How to choose a used mobile home
So
what did we look at when we started considering potential
used mobile
homes? Given that the abodes are technically wheeled vehicles, I
turned to used-car know-how. First on
the agenda --- finding one as young as possible within our price range.
Our current trailer is about 50 years old...which puts it before the
cutoff when mobile homes beccame manufactured homes. On June 15, 1976,
HUD tightened their rules and changed the name of the result. So this
is a smart age to look for --- if you can afford a trailer that dates
past this era, you're likely to end up with
thicker walls, better insulation, and overall higher quality of living.
(Plus, you can rightly tell your parental units that you didn't buy a
trailer --- you bought a manufactured home. Bonus!)
Next up --- potential
trouble spots. Roof leaks and bad floors are two of the most likely
flaws of a used trailer. I go into this in much more depth in Trailersteading,
so I won't bend your ear again here. As when hunting an ugly-duckling
property, it's just a matter of figuring out what you can live with
(and fix) and what you can't.
In the end, Mark and I
got lucky. Our septic installer is also a trailer mover, and he knew of
a 1993 Skyline Sabre less than a mile down the road from our new place.
There are
some obvious trouble zones we'll have to fix --- a few holes in the
floor, lack of a furnace, pipes that likely burst when the space sat
unheated
for three years, and single-glazed windows being the worst of the
downsides. But the trailer was a steal for $1,500 and will be very
cheap to move given its proximity to the eventual destination. Success!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Trailers are like time capsules, except that they were already 10 years out of date when new... It's ridiculous that for only $1500 you can buy a small, portable building to live in comfortably. People are so house horny in Canada they'll pay $500000-$1500000 for an un-built particle board house on a 40'x60' lot in a subdivision surrounded by thousands of identical buildings and commute 1-2 hours one way to work! I am not exaggerating #'s at all either, although its Canadian dollars, the rat race is insane here. I'm looking forward to see what you guys do with this new place, But the old place really had soul
Hi Anna and Mark,
I wonder what your projected tax savings are over say 10 years. Cheap land, cheaper house?
How does this compare with your nearby 'neighbors' in their 'conventional' houses?
Hard for the tax collector to really bite you??!! Especially if you can sell produce from the side of your road!
warm regards to you both, John
I'm getting more of a seventies vibe. What with the yellow and brown, the hanging cabinet and the lights/ceiling fan combo.
Nothing some DIY-ing can't fix, I'd say. And you can't beat the price.
Is it common for mobile homes to have such small windows? Practically all the houses I've ever lived in had wall-to-wall windows.
Roland --- Clearly, you and Mark are on the same wavelength. I thought the yellow was pretty, but he said it has to go....
Trailers do tend to have really small windows, and also really crappy ones. That's top of my own upgrade list --- adding more on the south side and swapping out the single-glazed for double. I have a feeling large windows just aren't compatible with the rigors of a move.
It very much depends on the kind of window and how the windows are fixed to the structure.
If you look at modern touringcars and city buses you will see very large windows bonded directly to the frame. These are actually part of the load-bearing structure. That's one reason why these windows don't open.
Of course windows that can open and window frames that are only fixed with a couple of screws and PU-foam aren't as sturdy as a pane of glass bonded straight to the structure. So I would definitely advise to do the replacement after the move. You might want put a 2x10 header above the window, and maybe even a complete frame of 2x10 around the larger window to support the loads.
According to the samurai carpenter [video], it's best to use glulam beams as headers since they don't shrink as much.
Also, I'd like to say that while there are definitely good things that have come from the seventies, that brown/yellow combination isn't one of them.
Tastes differ, of course. My apartment had (emphasis on the past tense) several purple walls when I bought it.
I will say the more modern trailers is they lack the style of 60's trailers, back when they wanted them to look like they were mobile, and possibly going fast! Oh, the rounded corners, the two tone siding, the horrid green shag (or red velvet!) the bubble, smoke windows at the tongue end!
That is a heck of a deal for 15 hundo. YES I would upgrade wiring as need be. YES I would upgrade to windows that are not paper thin. We did that in our 1950's conventional frame home and it is hands down the best thing we did. The AC can keep up, the heat stays in, and living near a road the NOISE is vastly reduced.
Best of luck to ya, look forward to updates!