In the early 1900s, upon opening a Sears catalog, you could browse for a house – pre-cut, numbered, and ready for assembly. The kit house, also called mail-order or ready-cut home, represented the America of mass production. Today, seeing an advertisement for a house built à la IKEA may seem novel, but this culture largely remains, whether it’s cookie-cutter homes or a subway car of Adidas Superstars. Kit houses of the 1900s put a magnifying glass to our desire to stand out i