Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire School me on mobile homes

gophergunner,

best of luck to you if you take the new job and move away from the city.

Don't let the negative comments here sway your decision making too much. Do a little research in your area and find out about "manufactured" homes in that area. Their not anything like the old metal "mobile homes" of the past, if your State is anything like the rest of today's world. Maybe check with some folks that own them in the area you're considering.

The folks that say you'll be cold in winter and hot in the summer must not know about modern manufactured housing. As an example, this morning the house was down to around 64 degrees after having put the last log on the fire yesterday morning at 0800. Temps around 65 yesterday for a high and down in the 20's last night. Been that way for 3 weeks now, sometimes as low as 11F. Kindling and maybe 4 good size chunks of wood and the house is good for the day. I make up the fire at night and the wife lights it off at 0530-0600 or so.

Summers here get up in the 90's regular and at times push/reach 100F. I put in one little window A/C unit in the master bedroom, turn it on when the bdrm gets up around 72-74. Open the windows when it cools down at night, run a couple of fans, and bingo, house is cooled back down to low 60's. Close up windows for the day. Of course, we spent a bit to put a nice cover on the deck on the west side of the house, to keep the setting sun off it and the west wall of the house which helped bunches.

Newer mfg homes, as others have noted, in cold climates generally come with 2x6 construction in the exterior walls and good insulation. Our is well insulated in the roof and the crawl space. As for pipes freezing, we might not get as cold as you will near Brainerd, but here's an example of what we saw the first winter we were here. Yes, -24.9F, in California even.



Ours sits on a perimeter foundation and is "converted to real property", so we don't pay the DMV for a license plate tag every year, just pay property tax like a regular building. Double glazed windows. Siding on ours is HardieBoard cement lap siding, which makes sense around here, surrounded by wildlands as we are. Our house has solid wood cabinet doors on all the cabinets in the house, metal clad exterior doors, electric furnace and water heater, outlets are as RockChuck described, right in the middle of the walls. I've been underneath and can second the motion to make the foundation high enough to make it easy to move around under. I can kneel mostly and am glad I didn't have to belly crawl. I'd have made it 3"-4" taller if I had been the original owner. Maybe even another full step on the entries even.

Having lived in all sorts of housing over the years, from actual camp trailers with additions built on the front of them, to 600 sq ft cabins, honest to goodness metal mobile homes, and more than my share of stick built houses I can tell you I'm as happy as Mt Boomer is with his situation. This place is WAY better than the stick built 70's house we lived in when my wife worked in the Sacramento area. That place had single pane windows that rattled when trucks hit a pothole 6 houses up the street where the main road crossed our street. No insulation, fiberboard cabinets, and generally shidty construction all the way around. The tract developer made his money on that community for sure. Our place is as well built as many site built homes, and better than a lot I've seen.

In our State at least, we had to go with a company that specialized in mortgages for mfg housing and we had NO problem getting insured either. After all , it's real property now.

If you want to spend your money on land, rather than getting a smaller property in order to buy a stick built home, don't be afraid of a newly manufactured "trailer" home. Not sure how old you are, but my wife and I are in our 60's and this likely will be the last place we live. I fully expect it to outlast us................at least by a year or two! We'd rather have our money to live on instead of getting it tied up in a house. If we had kids, I'd likely say "GFY, if the house is still standing when we go, then you can worry about it being a mfg home" .

Again, good luck with it all.

Geno