Help us buy a home? UPDATE:$2000, Woohoo!!!

[haele]

164. Good luck!

We bought a bank-owned 1971 double wide that had been sitting empty for two years just last year (original owner passed away) that was structurally sound - but the interior was seriously dated and most of the fittings were cracked or messed up because (according to the neighbors) the original owner stopped being able to take care of it around 2002.
It's almost 1500 sq. ft., a 2 bedroom/2 bath "mission" style, open floor plan, with an open hallway that has arched entry and storage shelf area looking into the front room.
We have been in the process of remodeling most of it ourselves; dropped about $25K so far in hardwood flooring, master bathroom repair, plumbing and wiring updates (to bring it up to code), energy-efficient windows, new handicapped accessible porches, and replacing the particle-board sub-floor in the bathrooms and hallway (where the washer had leaked once upon a time). Now, we're at the bits and pieces final stage, the "move the furniture into the middle of the room" and paint or replace molding, replace a section of paneling with drywall, or put in a new door-frame, or something like that.

The subfloor is something you have to watch out for; most double-wide sub-floor is basically 5/8" wood-pulp card-board that starts disintegrating once it gets wet, and it's better to replace the any soft-spots, bathrooms and any other area that can get wet with 5/8" treated plywood.
If you aren't going to be replacing the floor in the bedrooms, the cheapest way to extend the life of your floor is to put a piece of 1/4 sheet metal on the subfloor under the carpet or hardwood where you are going to put your bed or a sofa (or piano, or any other heavy piece of furniture with legs); this will disburse any weight stress and keep your bed or sofa leg from punching a hole through the floor over time. That's also a decent patch for a small soft spot in the floor, but it's better to just replace the soft spot then to patch it.

Another thing we found during the remodel is that it doesn't matter what any paint type says; if you're going to paint over the original interior doors or panels, you need primer first. Painting goes a long way to making the double-wide seem like a house inside, the paneling just becomes a wall texture, and you can make all sorts of interesting textures by rough-sanding the paneling, putting a thin layer of silicon spackle, then priming and painting over that; not a real replacement for putting in drywall, but it'll do in a pinch while you save up the money to get the paneling down, re-insulate, and put up new drywall in a room.

With an older double-wide, you're also probably going to have to replace baseboards, wall moldings, and ceiling moldings.

A good tool investment when you live in a double-wide: A small air compressor, a brad gun, and an air hammer. Your molding and paneling is put up with 1" finishing brads or staples. Your framing studs are typically 2 X 3's, and your sub-floor joists are 2 x 6's.

Do you know you can put a completely tiled handicapped accessible wet-room bathroom in a 6 x 10 master suite bathroom? We did it ourselves, and found a wonderful art-deco sit-down desk-style vanity top in great condition (with the original lobed-leaf shaped mirror) that we converted into the sink vanity.

Anyway, good luck.

Haele