Mobile Home Remodeling: A Helpful Overview From A To Z

There are many reasons why you may be considering a mobile home remodeling project. Maybe you feel that you need to freshen up your home. Perhaps it requires some maintenance. Maybe you bought it for a bargain price, knowing it needs some work. Or maybe you want to increase the value before you sell it.

All of these reasons are worthy of spending some time and money to achieve your goals. In this article, we will try to guide you through the mobile home remodeling process from A-Z. We want to help you form a clearer mental picture of the remodel by providing you with some common areas to improve, maintain or repair as well as the steps you need to take to make sure your remodel goes smoothly.

Areas to remodel in a mobile home

Kitchen

The kitchen is all about practicality meets style. From cabinets to cutlery racks or hangers, to kitchen islands, to appliances. There is a lot going on in the kitchen and you should find a way to not only make it look good but make it an efficient, practical, and organized space. To make the kitchen feel clean you can’t go wrong with lighter colors, such as sky blue, beige, and white.

Because it sees a lot of use the kitchen will need some retouching or repair work once in awhile. These include resurfacing the counter tops and repairing water damage from leaky pipes under the sink.

Living room

You will not only spend a lot of your free time in this area but it’s also likely to be the first impression others get of your home and where you will entertain guests. While your home should be comfortable and represent you, first of all, most of us will choose to make it a bit more neutral and practical.

Making the room as spacious as possible is a good idea. This doesn’t only depend on the actual dimensions of the room and your furniture though. Installing bigger windows, using lighter and colors, and rearranging furniture can go a long way making the room, and home, feel bigger than it is.

Bedroom

The bedroom is the most intimate part of your home. It’s your home within a home if you will. For each family member, it is a highly personal space where you can escape to and literally just be with yourself or your spouse. As such, you should decide what you would like this space to feel like. You can go crazy since this space is just for you!

There are fantastic kids room ideas online. The key here is to ask yourself what you want and look at what others have done. The possibilities are endless. This is a chance for you to express yourself and use your creativity.

Bathroom

A bathroom should regularly be inspected for water damage as well as cracked tiles, leaky pipes or faucets, or electric sockets that have been compromised by moisture. When your electronics start to go haywire, a bathroom is usually one of the first suspects.

It used to be the way that almost all bathrooms were exclusively white, light blue, or other very light colors. However, you can achieve some pretty spectacular effects going with darker blues or greens, adding stone textures to the walls, and going a bit darker. Here’s one mobile home owner’s bathroom makeover, which may serve as inspiration for your next project. Remodeling your master bathroom can make it a cozy place, perfect for drawing a hot bubble bath after a challenging day.

Exterior

With all that focus on the inside of the home, let’s not forget that the outside is important too. Not only is it the first impression others get of your home but if you like to hang out or entertain in the yard it should look good too.

As a mobile home owner, you are most likely not afraid to roll up your sleeves and do some DIY. Remodeling your home’s exterior provides some mouth watering DIY opportunities. You can add skirting, repaint, do a roof over, and or do some landscaping.

Common mobile home remodeling tasks and repairs

Replacing doors or door frames

Mobile home doors are usually cheaply made and it doesn’t take much for them to get damaged and require replacement. Most mobile homes also aren’t built with aesthetics as a priority and the doors can be plain. Mobile homes also expand, contract, and bend over time which increases the door frames chance of getting damaged.

Replacing the door itself is as easy as measuring the frame, buying a door, unscrewing the old, and adding the new. To replace the frame too will take a bit more work but is doable. It’s a good idea to coordinate this task with replacing window frames and repainting.

You can also install tinted windows or window film designed to provide privacy in the home or keep out UV rays and save on cooling costs.

Sprucing up your walls

Walls make up the largest visible surface in your home and have arguably the biggest impact on the look and feel of your home. For example, If your home feels a bit dark a simple repaint can go a long way to make it feel brighter and more open. Let’s look at some other common and affordable ways people spruce up their mobile home walls:

• Texturing: Adding texture can be as simple as buying a textured wallpaper or as involved as walling over with planks or stones. However, we recommend using texturing kits or paints. They come in a multitude of designs (wood, stone, metal, stucco) and aren’t invasive so they are easy to remove. Learn 3 Ways to Texture Mobile Home Walls here.

• Removing wall strips: Wall strips can give a mobile home that “factory-built” feel. Removing them or incorporating them into your wall redo can go a long way making it feel like your home. What Are Mobile Home Wall Strips And How To Remove Them?

• Painting: The cheapest, easiest way to make drastic changes to the interior or exterior of your home. A simple repaint can make a room more fun or serious, light or dark, open or cozy. We have covered the subject in depth and you can read all about it here Can You Paint The Outside of a Mobile Home ? | FAQ and here Painting Mobile Home Walls With Style.

Resurfacing the floors

Resurfacing your mobile home’s floors not only has aesthetic benefits but can help in many practical ways. Because of gravity, everything ends up on the floor eventually and it is one of the surfaces most likely to suffer water damage or bumps and bruises from falling or moving items.  Wooden floors are especially vulnerable if not treated well and maintained.

You can also make significant savings to your monthly heating bill by insulating your floors while you are at it. Just remember to always floor after you paint to save a lot of trouble! Follow the guide Replacing Mobile Home Floors in 7 Easy Steps.

