"Choose your love, love your choice." - Thomas S. Monson

(continued from previous post)

Josh said he wondered about the wisdom of spending the money building a new tiny house given our advancing years, the relatively short time we'd live in it, and potential resale problems. My initial thoughts:

• Tiny houses are cheaper to build because of their diminutive size, but we're still talking something in the $80k range to get the quality we'd want to put into it.
• Only God knows how long we'd live in it, but people said the same thing about our move up here to start over from scratch, and we agree it's been a wonderful adventure. We thoroughly enjoy Baker Rd., chickens, goats, a veggie garden, and all that goes with it. If it all ended tomorrow we'd be happy with our decision to move.
• I can't predict the future but I sure talk to a lot of people who think the tiny house movement is here to stay. Just yesterday.... So I wonder if resale would be a problem.

All of that aside, Josh's suggestion that we fix up MoHo instead of building got my head working. I could do almost all the work myself, spend probably about 1/3 the money of new construction, and have money left over for things we now consider luxuries, like going to a restaurant with hold-in-your-hand menus, or the nice toilet paper.

[A more serious consideration is funding long term assisted living insurance.]

Could MoHo be turned into a nice place?? Josh's comments got me thinking.

Here's what I've learned so far:

• In a departure from what's almost universally true of these things from that era, MoHo has 2x4, 16" on center framing, just like a real house. Most old mobile homes have 2x3, or even 2x2, and often 24" on center. 
• I've discovered a way to put a metal roof over the top of the standard slightly arced metal roof we now have, a roof that has already been patched extensively and has outlived all expectations. This metal roof would have a legit pitch and eaves, something missing from MoHo and a big part of what makes it look like a white trash mobile home. Have you ever noticed that mobile homes don't have eaves? They don't want to use up width, limited for highway transport, on eaves when it can better be used for living space. 
• I can take off the vertical metal siding and easily replace it with horizontal vinyl siding thanks to the standard framing. And for skirting...they make a faux stone vinyl panel that from 6' looks as real as rock. So we'd have a "stone" foundation and "wood" vinyl siding. It'll look like a real house! (just long and skinny, like me)
• Replacement double pane windows are a piece of cake, again thanks to the 2x4 @ 16" framing. 
• The shorter replacement doors for mobile homes aren't cheap, but are available. With a little work I can expand the width and put in 36" wide doors, the standard for normal exterior doors.
• We can move walls! No interior walls in a mobile home are load bearing, which means I can make our bedroom smaller (we don't need all the space because I built the storage bed and so we don't have a dresser taking up floor space). That 24" can go to enlarge the tiny the bathroom so we can replace the incredibly small tub/shower with a legit tiled walk-in shower and have a larger vanity.
• The second bedroom can become a laundry room so Pam doesn't have to drive into town to do that chore. And we'll still have room for a sewing desk, craft table.....maybe even a murphy bed.
• Out in the living room: tile flooring and real drywall. A modern wood stove will take up half the room of what we've got at double the efficiency. That alone will make the room "bigger." 
• The kitchen...down to the studs. Fix the floor and put in nice cabinets, a real fridge instead of the apartment size unit we have now, a nice range, and whatever sink/faucet unit Pam wants. 

All of this is stuff I've done before. Hard work, but so what? And notice how much of it would be done in a tiny house anyway. But in this case there's no site prep, no utility hookup, AND we can do it a piece at a time as the budget allows. First, the roof. I'm putting together a materials list and dollar figures now. It will still probably have to wait until next summer, but just that change will make MoHo look much better and stave off what's destined to be a disaster when the current roof finally gives up the ghost. 

Sometimes even your kids come up with a good idea! 

Standard numbers are $10k for a kitchen remodel and $5k for a bathroom, but that includes labor and I can do 90% of it myself, so those numbers can be cut by about 50%. I'd probably hire tile guys, and an electrician for the laundry wiring, but the rest....

Do you remember the parable about the fool who set about to build a tower but didn't carefully calculate the cost? He got halfway through, ran out of money, and became the laughing stock of the community for his unfinished eyesore. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to put the $1200 into a new roof only to find out some barrier exists to the rest of the plan and I'm stuck with a well protected white elephant. So I'm doing lots of research, talking to guys in the trades, building lists of what things should be done in what order, and finding out what options exist for things like siding. 

I'm pretty thorough when it comes to research on a project. 

But so far everything looks very doable. We could be perfectly happy living out our days in MoHo as we envision it. And go to Shari's Restaurant for dinner on Tuesday night.