In an effort to reduce rent i may move into a mobile home and try to get a roommate to move in with me, this should save me about $50-100/month in rent.
What all is good & bad about a mobile home? i have heard that they are constructed in such a way that heat and cold are not kept in well, so the price of AC & heating would be higher. What other problems do they tend to have that you have noticed?
We have lived in a mobile home for about 5 years now.
The biggest advantage I see is the cost. It’s much less expensive than a regular home.
We don’t have air conditioning, so I can’t tell you anything about that. But this has been a very cold winter and my house has been just as comfortable as normal homes have.
One of the disadvantages, it that the materials used in building seem to of a lower quality. Our house is an older one (25 years) and we’ve had floors rotting one in a while. It’s also a challenge to hang up pictures. You need to get the nails right in the studs or else they fall off very easily.
Another problem is the difficulty of reselling the the house. I can’t find a mortgage company that will give a mortgage for an moblie home older then ten years. It doesn’t bother me too much, I want a home for my family and this is what I can afford.
In my opinion, the biggest problem is the people who believe mobile home=white trash.
I’ve lived in a couple.
I would not want to live in one anywhere north of Dallas, simply because they leak heat like a sieve, and heating one all winter would cost a fortune.
Older mobile homes (and maybe newer ones, for all I know) are usually firetraps. Once they get burning, they go up like celluloid collars.
They are also notorious for flipping over in hurricanes and tornadoes.
I wouldn’t mind renting one for a while, but I sure wouldn’t wanna own one.
yeah, thats one of my fears, that they will leak heat and AC.
Renting a mobile home would save me $100 a month or so (a 2 bedroom one is $300), but if i have to pay for my own water, sewage, trash pickup & gas, which i get included in the $500/month rent at an apartment, that would cut the financial benefit down to maybe $50/month. If it leaks heat & AC then that would cut it down to barely $20/month over the course of a year.
I bought one nine years ago. We find it comfortable. It’s paid for and it’s on my own land, so I have no mortgage or rent. It costs some to cool but it’s tolerable. I have friends that paid more for an SUV. If it starts to tear up, I’d buy a new one and have this one hauled off after I salvaged what I could. I’ve been called worse thing than “white trash”.
I grew up in one. I didn’t live in a real house until I was 16. We lived out in the middle of nowhere in Utah, and we survived. None of us froze to death, and it got alittle warm in the summer, but we didn’t bake to death either. We have six people living in a 3 bedroom at one point, and it was an extremely tight fit, but we survived that too. I imagine a mobile home would be pretty comfortable for just one or two people. I wouldn’t mind living in one again if I didn’t have to share it with a whole family.
I have lived in a mobile home. Several years ago, I shopped around but decided instead to buy a house. I decided in favor of a house because as an investment, a house is usually, if not always going to be best.
The things I liked about a mobile home: One would assume you would at least be able to go 3 - 5 years without a major repair. I had to replace my a/c the first month I was in my home, followed by a hot water heater, dishwasher, and last spring… a new roof, and on December 24th I had to fork over $2300 to replace my main sewer pipe because a root grew through it and it collapsed. I may have more equity but I can’t help but believe that if I had bought a new mobile home I would not have had all of these costly repairs.
I think they have to be on a slab to get a mortgage from most lenders. Maybe that was required in order to get home owner’s insurance. I can’t remember now.
The one I lived in was a two bedroom. You could easily hear normal conversation in the living room, in the back bedroom. When it rained hard or hailed, it sounded like you were in a tin can rolling down a sidewalk. I am from Mississippi, so obviously, I have relatives that live in mobile homes 
. A couple of my uncles started with a double wide and then bricked them in. I guess this would make them just as resistant to wind as a house would be.
I don’t understand why the idea of a mobile home is so looked down on by most people. For someone in my situation, single, living alone, don’t really have (or want) a lot of material “things”, a mobile home would be good option. I do not want a single family house because I don’t need the space. Also I do not want a yard at all or one or two spare bedrooms that most likely I will not use. I am in the process of buying a town home, but not really crazy about having to have such a long term committment.
A mobile home would be ideal, I believe. For the heating and other issues, you could have an underground or semi underground “port” the home could back into. It would help with heating and cooling and add more protection during storms. I really like natural sunlight so you could have ports or windows in the roof or side of the structure to let natural light in. You could rent or buy the land above or around it if you so desire.
Also, you would have a little space between yourself and neighbors, unlike an apartment building. I would like to live closer to town because I hate the suburbs, but I cannot afford to live where I would like. You either have to be very well off or be in government housing (aka slums). If you are just an average person, you are likely out of luck. A mobile home could be a good solution. If there was such a choice, I wouldn’t hesitate.
Me and the Mr. lived in one, owned by his grandmother, for a few months after we married.
