece kits and were shipped to all 48 states. Sears promised that a man of average abilities could have these homes assembled in about 90 days.

Today, the only way to find these kit homes is literally one by one.  And that’s what I do. When I decided that Sears Homes would be my career, I endeavored to memorize each of those 370 designs of Sears Homes. Now I can drive the streets of small town America and find the Sears Homes - one by one.

In addition to Sears, there were other companies that sold kit homes, including Aladdin, Gordon Van Tine, Montgomery Ward, Harris Brothers and more.

Here are a few of the kit homes I’ve found in the Lynchburg and Roanoke area.

(Special thanks to Dale Patrick Wolicki for accompanying me on the trip to Roanoke, Bedford and Lynchburg to help with the treasure hunt!)

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To look at more pictures of Virginia’s Sears Homes, click here:

Yesterday, my husband and I did a field trip to Richmond to look for Sears Homes. I knew there were several in Colonial Heights and only three in Petersburg, but I’d never really scouted out Richmond - until July 5th 2010.

People often ask me how I find these houses. The answer: Lots of practice. Years ago, I specifically worked on memorizing hundreds of housing designs offered by Sears, Aladdin (another kit home company), Montgomery Ward, Gordon Van Tine and more. Now I can drive the streets and find the houses that match these early 20th Century designs. It’s a whole lot of fun.

Here were my best finds from our search in Richmond.  All these houses were found within the city limits of Richmond, Virginia. If you know of any kit homes in Richmond, please send me the address.

BTW, if you like what you see, please email this link to a friend.

Read about The Sears Homes in Hampton Roads here.

About three years ago, I found this Sears kit home - The Alhambra - in Virginia or West Virginia. And now I do not remember where I saw it. If  you know the address - or even the area - please post a comment and tell me where!

When I hear about the millions of gallons of oil spewing from the Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig, I wince (as do most Americans, I’m sure). When I hear that this enormous flood of oil is headed for America’s shorelines, it makes me want to cry.

Several times in the last six years, I’ve toddled down to Corolla, North Carolina in the off-season to spend a few days at the seashore. It’s quiet, serene and too beautiful for words (hence, the photos below!).

My dear friend Margee allows me to stay in her beautiful summer place in Corolla, soaking in the magical ambiance of a brightly decorated and airy vacation home and taking in the delightful aroma of those salty sea breezes.

I’ve done some of my very best writing by the seaside. In fact two of my books (including The Ugly Woman’s Guide to Internet Dating) were composed (in part) by the sea.  My muse is nature, and there are few things as inspiring as the quiet, beautiful beaches of North Carolina’s outer banks. I hope and pray that America’s shining seas and beautiful seashores survive BP’s horrific oil spills.

What a surprise to find an abundance of Sears Homes in Annapolis Maryland!  It’d be interesting to know how and why this Navy town ended up with so many kit homes.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, so here are a few pictures of my “finds” in Annapolis. Note: All of the homes pictured below were found within the city limits of Annapolis, MD.

BTW, if you enjoy these pictures, please spread the word and email a link to your friends! And join our group on Facebook, “Sears Homes.”

To learn more about Sears Homes, click here.  In short, these were houses purchased out of the Sears Roebuck mail-order catalog. They were shipped to the rail station in 12,000 pieces and assembled by the aspiring homeowner. About 70,000 Sears homes were sold from 1908-1940.

To read a recently published article on the Sears Homes of Annapolis, click here.

One of my favorite Sears kit homes is the Sears Dover. This little neo-Tudor is adorable, thoughtfully designed, well-laid out, relatively spacious and just as cute as a button. On the back of the house is a large shed dormer, creating plenty of room on the second floor for an additional two bedrooms and a full bath, giving the house a total of four bedrooms, two baths, large living room, dining room and kitchen.

For the late 1920s/early 30s, that was a good-size house.

Here’s a cutie-pie in Champaign, Illinois. This particular catalog page does not show price, but generally the Dover sold for under $3000. Pretty good deal.

This photo (and the one below) was taken in late February 2010, when I visited my daughter and her family.

