The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What is the absolute cheapest way to acquire a decent house? Money is tight, but me and the girl are tired of living in an RV, and we're ready to upsize. Land isn't a concern because we have a family property, but it needs to last awhile and it needs to be larger than the 350 sq ft (!) we currently live in. I've been looking at the following options:
Construct an A-Frame house. These seem solid, but the cost is somewhat prohibitive, at somewhere around 25k with me performing a significant amount of the labor. Not a huge fan of the shape either, as it seems to be pretty bad conceptually in the cost-vs-space sense.
Do one of these sort of things: https://www.steelmasterusa.com/quonset-huts/. Cost seems comparable to the A-frame, but for more space and durability
Buy a used mobile home. They can be surprisingly cheap. As low as free, actually. They won't last more than probably a decade, but hey, that's a future problem. Size is disappointing, but not unbearable. I grew up in a mobile home after all.
Any other ideas? Any actual home construction seems to move it into the 200k range, which seems not worth it to me relative to the steel building setup, though I'm open to other opinions.
Define "actual home". Home Depot and Menards offer several small and tiny* kits with sticker prices well under 200 k$.
*The official definition of "tiny house" is "400 ft^2 or smaller". In theory, four people can squeeze into a 600-ft^2 house without much trouble—say, 120 ft^2 for a living room, 80 ft^2 for a dining room, 100 ft^2 for each of two two-person bedrooms, 40 ft^2 for each of two bathrooms, and 120 ft^2 for a kitchen.
More options
Context Copy link
A-frames suck. You don't have to build three walls out of four, but the roof surface is huge, and it gets hot as balls there.
A mobile home should be fine. Is it possible to buy a used double-wide, or are they impossible to take apart?
Why not build a regular home instead of building an A-frame? Something small, like 8m by 6m (500 sq ft), should be pretty buildable alone, you just need some aid to raise the walls after building them and to construct the rafters. If you can afford prefab trusses, you can save yourself a lot of pain.
A frames were moderately popular where I grew up, but that was a state known for cool temperatures and lots of rain. So I would say the heat issue depends on the climate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We talked to the person who placed our house, and apparently he sourced a double wide and single wide from two different locations, moved them, and re-assembled them into a triple wide, which is still inhabitable several decades later, and seems likely to remain so. He said it was fairly difficult to move, and also added a metal roof, which I think is expensive. It is more space than we need, and there are probably 600 sq ft we aren't really using.
Negatives: I don't know if it would work in a wet climate, since it does not have a foundation. It's difficult to sell, since most loan companies will not finance previously moved manufactured homes. Ours is financed, at a slightly higher rate, because the loan holder is a local nonprofit.
I grew up in a mobile home that my dad had expanded over the years into a house that was indistinguishable from a non-mobile home (to the untrained eye, anyway: I'm sure if you're a builder you could probably tell). Started with the mobile home, build extra rooms off the sides as he could afford the material. Eventually re-sided everything and put a new roof on top of the whole shebang. So you can potentially start with a mobile and build out from there.
Caveats: my dad had a good amount of professional construction experience, and the mobile home in question was on the older side, but was in it's original spot. From my understanding, moving a used mobile home to a new location can potentially cause a lot of structural issues.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link