She had let her dogs destroy it by peeing all over the place so the floors were ruined by the time we moved in. When we were moving out, I ended up falling through the kitchen floor, which had been sagging for a while.
However, had she taken good care of it, it would have been a very nice place. 3BR, 2BA and all the other stuff that comes with a normal house. I’ve seen lots of double wides that are much nicer than a regular house. The only problem I have with them is the flooring is usually made of particle board which is weak (at least this is how it used to be, maybe they are made differently now) and plus they are bad investments. I’ve never heard of one appreciating, but I could be wrong on that, too.
I just moved away from home, which was a trailer that that had it’s origins in the 70s, so it’s nearly 30 years old or more. Frankly, those things aren’t meant to last that long. In the past ten years, all the floors have been replaced, except for one room, which is going to get that treatment shortly. The floors were particle board and that rots like crazy, even with the semi-drought conditions that have been building for the past few years. Same goes for the roof. Ours was replaced this summer, because a hail storm the previous summer banged the all-holy hell out of it, but the effects didn’t show until after spring thaw. In March, the living room suddenly had an ENORMOUS ceiling leak, but nothing could be done about it until after planting. Such is the lot of the farmer.
The walls are very thin and sound travels across the entire trailer. When someone’s watching TV in the living room, you can hear it in my parents’ bedroom and vice-versa. This also means that, um . . . my room being next to my parents’, sometimes I heard “sounds.” We’ll leave it at that.
Anway, it’s a double-wide and, like pepperlandgirl, six people lived in it. I can imagine two people being comfortable, but six? ACK. 'Twasn’t shibby at all. Trailers, in my experience, are pretty compact and there isn’t much storage space. You might want to think of “creative” storage solutions if you can. Also, the doors on ours are slightly narrower than standard door frames, so you might want to measure any existing furniture carefully, before going to the effort of hauling it to the new place and discovering that your sofa won’t fit. The ceilings were low enough so that 5’2" me could palm my hand against them with very little effort.
As for leaking heat and A/C, if you seal the windows with plastic (3-M makes kits), it reduces the loss significantly. If you stretch it good and tight, you can’t even tell the windows are covered. Curtains help even more, though more so if you keep them drawn. We did this and the only drafts came from people leaving the front door open.
One of the main drawbacks is that there isn’t a cellar, so when there’s a tornado warning, you start thinking frantically of where the closest ditch is and hope that your dog isn’t kidnapped by the evil spinster schoolmarm.
The first place I lived in after I was on my own was in a mobile home. I lived in it for about three years, from 1994 to 1997. It was cheap, modest living and at least I had a roof over my head. It was built in 1973, so the house was over 20 years old and it showed its age. I agree with everyone who says the heat leaks out in the winter as the windows were not too securely sealed. The roof in the living room also always leaked, and nothing seemed to stop the rain water from dripping down onto the carpet. I never felt really secure inside it when there was a storm outside. One time we had winds of over 60 mph. When I got home that day I found out that my awning had blown away and landed in the neighbor’s yard (no other property damage had occurred, fortunately). I don’t live in a hurricane or tornado-prone area, so I’d hate to live in one if I did live in such a place. The floor creaked in certain places and I was afraid it might give someday. And yes, I was constantly worrying about it burning down on me while I was away. I was glad to move out of it when I did.
I have lived in a mobile home (we used to call them “trailer houses,” BTW), I have owned the upscale version (a pre-fab or “modular home”), and I used to help build mobile homes (I was an electrician at the Marlette Mobile Home factory in Great Bend, Kansas).
Yes, the construction is… unique. The following statements were all true when I was building them. Since there is no sheet rock on the walls, fire barriers found in wheel-less houses are non-existant in mobile homes. The cross walls (the walls that go from side to side) have no insulation in them and are therefore even worse as fire barriers. When the construction crew is putting the walls and roof on, any sawdust that is created usually falls down between the cross walls - the sawdust is a fire starting potential. Check the wiring in your outlets and wall switches; if it is an older mobile home, you could have aluminum wiring - that is a definite safety hazard. The walls of a mobile home are held upright by the roof; if you are in a high wind location and lose part of your roof, you’re in big trouble.
The good news is that they are an affordable way for young couples to get started in life. As long as you have a competent mobile home technician check the structure, you should be okay.
Oh, by the way, there are some mobile homes that are approved by the government (for military and federal workers) for colder climates. Marlette happens to be one of the manufacturers of approved mobile homes. They obtain this rating by using 2 X 6 studs for the outside walls and installing silver board and extra installation.
If you have a Marlette that was built about 25 years ago, look at the speaker wiring for your built-in stereo system (behind the tuner/tape deck) - if the wires have a figure-of-eight knot in them, I helped build your mobile home.