Renos!
Do you enjoy renovating? I love it. My current residence, a mobile home adrift in the central New Jersey development sprawl, is a roughly-60-year old tin box that had been totally renovated just before I bought it in October 2022. But Holy Crowbars did the thing still need a lot of work! Yes, it had just been redone—quite nicely, to be fair—but there were serious deficiencies lurking beneath the fresh drywall and premium flooring.
The most egregious of the problems were not visible: the owner did not bother to upgrade any of the utilities. It still had its original gas forced air furnace, a noisy, inefficient beast that scared the shit out of me the first time it fired up. Then there was the 20-year-old 30-gallon water heater that yielded a 90-second shower at best. Plus there was the visual shock of the breaker box: ten pounds of wires and obsolete crap crammed into a five pound boot. It was almost literally bursting at the seams.
I could go on, but I figure this was enough to give you a good idea of what was awaiting me after I signed the title. My suspicion is the owner was looking to make a quick buck by doing a cosmetic-only flip on a mobile senior citizen that, like me, had some serious health issues.
So why did I buy the thing? Mostly because it was among the last four or five affordable homes I was able to find during the peak of the Covid-fueled real estate madness. This one wound up at the top of my very short list owing to, of all things, the bathroom, specifically the shower. It was the only unit that had a shower, and not a tub. And the shower had real tile. I would otherwise be ripping a bathroom apart to get what this one had right up front.
But while the bathroom was a major positive, without doubt the biggest negative was the kitchen, one of the worst-designed things I'd ever seen. It looked decent in the real estate listing photos; indeed, the aesthetic choices the owner made aligned well with those I'd make. Likely it was finished mere weeks before the unit was listed for sale: the cabinets were manufactured in January 2022, the instructions for the oven were still taped to the rack, and the refrigerator still contained some of the packing material. And it was all going bye-bye.
So, for the benefit of anyone surfing for renovation ideas, or just curious to see what I did to a freshly-renovated mobile home, here are the highlights.
Grab Your Crowbar!
- Rebuilding a Brand New Kitchen
- Finishing An Unfinished Bathroom
- Wow, a Mud Room! But... Why?
- Twenty-first Century Utility Upgrades
- Before and After Gallery
The floorplan above is how it was when I purchased it; below is the "after" version following all of my renovations.
