I may hate old mobile homes, but newer manufactured homes have a lot going for them. They’re better made, using better materials. They look better; in fact, many are indistinguishable from site-built homes, and if you remove the wheels and the tongue and bolt them to a foundation, they appreciate in value just like any other house. One of the biggest benefits of manufactured homes is their size; you can go big. In fact, there are triple-wides with 3,400 square foot floor plans — that’s about the size of my current workshop and barn. Of course, you don’t have to go that big.

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Depending on when it was built, when someone says ‘mobile home’, that could mean an actual mobile home or what’s now called a manufactured home, and there are differences. For the sake of simplicity, American mobile homes were made before about 1976, and were not subject to the same regulations as the manufactured homes that came after that. It should be noted, however, that the federal code regulating manufactured home construction has been updated from time to time, and in general, the newer the home, the more strictly its original construction was regulated. A home from 1980 might not have ever been of sufficient quality to pass a new home inspection in 2010. But for the purposes of this entry, that doesn’t matter, because we’re talking about mobile homes — the old, crappy ones. Continue reading →

This series of articles was originally going to be one, single entry, but it got pretty long and as I wrote, I continued to do more research, and it became the sort of piece that I might never finish. I took a break for the election and subsequent bullshit, but now I’m back at it.

This is about portable housing. If you know me, and you don’t, you know that I’ve lived in a lot of different types of homes, most of them very non-traditional. I won’t list them all here, because I feel like I might have already done that elsewhere on this site, but where I have personal experience I’ll try to include some of it. If I was writing about this subject generally, I might have different things to say about each type of home, but I’m writing about them as options for a very specific scenario — moving to a rural property in the tropics, setting up housing quickly and efficiently, and living in it for an underdetermined period of time while I build outbuildings and more permanent human housing. Continue reading →