To learn more about Sears Homes, click here.

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Pictured below is another beautiful Sears Home, The Americus. This house is in Urbana, Illinois. So I guess we’d call it, a fine little Sears House on an Urbana budget?

To see more pictures of Sears Homes, click here.

When I was in the Chicago area this Spring, I spent a few days with my friend Rebecca Hunter. After tooling around town looking at lots and lots of Sears Homes, we sat down in her beautiful dining room and made a list of the Sears Homes that neither one of us had ever seen.

It’s been my experience that the 60 most popular Sears Homes represented about 90% of their sales. Over and over again, we see the same designs, the Mitchells and Lynnhavens and Gladstones and Craftons and Argyles, etc. Sears offered 370 designs of Sears Homes, and of those 370 designs, there are 108 designs that neither Rebecca nor I have ever seen. This is quite remarkable, as the two of us have seen something approaching 10,000 Sears Homes. That’s a lot of Sears Homes.

Dale Wolicki says that it’s likely that some of these designs were never sold or built. In other words, they never went beyond being pictures in a catalog. He’s probably right.

For those Sears Homes aficionados, here is the list of Sears Homes that neither Rebecca or I have ever seen:

Adams

Adeline

Alden

Almo

Amhert

Amhurst

Amsterdam

Arcadia

Atlanta

Bayside

Branford

Bristol

Cambria

Canton

Carlton

Chesterfield

Chicora

Cleveland

Coateshead

Colebrook

Corning

Corrington

Croydon

Dartmouth

Durham

Estes

Fairfield

Fulton

Gainsboro

Glen View

Hamptshire

Harmony

Harmony

Hopeland

Kenfield

Laurel

Lenox

Letona

Lorne

Malden

Marquette

Melrose

Milford

Millerton

Model # 141

Model #104

Model #107

Model #116

Model #122

Model #130

Model #134

Model #136

Model #139

Model #143

Model #157

Model #158

Model #159

Model #165

Model #166

Model #175

Model #176

Model #177

Model #182

Model #183

Model #191

Model #195

Model #198

Model #199

Model #202

Model #204

Model #216

Model #228

Model #241

Model #264P159a

Model #264P206

Model #264P207

Model #264P243

Model #264P252

Model #36

Model #59

Model #64

Model #70

Model #C2001

Nantucket

Natoma

Nipigon

Norwich

Oxford

Pennsgrove

Portsmouth

Seagrove

Sheffield

Sherwood

Silverdale

Spaulding

Springwood

Stone Ridge

Sunny Dell

Tarryton

Torrington

Trenton

Valley

Vanita

Verndale

Vinemont

Wareham

Warren

Webster

Below are some photos of Sears Homes from my recent trip to Illinois:

After years of hard work, Dale Patrick Wolicki and I are finishing up our book on Wardway Homes. Yes, Montgomery Ward sold kit homes through mail order, and heretofore, there’s been a dearth of information on this topic.

The story of Wardway Homes is quite intriguing but digging up the documents and the details on this topic has been challenging. For many years, Dale has been collecting catalogs, clippings, magazine articles and ephemera on Wardway Homes and without him, this book never would have been written.

Look for “The Mail-order Homes of Montgomery Ward” to appear sometime in late June or early July 2010. It’ll be a dandy book, heavy laden with awesome photographs and vintage images from their early 20th Century catalogs.

Sounds so good I can hardly wait to read it myself!

When I learned that I was going to be writing a new book on the Sears Homes of Illinois, I called Cairo Historian Richard Kearney and asked if he could spend a day with me when I traveled to Southern Illinois.  I needed his help to find a few more Sears Homes near the site of the old mill in Cairo. Richard readily agreed to help out, which was a huge blessing, for I could not have done this without him! He and I spent an entire day traipsing around Olmstead, Tamms, Mounds City, Urbandale and many other little towns near his home in Cairo.

As we drove along bucolic country roads (some of which didn’t even show up on my GPS!), Richard was the perfect tour guide, providing an amazing bit of color about the region and its fascinating history.

