Above all else, they should preserve the house, which is what Keith and Joyce Scheetz have done with their “Lustron” house, formerly of Westfield and now located in Eden.

A Lustron home is constructed of porcelain-enameled steel panels bolted to a steel frame and secured to a concrete slab. There were only 2,500 of these houses built, all in the late 1940s, of which only 125 remain in existence.

Until recently, one of these homes was located at 125 Elm St. in Westfield. This past month, the Scheetz’s dismantled the home and moved it to their property in Eden, where they had prepared a basement and foundation for it to rest upon.

Joyce Scheetz describes the project as “the mid-century modest home of my dreams, a dream I hadn’t had until that exact moment.” By this she means that she and her husband were seeking to downsize and wanted a mid-size atomic style ranch home. The Scheetz’s found the Lustron through a series of fortunate events.

Photo by David Prenatt An interior picture of the Lustron Home before it was dismantled. It shows the porcelain-enameled panels that make up the walls.

Joyce is a porcelain restoration specialist and has been buying and selling antiques for two decades. Keith is a civil engineer, “which has proved very useful in this endeavor,” she said.

Some 20 years ago, Joyce and Keith were married on the front porch of their first restoration project, an 1861 farmhouse in Eden. Because of their work on this home, they were the recipients of an award for preservation by the Eden Historic Board, the first such award given for a private residence.

When they decided to downsize, Joyce said they searched for the right home for nearly a year and were ready to give up. One evening, while out to dinner, she checked Zillow listings on her phone and came across the Lustron home.

“I thought to myself, Lustron? I’ve heard of that. I showed Keith and suggested the crazy idea of can we take this thing down and move it? So we decided to check it out.”

The two had an appointment to look at the Lustron home, Joyce said, but the realtor got sick and had to cancel. They decided to take the hour and 10 minute drive to Westfield, anyway, to look at it.

Photo by David Prenatt The interior of the home as it is being dismantled

The owner of the Lustron happened to be home when they arrived. She invited the Scheetz family in and told them that her realtor had advised her to change just about everything about the home in order to sell it.

“Thankfully she did not heed her advice, realizing the house was a gem being 99 percent original,” Joyce said. “She expressed her hope that someone would love it for what it was and that they would decorate it in period ’50s decor. I told her I was her gal and that was my intention.

“The project has been quite an undertaking,” Joyce said. “Keith and I have done all of the work ourselves from the surveying to the deconstruction. We have taken every screw out and loaded each and every panel into the tractor trailer.”

In fact, Joyce said, the only tasks they were required to outsource were the taking down and reconstructing of the frame and trusses, and the pouring of a new foundation for the home in Eden.

Each panel had to be numbered and tagged before being taken down, Joyce said. She drew up diagrams as well, showing where each panel belonged. Additionally, the panels had to be taken down in order, moving counter-clockwise, because each panel removed revealed the screws for the next panel.

“You can’t get ahead of yourself or start in another place,” Joyce said. “We downloaded a copy of the original Lustron Erection Manual which has been invaluable.”

The greatest challenge, outside of the distance from their home to the worksite, has been the fickle weather conditions this winter, Joyce said. Despite its age, the house itself came apart “relatively easily,” she said. “We only had to cut off a handful of screws.”

The Lustron home was the brainchild of Carl G. Strandlund, an executive with Chicago Vitreous Enamel Products. The return of American GIs from World War II, had created a housing shortage. According to Ohio History Central, Strandlund envisioned applying the automobile industry method of continuous assembly lines “to ‘Fordize’ the housing industry.”

Strandlund was able to secure a $15.5 million loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Truman administration. The government also gave him the use of a million square-foot Curtiss-Wright plant next to the airport in Columbus, Ohio, for his operations.

Strandlund hired two Chicago architects, who designed a 1,025 square-foot ranch-style prototype. The home featured built-in storage, kitchen cabinets, bookshelves, a china closet and a bedroom vanity, as well as an efficient heating system.

In April of 1948, 40 of these prefabricated homes rolled off Strandlund’s assembly line. They were accompanied by an advertising blitz focusing on the durability of the porcelain panels as well as the features that made the Lustron home superior to more expensive homes.

The company soon ran into trouble, however. The homes did not sell well, as the average $10,500 price was too high for many budgets and banks were hesitant to loan money for factory-built homes. Also, the home encountered problems with local building codes. The housing crisis subsided and Strandlund was having difficulty repaying his loan. This resulted in Congressional hearings regarding the project. In 1951, a foreclosure and liquidation sale was held and the plant was converted to defense operations for the Korean conflict.

Joyce said many neighbors and Westfield residents stopped to talk with them as the project unfolded.

“We are very grateful to the community of Westfield for its support of our project,” she said.

More pictures and a detailed account of the project can be found on the Scheetz’s blog: https://lustronorbustsite.wordpress.com.