Questions: Maunfactured / Mobile Homes, Pros and Cons

I suppose my situation is a bit unusual. We planned to build a house at first but decided later to save some moola and "improve" the double-wide mobile home we bought and placed on our 10 acres high on a hilltop. Had a dozer drag it up because there was no way a truck could have made the climb.

It is worth far, far more than we paid for it.

It was built in Idaho and we had it hauled to CA. 2x6 walls and heavy insulation. Composition roof and hardwood siding. Placed on a permanent foundation. We modified it a little as we:

Replaced all the walls with thick sheetrock.
Replaced all the windows with expensive dual panes.
Replaced all the doors, internal and external.
Replaced all cupboards in every room.
Replaced all appliances and re-wired the kitchen.
Installed hardwood floors over 3/4" plywood on top of what was already there.
Put tile in the kitchen and both bathrooms.
Replaced all plumbing fixtures and electrical outlets, switches, etc.
Replaced all ceilings with shiplap knotty pine.
Knocked out interior walls to create a great room with 4x6 beams.

The list goes on and on but you get the picture. We took out absolutely everything inside the house, ripped it back to the insulation and installed quality everything. $40k worth.

Considering a few acres are now totally landscaped, it is worth quite a bit, given the neighborhood as well. But none of that matters to us a twit because we improved it only to serve our needs and plan on living out the rest of our days here. We didn't want to be house poor either and I can't tell you how nice it is to have zero bills (other than the usual utilities, insurance, etc.) and be retired.

I should mention that it took us eight years to complete the task, on the inside of the house, at least. All done by ourselves, no professionals.

The living room area:



A small part of the yard. The decks go all around the house.

I appreciate the input and photos!!
Thanks for ya'alls insights.

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I am sure of two things: There is a God, and I am not Him.
The movie Rudy

The OP asked for pros and cons, so here are mine.

First, in the South-east, I would ONLY live in a cement, or possibly stone, house! Between termites and hurricanes, and possibly even tornadoes, stick-built housing just doesn't seem like a good choice for that area, whether it's site-built or built off-site in a factory.

We lived in a bought-new manufactured home for eight years, and it was a nice house. It was on a full cement foundation, and 'de-titled' so it was taxed like a regular site-built house. It had six inch walls, and good double-pane windows, a sliding glass door at the back, and a nice porch on the front. Nice house. Not perfect -- we had to fix a couple of things, and I wasn't happy with the small-diameter water supply pipes used. But over-all, it was a good house.

For me, I think the biggest con to manufactured houses is that I don't know of any that are designed for passive solar heat. Our climate is excellent for utilizing passive solar, but in order to go that route I'll have to hand-build a house, and at my age, I'm not sure I'm up to that anymore. We'll see.

Currently, we live in a 1971 double-wide trailer house. It still has the original arched metal roof and metal siding, but the inside has been gutted and rebuilt. The walls are now six inches thick with adequate insulation, and the windows were all replaced with good-quality double-pane low-E windows. There are still things that need to be done, but the floor plan is nice for my daughter and I (even though the house itself is only 800 s.f., with another 150 s.f. in the utility room addition), and I love that the property taxes on the house are only $5/year! (The land with improvements is more, but we still pay less than $200/year total for property taxes for this place.) It's small, but a nice house for us. Of course, I don't feel like I need to have a McMansion, which helps in being content with what we do have!

I think each person has to make their own decision about what they want for housing. If you have plenty of time and energy, getting some land with an older MH may be a good option, because the MH can be fixed up very nice, inside and out.

Kathleen

"They're ugly and square, they don't belong there, they looked alot better as beer cans"

Jimmy Buffet

How I feel about 'mobile homes'..........

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Roger

after our housefire in 2002 we bought a Patriot mobile home, double wide..we love it..it is a really nice one. You gotta buy quality if you buy mobile homes..I recommend the Patriot brand. we put ours on a cement crawlspace, but if i was able i would have put it on a basement..we just didn't have the $.

our only beef is that the windows we ordered weren't what we got and they wouldn't change them..we wanted where the tops and bottoms tilted in to clean, but the tops on ours do NOT move at all..which I was ticked about.

also you may have to buy plumbing and elec replacement parts from a mobile home dealer rather than a home improvement store as sometimes the sizes are different.

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Brenda Groth
http://restfultrailsfoodforestgarden.blogspot.com/

What it comes to is you get what you pay for. The better MH cost as much as a stick built. The only reason people around here put them up is speed.

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Nothing is as strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength - St. Francis de Sales

I've seen a few Maronda and Ryan homes up close and personal, and frankly, you're better off with a doublewide! They are cheap and shoddily constructed, in my opinion, and everything that isn't upgraded from the outset is carp. ('Five-year' carpeting? Really?) The 'wood' molding actually is some kind of fiberboard (read: cardboard!), something you'll discover the first time your kid runs his tricycle into the door frame. Kitchen cabinets? Junk.

Around here, these houses sell for $200,000-$300,000. Unreal!

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"I love all of this mud," said no one, ever.

A few years ago I was a construction foreman for a new chain hotel in the 'burbs of Philly, PA. The place was probably the biggest piece of crap I ever worked on, and the framing was absolutely the worst I had ever seen. ( I just wired the place, so it wasn't my fault, LOL) Out of plumb, square, level, and totally a mess. It was so bad that the owner was flipping out at the paper hanger since the patterned wallpaper looked like Steve Wonder hung it, after a night of hard partying. The hanger gave the owner a 4' level and told him to "find a straight wall in the place, and then we'll talk" Near the end of the job, a high end trim crew showed up. These guys were off the hook. They installed massive crown and other intricate moldings in a building that was a nightmare, did it quick and made it look nearly perfect. I was stunned. When I told them how impressive they are, they told me it's nothing special, since they also trim for the biggest "executive homebuilder" in the country, and the crap they build
make this place look great. Since then I have heard repeated stories from all different trades about this outfit and dealing with things like trying to trim a multi-million dollar house with a powder room that is 2" out of level in a 5'x7' room, or hanging kitchen cabinets on walls that lean so far that the cabinet doors slam shut until they are pulled open further than 90* then they slam open.
Like I said in an earlier post, when it comes to big name, regional and national builders, a lot of what they build is done on the "silk dress on the pig" model. The other thing they bring to the table is a high reliance on illegal labor. When everybody was hurting for work a few years ago, and some of the big outfits still had townhouses and other projects to complete, it was nothing for a local contractor, such as a painter or mason to be told that they were no even allowed to bid on the work, since they had no chance of competing with what the illegals charge for the work.

All in all, the whole situation is pretty messed up. I'm no fan of manufactured (single and double wide) housing, but if I ever get to the point that I can't or won't build my next home, I'll definitely find a quality modular builder to do it for me.