A few hours into our fun day, we came to Mounds, home of this interesting old Glendale. Yes, it’s in rough shape but it is (or was) a fine old Sears Glendale. Obviously, the house has been vacant for years and years. As is evident from the photo (see below), the front porch is long gone, so I asked Richard, “Hey, you want to go around back and get inside?”

Richard, who could best be described as the consummate gentlemen with a pinch of adventurer and a heaping helping of intrigued historian, replied without a moment’s thought.

“Sounds like fun!”

So off we went, eagerly traipsing into the back yard, preparing to enter a vacant house in a run-down section of this economically depressed city. The basement windows were missing and as we walked past them, I thought I saw something move in the dark, scary basement.

“Must be a raccoon,” I thought to myself.

Richard took the lead and I was close on his heels, eager to get inside the old Sears House. As he rounded the bend and entered the backyard, a ferocious and large pitbull lunged at us, barking and spitting and snarling, and with teeth bared. Almost like a cartoon caricature, the lunging beast struggled to snap at Richard’s face but was held back by a very large chain.  Richard came to such a fast stop that I almost ran right into his back. We both took a few steps backward and one of us (I’m not sure who) said, “We need to get out of here, right NOW.”

In retrospect, I don’t know what was going on at that very deserted-looking house, but I do know that the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I *felt* danger. Richard and I turned and ran back to my car and took off.  As we were trotting back to my car, I remember thinking about that old song, “The things we do for love…”

“Like walking into an abandoned, vacant house in the middle of a not-so-good section of town…”

Thinking about this in the calm of my pretty pink bedroom in Norfolk, Virginia, I’ve no idea why there was a vicious, angry pit bull tied up on a huge chain in the back of a long-time vacant house. I’ve no idea who or what I glimpsed in that basement. However, I’m glad that both Richard and I lived to tell the tale!

Next time you read a book on Sears Houses, remember, history has a price! 

Recently, I traveled to southern Illinois to re-visit the site of the old Sears Mill.

In late 1911, Sears spent about $1 million to build a state-of-the-art mill just outside of Cairo, Illinois. The mill was actually located in a tiny burg called Urbandale. The Sears Mill was an impressive operation, covering 40 acres and employing about 80 full-time workers. About 20 acres were “under roof.” In other words, the site had 20 acres of buildings.

That’s a lot of buildings.

Each day, the railroad cars brought enormous quantities of yellow pine and cypress into the mill, right out of the virgin forests in Louisiana and Mississippi. Each day, those workers turned those logs into 10-12 kit homes. You read that right:  Hard-working men, using powerful saws and planers and other massive machines, carved those trees into kit homes. Kit homes with 30,000 pieces. That’s a lot of lumber.

In 2003, when doing research for my book, “The Houses That Sears Built,” I traveled to the site of the old mill. Not much to see there, but a couple little Sears Homes and a lot of woods and a couple bean fields.

Fast forward seven years to 2010.

Now I’m writing a new book about Sears Homes, and I decided it was time to dig a little deeper.

This time around, I contacted Richard Kearney, a local historian, long-time Cairo resident and all-around Smart Cookie and good man.

I asked him if he might have time to spend a day with me, helping me navigate the back roads of southern Illinois. To my delight, he readily agreed. Our day together could not have been any more delightful. With Richard’s fantastic knowledge of the area, I learned so much more about the old Sears Mill and its connection to local history.

One small example:  Soon after entering Urbandale, we turned onto “Sears Road” (the site of the old mill), and Richard spoke up and said, “You know, this used to be known as ‘Sears Roebuck Road.’”

I replied, “You’re kidding!”

He said, “It’s true. This road went all the way through, and when the Interstate came through, it cut the road right in half, creating two dead end streets on either side of I-57.”

This is the kind of quirky history that I just adore. I was enthralled.

“On the other side of the interstate,” Richard said, “you’ll find the other half of this road. It’s now called “Roebuck Road.”

Now I’ve been writing about Sears Homes for many years and I’ve been to Cairo many times and I’ve spent many hours learning more about Sears and Cairo and the mill, but I’d never heard any of this.

