How many of you live in a mobile home, manufactured home, or trailer?
Most of them are pretty much set up the same, unless you get a custom set-up. Ours is 30 some odd years old. And it has a time keeping itself warm. Every year I tell Husband that this is the last year I will suffer a winter in this thing. However things creep up, and we have to put off building something new. Our biggest obstacle is that we live in one of the few counties that actually have building codes other than, if I push on it and it doesn't fall, it's all good. (that and money of course, but that goes with the building code problem)
So what we are doing in the interim is "customizing" the home. Things like putting in a real floor is quite normal for a trailer house, especially when one falls through it. I've done that, what. . . twice now? But the biggest problem is pipes freezing.
I have something that I think was once suppose to be a dinning room. Or at least a space to but a desk size table into for people to eat on with a cheap lamp type chandelier hanging above it. A silly little table isn't big enough for the 5 of us, we have tried. And it has the washer and dryer in a closet type thing in the same area. We have taken the fridge out of it's cubby hole and put it in the dinning area, along with the 2 upright freezers. But the washer is on the north side of the house. Bad Bad Bad. The lines to it freeze every year.
We moved the laundry area to the master bath. Our master bath has been all kinds of things over the years, ever since we removed the brittle plastic garden tub because of a leak and mold. I think creating a laundry room will be the last step. It is 12F now, and the lines didn't freeze! With as much laundry as I have to do between the 5 of us and our various chores resulting in much dirt, dust and oil, this is great! Plus the first time in 10 years that I could do laundry on such a cold day.
But now we have an empty hole in this dinning area. Husband will be putting in a new pantry in it. This helps out greatly, and I will have a place to put all those canning jars!
We have several winter projects we are working on. Maybe with the customization of our own trailer will help give some of you, that are tired too of living in one of these things, a few ideas of your own.
And I would love to hear about your own tailored trailer.
6 comments:
I also live in a trailer. We have installed sub flooring ,and laminate flooring,it's pretty, but hard to keep clean! Ours is pretty well insulated,at least for the area where we live. We have also re-paneled the walls,did away with some of the windows...there were too many! but still I would rather have a house,maybe someday! Blessings Jane
We have been narrowing some of our north side windows, and that has helped. We need to do something about the closets on the north side, they seem to always be freezing in the winter.
We re-sided a double wide we lived in years ago. Under the siding we installed celotex. It improved the livability immensely. We also replace windows with double panes and sheet-rocked a couple of rooms while moving some walls around to make better use of space. We replaced sub-floor in a couple of places because of leaky doors or windows.
The one repair we made we still laugh about was up-grading the hot water tank when it died. Hubby said a 52 gallon hot water tank would fit in the hole. We had to strip the paneling off the opening. Then Hubby picked the tank up and bowed the studs out as he pressed the tank in the opening.
Our mobile home is about fifteen years old now. The only thing we've done to make it custom is that when we bought it 3 1/2 years ago we added a room in back. We don't have any problem staying warm, thank the good Lord. It could use some interior work, but there's nothing so far we can't live with. We're hoping it lasts as long as we need it, since we're both past 65 years old.
We put a new roof line on, insulation, siding and block below. It stays pretty warm. Our garden tub is still in and I use it to start seeds. I'd like to rip it out and the wall behind it to create a laundry room and bathroom with an outside door access. We once thought we'd build too, but that seems to be far far away now.
We have a crappy doublewide. It needs lots of repairs especially the roof in the bathroom. Phil has worked as a roofer but he can't figure out with all he has done to it, why the vent over the bathroom still leaks. We'll be putting in some new floor under the frig. (hopefully before the frig falls through the floor!). It is an on-going struggle to live here.
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