Roof over

The roof is one of your homes first lines of defense against the elements, including the sun’s rays, snow, wind, and rain. Your roof regularly faces one, or all, of these dangers and protects you from them. It is also under strain from your home’s natural expansion, shrinking, and bending.

Pitched roofs are not only in style right now but have many benefits over flat roofs. They have better drainage, are structurally stronger, and require less maintenance. For a more comprehensive solution, you can also completely replace your roof. As a final option, you can coat the roof in a sun-and-water-resistant paint or membrane.

For more ideas on what you can do to remodel your mobile home see our Our Best 2017 Double Wide Remodel Ideas.

How to remodel a home, a step-by-step guide

What you need

No matter how extensive your mobile home remodeling plan is, there are some basic supplies you will need.  Having most of these items handy is a good idea anyway as they can help out with a wide variety of DIY tasks. Of course, your list will change slightly with more or fewer items depending on which areas of your home you would like to improve.

• Ladder: A ladder is a must, whether you are working on the roof, door or window frames, painting or applying wall textures.

• Buckets: Another simple, yet versatile tool. Not only is it useful to store paint, glue, or other liquids but there will inevitably be a lot of scrap or supplies that need to be organized.

• Gloves: To keep your hands clean and protect them from sharp edges. Surgical gloves should be fine if you only plan to paint but you should get protective gloves when working with nails or power tools.

• Scrub brushes: There will be plenty of surfaces to clean and smooth down.

• Tape measures: Almost any kind of remodeling will require some measuring at some point. Whether it’s to buy the right volume of paint or a door with the right dimensions.

• Painters tape/masking tape: Handy for all kinds of situations. Can be used to hold something in place or create work zones.

• Drop cloths or tarps: Remodeling can be a messy business. Using drop cloths or tarps in your work area can save you a lot of clean up time.

• Hammer: The good old hammer isn’t just for banging stuff into walls. It also comes with a nifty plier, and yes it breaks stuff.

• Screwdrivers: Also make handy little crowbars when you’re in a pinch.

• Hole filler: To hide removed nails, screws, or small dents caused by the remodeling.

• Sandpaper: Most tasks will need a surface to be sanded down smoothly at some point.

• Drywall/carpet knives: A decent one can cut through almost anything!

• Level: You don’t want to finish your remodel, take a step back in appreciation and then notice everything is skew. An essential tool.

• Putty or (drywall) caulk: We all make “oopsies” every now and then and you will need this to cover your tracks. Also needed for many tasks.

• Safety goggles: Safety first! Whenever you pull or bang stuff, debris tends to fly around.

• Paint: It is very unlikely that removing or replacing anything in your home will not have to be masked over with some paint.

First things first

Inspect your home

Even if you are purely remodeling your home purely for aesthetic reasons, it’s a great opportunity to do some maintenance as well. You might even uncover some defects you didn’t know were there and that’s why it’s important to have something like drywall caulk, tape, and putty at the ready.

We already mentioned common flaws in the previous section. It’s definitely worth it to have a look at your roof, door, and window frames, check for water damage, peeled paint, cracked walls, etc. It could save you a lot of time and money, fixing the problem later might damage the remodeling you just did.

Research and gather ideas

If you want to spruce up or personalize your home the best way is to see what other people have done. Not only will you get a sense of what’s possible, you might also find some inspiration and pick up some handy tips along the way.

There are many blogs online run by mobile home owners where they showcase what they have done and advise you on a first person basis. Social media like Pinterest is another great place to find ideas and keep them for future use.

Come up with a plan of attack

If you put a lot of effort into the first two steps it will properly prepare you for this one. There are a few very important considerations when you plan your remodel:

• How much time you have
• What you need
• Your budget
• The order in which to do tasks

An obvious way to plan around time constraints is to limit your remodel to a room or section at a time. You don’t want an area to look half done so it is important to break the work into manageable chunks. Properly inspecting your home also decreases the risk of extra, unplanned work.

Come up with a checklist of things you need to make the buying process easy and carefree. Shop around at second-hand stores if you want to save money. Splitting tasks into chunks that can be completed one at a time also allows you to pace your spending. Doing proper measuring beforehand is crucial to not overspend.

To avoid damaging work you have already completed it’s important to figure out an order in which to complete tasks. As a rule of thumb painting should always come last. An example is how you should panel a wall first, before you put in skirtings, and then lastly paint. It might seem obvious then to do your floor last but depending on the type of floor and what you want to do, it’s not always possible.

Zero-In

Dedicate a set amount of time to your project. The amount of time you will take depends on the tasks you want to complete. Remember to factor in adequate drying times for paint, primers, caulk or putty, and roof-over membranes. Painting second coats might even mean you need to give the first coat a day or two of rest. You also don’t want the paint to dry before the job is completed as it might result in seams.

With a project like this, it’s best to zero-in and get it over and done with, even if it takes a significant amount of time. There are a lot of things to keep track of and taking significant breaks only increases your chances of misplacing supplies or losing track of your progress.

So there you have it, from A (areas) to Z (zero-in), you have the information you need for your next mobile home remodeling project. Now it’s time to start! Whatever your goal, taking the time to do it the right way will not only yield superior results but will also be cost effective in the long run. We can’t stress enough how important it is to do research for fresh ideas and inspiration. You don’t want to look back at a wasted opportunity. Also, don’t be afraid to reach out to the community for advice by reading guides, like the ones we provided above, or following other forums. The mobile home community is extremely helpful and forthcoming!