I asked Richard to show me where Roebuck Road was. He gladly obliged.

And there it was - Roebuck Road. And there was yet another bonus! Behind the Roebuck Road sign was a perfect little Sears house. It was a Sears Wexford.

A Sears House on Roebuck Road. Or maybe it’s a Roebuck house on Roebuck Road?

Either way, Garmin apparently never got the memo that Sears Roebuck Road had been sliced into two pieces.

Richard - thank you so much -  for sharing your knowledge and being such a good sport and giving up an entire day of your life to help me find my way around the southern-most tip of Illinois. You’re a real trooper and a treasure-trove of knowlege!

In 1975, I could be found tooling around Portsmouth in my 1959 red Cadillac Sedan de Ville. It was a great car with a four-barrel carb, dual exhausts and a powerful V-8 engine and more than 300 horsies under the hood. Or so I told people. When I shared that statistic, people would cock their head a little and look at me funny. (That has happened to me a lot in this life…)

And then I’d tell them that it was a 390-cubic inch engine which produced about 330 horsepower.

Mechanically speaking, one horsepower equals the amount of effort needed to move 33,000 foot-pounds per minute, or (in simpler terms) the ability to lift 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute’s time. When used as a measure for electric motors, one horsepower equals about 746 watts. The term “horsepower” was coined by James Watt. He was an 18th Century genius who is credited with significant innovations to the steam engine, making it useful, affordable and practical. The historians say that Watt’s inventions and innovations transformed America from an agricultural society to an industrial society.

There’s a reason our old expressions developed the way they did. Back in the day, stage coaches often had six horsepower, with the six sinewy animals straining at the reins to pull the carriage down the dirt roads. Or, as in the case of the 1905 advertisement shown below, the most modern concrete mixers of the day had ONE horsepower.

BTW, there’s a significant problem with this advertisement. There’s no legal disclaimer at the bottom that says, “Horsie not included.”

So reads a large advertisement in the 1912 issue of American Carpenter and Builder. I own a number of these architectural magazines from the early 1900s and the majority of advertisers offered products with a connection to the new and modern building miracle:  Concrete.

In 1867, Parisian gardener Joseph Monier was awarded a patent for reinforced concrete, which is concrete with embedded metal.

By the early 1900s, concrete became a hot item in the building trade. The rear pages of American Carpenter and Builder were filled with concrete products and concrete dry mixes and concrete mixers and concrete block makers. Concrete was big money. One of its biggest selling points was the fact that concrete was fireproof. In a time when fire was one of the great threats facing city residents and farm owners alike, creating a fireproof building was a big selling point.

As someone who loves to read old architectural magazines, I thought I’d seen it all - until I found this ad for concrete pine boxes. The ad promises, “Wooden boxes are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.”

Uh, it’s been almost 100 years since that statement was made and it hasn’t proven true.  “Wooden boxes” still abound.

I’d love to know how many contractors made money selling concrete caskets during the slow seasons of their building business.

We’ve broken a record in Norfolk. A bad record. We’re not far from breaking the 1889 record of 70 inches of rain in one year. And hey - we got three weeks to go!

We had more torrential downpours last night. And then more rain in the wee hours.

This morning, I arose at 4:30 to get some writing work done. I went out to my sunporch and heard the plop, plop, plop of a leaky roof splashing raindrops onto my beige carpet. So then I had the husband run around and fetch plastic buckets and containers for the SEVEN places that were dripping water.

I ran upstairs and out to the sunporch ROOF (which is flat) and wearing my jammies, I went out on the roof (barefoot), got down on my hands and knees and bent over the edge of the sunporch roof in the POURING rain and cleaned out the gutters. When the gutters get too full, the water rises up behind the flat-roof’s flashing (bent over into the gutters) and then - thanks to that little miracle we call “gravity - flows merrily into the sunporch ceiling. The low spot on the sunporch ceiling is in the center, so that’s where it drips.

