In my previous
article, “You Can
Afford Your Homestead Dream,” I described how to find, analyze, do
your due diligence, negotiate and buy your homestead by focusing on
mobile homes with land. The first question you might have after
purchasing such a property is, “What the heck do I do with it now?”
Good question.
First thing you don’t do is invite your friends and family over to see
your new place, that is, unless you have a great deal of emotional
resilience. Let’s face it, if you bought a place like I suggested,
chances are you won’t be impressing anyone with it for some time.
It is a good idea
to pick your battles one at a time if you intend to win the war of
creating your homestead. You might have to begin, simply enough, by
hacking your way through high weeds just to get to the front door.
The immediate gratification you receive from cleaning up the front
yard and cutting the grass and weeds can be a huge boost to your
morale. Neighbors will, no doubt, be impressed, not to mention
thankful.
Once you have a
path to the home you might continue to attack the remainder of the
yard surrounding the mobile home. This not only makes working in and
around the home easier, it also gives you an open field of fire to
help deter the usual varmints that have become accustomed to living in
and under your home. In my area this means field mice, snakes, feral
cats, possums, raccoons, black widow spiders, and the occasional
homeless person, just to mention just a few.
Securing and
Prepping the Home
Securing the home
itself is our next focus. On the first day, this may mean nothing
more than putting up oriented-strand board (OSB) over broken windows,
replacing deadbolt locks or securing exterior doors with whatever is
laying around. Holes in the floor need to be covered temporarily so
as to keep others out and us in. I prefer OSB for these temporary
fixes due to the fact that plywood costs considerably more.
Purchase a box of
the 3 mil “contractor garbage bags” and consider renting a dumpster,
if necessary, to remove all the old debris, junk, broken furniture,
dead appliances, old-pet-urine-laden carpet and whatever else you have
inherited with this property. I don’t recommend trying to save any
carpet or padding. I typically tear all the floor coverings out,
right down to the sub-floor.
Once the home is
emptied out, I open up all cabinet doors and begin my assault on the
creepy crawlies that have taken up residence. I find that whatever
approach you take must be repeated several times in order to kill the
adult bugs and again later to kill the new batches that always seem to
hatch when you think you have things under control. For what its
worth, the best products I have found contain fipronil as the active
ingredient. While I do try and be as gentle as I can on our
environment, I have finally conceded to this approach.
My next step is
to paint the ceiling, walls and sub-floor using “Kilz” primer. This
white paint/primer covers stains and paint quite well but more
importantly it can seal in odors that may have soaked into the
sub-floor. In worst-case scenarios, I will use the oil-based “Kilz”
primer, but be sure to have plenty of ventilation because this stuff
gives off extremely strong fumes. The smell will go away when dry but
it can be rough on the painter when wet.
By painting the
ceilings, walls and sub-floor the same color you don’t have to spend
as much time worrying about trimming-out or getting different colors
on other surfaces. If you later wish to paint the walls a different
color, you will have a great primer in place and it should only take
one coat of your new paint to cover.
Replacing
mobile-home doors and windows is similar to watching the pit crews
change tires at a NASCAR race. The doors and windows are installed
with dozens of ¼ inch drive sheet metal screws. I replace mobile home
windows with mobile home windows but I prefer to replace the doors
with solid, six panel metal doors designed for stick-built houses. I
buy these at surplus stores. I do have to retrofit these doors into
the house, which can take several hours, and a bit of carpentry work.
If you don’t feel comfortable with doing this then feel free to take
the much faster route of just swapping the old mobile home door with a
new one.
