12,000 easy pieces

Much to their surprise, they learned they were living in a house built from a kit. Craig turned to the Web and learned that the classy oak floors downstairs, the gleaming Douglas fir floors upstairs, the charming built-ins and the sconces in every room all came as part of a do-it-yourself kit ordered from a Pacific Ready-Cut Homes catalog.

"We had no idea what a Pacific Ready-Cut home was," said Kim Proctor. "We never thought it was a kit home."

Back in the 1920s, "buying stuff out of mail order was kind of the 1990s equivalent of buying stuff from the Internet," said Rosemary Thornton, who along with Dale Patrick Wolicki wrote "California's Kit Homes: A Reprint of the 1925 Pacific Ready-Cut Homes Catalog." "You've never touched it. You've never seen it. You send your money in a little brown paper envelope and somebody sends you back a house."

Thornton, who also wrote a book about Sears' mail-order homes, says that although those houses may be better known nationally, Los Angeles-based Pacific Ready-Cut Homes Inc. -- once the biggest home builder in the West -- dominated the pre-cut market in Southern California during the company's pre-Depression peak.

Eight decades later, many Pacific Ready-Cut houses still stand in neighborhoods as varied as Beverly Hills and South Los Angeles. From the outside, it's hard to tell that a house was built from a kit, unless, like Thornton, you're familiar with the designs in the catalog. And in most cases, not even the current owners know they are living in a kit home.

From 1908 to 1940, Pacific Ready-Cut sold 37,000 ready-to-assemble homes based on 1,800 plans, plus some custom-designed ones, as practical California bungalows replaced fancy Victorians. Although most of the company's houses were one story, it also produced two-story homes, duplexes, bungalow court apartments, hotels, gas stations and offices.

After World War I, the prefabricated housing market in Southern California really took off, Thornton said. "Returning soldiers needed a place to live, and that's when Pacific Ready-Cut Homes started making bigger, better houses."

The firm's heyday in the 1920s coincided with a spike in California's population and a booming economy that created a new generation of homeowners. At that time, the firm operated branch offices in 53 California cities, expanded nationally and also shipped kit houses to Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala and Japan.