While I was up above - traipsing to and fro on this black rubber roof - my bare feet hit a slick patch of black rubber roofing (at 4:30 am keep in mind) and that sent me slip-sliding across the roof. In that split second, as the roof’s edge came closer and closer, I thought, “Great. This is how it all ends. The architectural historian slides off the flat sunroof of her own 1924-built Colonial Revival at 4:30 in the morning, with green-handled salad tongs in one hand and a blue Mag-light in the other.”

However, I survived that event.

Then hubby came out in the darkness and held the flashlight for me while I cleaned partially decomposed leaf matter and acorns and twigs and squiggly pink worms out of 35 linear feet of gutters in the pouring rain while wearing my jammies.

About 20 minutes later, I came back inside, drenched to the bone, and put on clean jammies and dry socks.

At 10:30 am, another torrential downpour clogged up the gutters again. This time, I went out with my drill motor and my hammer. I was going to fix those *&#^ gutters once and for all. I drilled about 129 half-inch holes in the gutters and then using the hammer, I *beat* the downspout off the gutter. I could *see* the problem - the downspouts were clogged with all manner of debris, but everytime I jammed my hand down into the downspout’s elbow, I only made matters worse, because when I pulled my hand *out* of the downspout, the razor-sharp sheet metal screws removed a little more downspout-clogging organic matter from my right hand.

I saw someone driving by on the street slow down to watch this amazing show. I am quite sure I looked like a mad woman. That’s because I *felt* like a mad woman.

At this point, if I’d had access to 13 sticks of dynamite I would have used all of them to blow those sunporch gutters to aluminum-gutter hell, where they surely belonged.

Again, when I re-entered the bedroom (where you access the sunporch roof) I was soaked through and through. As I walked toward the bathroom to peel off soaked clothes, I muttered, “Those gutters won’t hurt anyone now.”

I washed my hands in the bathroom and they burned from the death of a thousand cuts. Forcing my large hands into the downspouts’ mouth again and again and again left me with a right hand that resembled an uncooked rump roast. I focused on something other than pain and wondered if it’s possible to go into shock from having 83 small slices on one hand.

So I went back to my work and then I realized I need some boxes to ship books to people overseas. I went downstairs to my basement (where we store boxes) and as I descended the steps, I saw one of my boxes gently floating by at the foot of the stairs, like a cardboard gondola (sans gondolier).

My basement has five inches of standing water and a POS sump pump with a lot of ’splaining to do. Remembering the MANY extension cords we’d draped throughout the basement floor (to run fans and humidifiers after the last GREAT FLOOD - two weeks ago), I decide to not step into the potentially electrically charged water.

Instead, I pause and don my husband’s insulated rubber-sole boots and then courageously step off the basement steps and into Lake Colonial Revival. Nothing sparks or zaps and if I have just died instantly from an electric shock, it happened so fast that I have no conscious memory of it, so it’s all good. Perhaps with this one great step, I’ve walked right into eternity and never even knew it. I wonder if this is the case. However, I don’t see Mother anywhere nearby so I figure I’m still among the living and walk over to the sump pump.

Once at the sump pump, I give it a good swift kick in the float and it roars to life. Forty minutes later, we’re down to 1/2″ of water. Using my water-puddle-rapid-movement-device (something I used to call a broom), I sweep a little more recalcitrant water into the sump and then I notice that the formerly dry spots in the basement are wet again. The basement is refilling itself with an endless supply of flood water.

At this point, I call my husband and tell him, “I’m leaving. Don’t know when or if I’m coming back, but I’m leaving. I’m off to find dry ground and a dry house with beige carpet that doesn’t squish when I walk across it and gutters that don’t channel rain water into my office space where I store boxes and boxes of early 20th Century irreplaceable documents. If I come back with an olive branch, you’ll know I was successful. If not, it’s been nice knowing you.”

Long day. And I just got back home. He reported that the basement refilled after I left.

It’s nuts I tell you - just nuts. Our basement hasn’t flooded since 1924. An old man built our house in 1924 and he built it on its own tall hill. And yet - we flooded. Second time in 87 years. And the first time was two weeks ago.

Anyone got a rubber room I can borrow for a few weeks? I might need it…