The Diva Farmer’s mobile home makeover is amazing!

Whether it’s a yard sale find or a complete mobile home, Tina Nichols creates pretty things. Her mobile home makeover is a great example of the potential that older mobile and manufactured homes have when a talented owner gets ahold of it.

Get ready for an amazing mobile home makeover!

Mobile Home Makeover – Finding a Diamond in the Rough

After a 6 year career in the military, Tina was ready to own a home. She wanted her new home to have three things: be a smaller cottage-style home with a fireplace, large kitchen, and outdoor space large enough for a garden and some fruit trees. Unfortunately, in today’s real estate market ‘reasonably priced’ means one of two things: rundown and needing major renovations or a compact cookie cutter town house. Neither appealed to Tina.

Tina had just about given up on her search for a home when she finally stumbled upon a gated mobile home community with a 1979 Fleetwood double wide that had everything on her short list and then some.

The home still had the late seventies paneling, an era known for autumn colors: groovy greens, burnt umbers, and basic browns. Darker muted colors in flowering patterns are reminiscent of the seventies as you can see:

Mobile Home Makeover: Transitioning into the 21st Century

Tina managed a mobile home makeover that transitioned the late seventies model mobile home into a modern cottage masterpiece.

The end result is gorgeous:

Mobile Home Makeover 101 – Demo Day

Remodeling her own home was a labor of love!

Tina managed the entire mobile home makeover by herself, only using a contractor to help demo and hang the cabinets.

Demolition day is usually the most physically intensive part of a mobile home makeover. It’s always smart to have extra man-power.

Mobile home kitchen remodels can pose a few complications. Water lines, gas or propane lines, and heavy cabinetry are all issues that owners have to deal with during demolition. In this case, Tina had to remove the entire ceiling in addition to the cabinetry, flooring, and paneling.

Mobile Home Makeover 102: Rebuilding

After the demolition was finished the rebuilding began. Tina installed sheet rock over the ceiling and walls to give the kitchen a clean canvas to build upon. The floor was also prepared for new covering.

Cannister lights were strategically placed to provide good task lighting for Tina’s favorite hobbies: baking and cooking.
The sheet rock was finished too.

The ceiling was painted a bright white to allow light to bounce around. The walls were painted a light blue and the flooring was laid.

Once the paint was dry the new cabinets and lighting was hung.

Tina extended the cabinetry into the dining area.

Finally, the cabinetry was painted, the countertop was installed, and tile back splash was started. This is a gorgeous mobile home makeover! See more about Tina’s great mobile home makeover here. 

A great baking center:

Laundry Room Makeover

Before Laundry Room Mobile Home Makeover

In addition to the kitchen, Tina updated her laundry room, too.

Here’s the original room:

After Laundry Room Mobile Home Makeover

The end result of Tina’s laundry room is awesome!

The white surfaces in the laundry room creates a great cottage feel. See more of Tina’s laundry room makeover here. 

Yard Sale Find: Updating a Kitchen Island

Tina added a contrasting color into the kitchen by placing a red butcher block island in the middle of the kitchen. It was a yard sale find! You can see all the steps of Tina’s yard sale find the update here. 

After update:

Tips for Your Own Mobile Home Makeover

I asked Tina to share some of her best tips and advice for mobile home makeovers.  She was quick to say that homeowners should not push themselves with an unreasonable time-frame. Mobile home makeovers take time!

Tina had been living in her kitchen remodeling chaos for one year. That in itself is mentally draining, but pushing herself physically day after day to work on the remodel left her exhausted. She has since learned to pick one small area, focus on that till it is done, and then move on.

Mobile home remodeling is not a race!

Homeowner Q and A

Give Me Something to Believe In….

It’s tough to explain to some people that you are going to buy an 30 year old mobile home and remodel it into a beautiful home. Some people simply doesn’t have the creativity to envision such a thing and Tina dealt with that.

Tina admits that her biggest challenge during the projects was getting people to believe in her vision, “I think everyone thought I was nuts to buy this place, but now they are amazed at the rooms I’ve completed.”

Tina went on to answer a few more questions: 

Why did you chose to live in a mobile or manufactured home?

I grew up in one and have always had a soft spot for them. I cannot see spending the money on a site built house when I can turn a $24K home into my dream home and then be debt free.

Any advice you would give someone thinking about buying a mobile home?

Get past the outdated ugly; it can all be modernized. You want to focus on the layout, the flow from room to room and see if your dream house is hiding somewhere in that layout.

Next, make sure it is structurally sound and has minimal damage. Ugly can be fixed but real damage indicates you may have a major headache on your hands.

Have you been stereotyped or dealt with misinformation about your home? How did you deal with it?

I live in an area of the country where ‘trailers’ are for the poor. Co-workers were stunned that I bought a “trailer”, they still joke about it. True, there are a lot of trailer parks around here that are dumps, but I happen to live in a lovely gated community and I simply reply to the rude comments by asking them if they are debt free; because I am.

I then invite them over and watch their jaws drop when they see the transformed rooms!

Any other remarks, advice, information, tips you’d like to share?

My son always said I could turn the ugliest house into the most beautiful place to live and that is what I’m doing with The Cottage. You can live in luxury and still have money in the bank and be debt free; just follow your own path.

Thank you so much for sharing your gorgeous home with us, Tina! I cannot wait to see what you do with the rest of it!

And thank you so much for reading Mobile and Manufactured Home Living!