Affordable Manufactured Home Living Room Makeover

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I’ve been a bit hesitant to share my own affordable living room makeover because it can’t compare to all the beautiful homes that are usually featured here on Mobile Home Living. However, I think the world needs more manufactured home makeover inspiration so that trumps my hesitation.

Sharing our home remodels and room makeovers, regardless of price or scale, can help other homeowners realize the potential in their older mobile homes.

Related: Making The Most Of An Open Floor Plan In A Single Wide Remodel

Our Little Home

We bought this 1978 Homette single wide 4 years ago as our first big step toward becoming debt-free. We have plans to completely gut it and build onto it without incurring any debt in the process.

Small updates and room makeovers have helped us create a comfortable and functional space while we’re saving up for the remodel. I just know it’s gonna take forever!

This entire living room makeover cost around $750 and that includes most of the furniture and accessories. We already had the TV, personal photos, accessories, and books.

Here’s what it looked like the first time we viewed the home. We bought it a week after this image was taken:

Here’s the room after the makeover:

Inspiration and Mood Boards

The experts say that planning is the most important aspect of a makeover or remodel and I took their advice. I didn’t have much to work with so I figured I’d try to get as much as I could out of it.

Creating an inspiration board, or mood board can help a lot when planning a room makeover. Collecting pins of your favorite rooms on Pinterest can help you decide what colors and styles appeal to you. Here’s the room that inspired my living room makeover:

Here are a few websites that let you create free mood boards:

• Olioboard
• Realtime Board
• Evernote
• Pic Monkey
• Polyvore
• Sample Board (Free 14 day trial) 

Our $750 Living Room Makeover

The first thing we did was paint the walls with the color Vintage Teal from Valspar.  It was a close pick between the 3 colors below but the Vintage Teal won out with a tie-breaking vote from my daughter.

The darkest teal seemed to make the lines in the faux wood paneling disappear better than the other colors.

Zig-Zag Hallway

The hallway zig-zags were super easy to do! I painted the walls a light ivory then taped off the zig-zags with high-quality painters tape. I found that the green tape with a frog on it works well and gives you a nice sharp line.

Flooring 

Next, we ripped up the old carpet and installed laminate or floating floors. We chose floating floor because the living room’s sub-flooring had been replaced but wasn’t completely level with the hallway. The floating floor is very forgiving and allowed us enough leeway to cover up the issue and transition into the hallway perfectly. Floating floor is ideal for mobile homes with slight floor level issues.

The flooring we used was Project Source from Lowe’s and cost around .79 cents per square foot.

The flooring has stood up against 2 dogs, a cat, and 3 people for close to 3 years remarkably well. It doesn’t scratch as easily as I thought it would and for the price of about $120 we were able to completely cover the entire living room and most of the hallway.

Be sure to buy extra if you do use this particular brand. Damage along the edges and around the corners accounted for about 10-15% of each box. I’ve been told more than one that it happens a lot with the cheaper laminate.

Furniture

The furniture we purchased was affordable to a fault. This sofa and chair set came from Walmart and cost $300. IIt has no cushioning – you can feel the frame when you’re sitting on it!

Joe hates it!

Lesson learned. 

Interior Designer Trick: The Rule of Thirds

A large reason I chose this sofa and chair set was that it had a low height. Lower furniture heights are perfect for a small room with 7-foot ceilings. Interior designers live by the rule of thirds, meaning that your furniture, chair rails, and tables should only be as high as 1/3 of your total room height.

Learn more interior design tricks for manufactured homes here. 

Next time, I’ll go with a better quality sofa. Heck, I may even spend $500.

Coffee Table

The coffee table is another Walmart find and cost $105. You can buy it here.

I love the industrial style of the table and the size was perfect for our low profile sofa and chair.

There are two things we dislike about this table: the wheels do not move so you will stub your toes and the wood is cheap. Actually, it’s not real wood at all, just a particle board with a photo of wood overlaying it. Unfortunately, Scotch tape will destroy it. I was wrapping a gift one day and cut 3 pieces of tape and placed them on the edge of the table until I needed them – all 3 pieces removed the paper from the table. I was able to use a light brown watercolor pencil to repair it fairly well.

Another lesson learned!

Misc. Accessories

Shelves and Fireplace 

The two shelves were purchased at Big Lots but you can buy them at Walmart for $44 here.

I painted the back in a lighter teal with acrylic craft paint. We bought the fireplace second hand from a friend for $75 and painted it white. It has a little heater with fake fire and is cozy on a cold winter evening.

Cloth Foot Rest – Poof

 

This bright yellow cube poof/footrest/chair/table/cat bed/pillow is the most useful thing in our whole house! When I bought it the price was $29 on Amazon but it’s now showing as $59. You can buy it here (though I’m sure you can find one a lot cheaper somewhere).

Curtains

The curtains were another Walmart find. They are light teal shears and cost $15 per pair for a total of $45. I had a light brown Moroccan style curtain that I placed between the teal on the double window.

Pillows

Pillows can really brighten up a room. These pillows were $10 and $11 each at Amazon.

Rugs

The rocket rug was a great find at a local consignment store. It was $10!

I also bought an indoor/outdoor rug from Overstock.com for $20 to place at the front door but it’s redder than orange, the color shown in the photo is not accurate at all.

You can check out my Mobile Home Kitchen Update here!

For approximately $750 I was able to give our living room a complete makeover. It’s a more modern and stylish space and I’m very happy with the way it turned out:

You should share your makeovers and updates too!  As always, thank you for reading Mobile and Manufactured Home Living!