John Hutchcroft has restored quite few old homes around Indianola, but he noticed something strange about the house on the southeast corner of West Iowa and North Howard.

Small nails he pulled from the window panes were numbered. He didn't think much of it at first, but after he found handfuls of nails that were all numbered, he knew something was up.

As it turns out, each piece of the house has a number on it somewhere.

That's because the entire house was ordered from a Sears Catalog and sent in pieces via rail.

According to the Sears Archives, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold between 70,000 and 75,000 homes from its catalog from 1908 to 1940. The company designed 447 housing styles to choose from.

Hutchcroft said the home at 910 N. Howard was likely sent to Indianola from Chicago. It came in pieces and everything was numbered, from the windows and boards right down to the nails.

Even if you could only barely read, he said, you could still figure out where the pieces went.

"I'm not saying this adds any value to this especially," Hutchcroft said. "But I think it's kind of neat."

Hutchcroft has owned the house for decades, but didn't know about its unique history until he recently began restoring it and preparing it to be sold.

He hasn't found the exact style or plan of his house, but estimates it cost less than $10,000 when it was ordered 97 years ago.

There used to be a lumber company in Indianola, he said, that also sold house packages. They were usually the old turn-of-the-century two-story farm houses.

They were simply built with three or four bedrooms in them and they only cost about $850.

According to the Sears Archives, homes sold between 1915 and 1920 cost anywhere from $191 to $5,972.

John and his wife, Michelle, have been restoring the house for about five months.

They restored the old hardwood floors, painted the walls white, put a granite counter top in the kitchen and made sure the fire place and all the built-in shelves are in good shape.

The couple went up to West End Salvage in Des Moines so they could get counterweights for the windows, and they put in new storm windows outside.

They ran new electrical and plumbing throughout the entire house.

But, first, they had to get through the insulation in the ceiling of the unfinished basement.

"It was ugly. It had coal dust in it. They did that for a couple of reasons, the main one was to be a fire deterrent," Hutchcroft said. "They had used corn cobs. They had used straw. They had used ground up paper. Whatever they could find they crammed in there."

Despite the mess, Hutchcroft said he enjoys fixing up houses.

"It's kind of a passion to restore these old ones," Hutchcroft said. "I spent a lot of money here and my wife has spent an enormous amount of time here.

"For the last five months — Mother's Day, Father's Day, Sundays — this is where we're at. Everyone else is going by on their motorcycles and pulling their boats and we're doing this," he said. "When you're at the 40-percent complete mark, you're like what the hell did I do? I just bit off more than I can chew.

"But it's kind of fun seeing something that 40 years from now when I'm dead and gone will still be in pretty good shape."