Mobile Home .
Hello, I’m Crystal Adkins, the creator of Mobile Home Living.
Thanks for stopping by. The story of how I went from food stamps to not rich but not counting pennies for gas anymore is pretty awesome.
Here’s How Mobile Home Living Began
In 2011, my husband Joe and I bought a 1978 single wide mobile home in Oak Hill, West Virginia. It sat on a quarter acre lot on a nice residential street within city limits. I found it through an ad in the weekly trader (like Craigslist but on newsprint).
George Doug was the owner and he wanted $6,000 for the mobile home and $250 month for lot rent. The mobile home was too old to move but too young and in far too good of a condition to tear down. The ad also said the owner would consider a rent-to-own contract with $1,000 down.
I figured it couldn’t hurt to call even if it did seem a little scammy.
Oak Hill was an hour and a half from our hometown, Pineville, WV but only 15 minutes north of Beckley, where my husband worked everyday. I called George Doug’s number and we got to talking and you’d think we had been best friends for years. We hit it off immediately because I was a coal miner’s daughter that had driven Caterpillar 777’s on strip mine reclamations in Welch and he was a retired MSHA inspector. I think he liked that I knew about coal mining and I tend to talk too much (if you haven’t noticed already).
That same evening Joe, Livingston Grace, our 7 year old daughter, and I drove up to meet George Doug and look at the mobile home.
I loved it the second we pulled in and George Doug seemed like family from the get go. My heart just about exploded with joy when I saw that the little elementary school that Livinsgston would be attending was on only one street away. It was everything I would have wished for in a home and then some.
There was just one problem.
We didn’t have the entire $1,000 to put down on the mobile home and to be honest I was a bit suspicious of the whole situation. Things that are too good to be true usually are, you know?
We talked everything out that night and I investigated as best I could over the next couple of days. George Doug had the paperwork drawn up by an attorney and we borrowed a couple hundred dollars from Joe’s family to meet the $1,000 down payment.
Within the week we were moving in because school was going to start in 2 weeks and we wanted Livingston to start her new school on their first day.
We had bought our first home and I was ecstatic! I remember asking Georgeo Doug if it was OK to paint the walls and he said something like, “Well, I reckon you can. It’s your home. Do what you want with it.”
Yeeeesssssss……
After a few months of settling in (aka tax return), I could see the potential in our new mobile home, but I didn’t know where to start.
Naturally, I turned to Google Search and typed 4 little words: mobile home remodeling ideas.
And that one little Google search changed our lives completely!
A few articles, blogs, and dealerships appeared in the search results, but I couldn’t find a single site that catered to mobile or manufactured homeowners.
Eventually, I stumbled upon some statistics stating 18 million people were living in mobile and manufactured homes in America.
Why were there no magazines or websites or TV shows catering to us mobile homeowners if there are over 17 million people living in them?
Popular brands like Better Homes & Gardens and HGTV rarely acknowledge us mobile homeowners but I figured we’d at least have a website that catered specifically to mobile homeowners by 2011.
But, nope, not a single one appeared in my search results.
And so Mobile Home Living began… or the idea of it anyway.
I only had one issue. I didn’t know a single thing about blogging or websites. I didn’t even know what a URL meant or what a domain was. I was a 35(ish) year old woman that only used a computer a few times in trade school and got an Apple desktop for Christmas my senior year of high school. I loved computers though I didn’t know much at all about them.
But I knew how to get online and I knew how to read so that’s what I did.
I read every article I could find about blogging while sorta working two jobs. I handled medical records during the day and stayed with my next door neighbor with dementia at night. Her daughter lived on the other side of us and we became fast friends soon after we moved in. Joe and I put Livingston Grace to bed and I’d walk next door and get my neighbor ready for bed then blog till 2am and sleep a while and then have breakfast ready for everyone in the mornings. After breakfast, I’d walk Liv to school along with our two Boston Terriers. Work with medical records from home 9-5 and spend the evening with my family. It was good times, no, no, it was great times.
I think it’s funny how things just sorta work out sometimes.
I eventually managed to buy the domain mobilehomeliving.org from GoDaddy and learned how to point it to the blog I created on Google’s free blog platform called Blogger.
My cousin’s wife let me feature their gorgeous double wide remodel shortly after I started the blog. That was the first of dozens of beautiful mobile homes we’ve featured here.
Featuring mobile homes will always be my favorite part of Mobile Home Living®.
I think it’s a great way to show the world just how wonderful affordable living can be and I’m seeing a shift in society.
People are tired.
Tired of working 80 hours a week to pay for a fancy home they can’t even enjoy properly. Tired of car payments and insurance company BS. People are mostly just tired of the Joneses.
Looking back, I honestly have no idea how Mobile Home Living became America’s most popular resource for mobile homeowners.
There was obviously a void that needed to be filled and I did my best to fill it and something worked.
Mobile Home Living has been mentioned by some pretty big websites.
Today, Mobile Home Living is the most popular resource in America for mobile and manufactured homeowners. A couple years ago Google said we’d had over 58 million pageviews total. At one time, we were getting over 250,000 visitors and over half a million pageviews every month. Not so much these days but our foundation is 12 years strong with an unbought following of 100K followers in our Facebook Group, 25K on our Facebook Page, and over 150K on Pinterest. I didn’t pay a single penny for any of them.
Curbed did a great article about mobile homes in America and quoted me quite a bit. You can read it here.
I was asked to be the manufactured housing expert for the Spruce, one of the biggest lifestyle websites on earth. You can read my bio here.
We’ve also been mentioned by Foremost Insurance, State Farm, BHG, MSN, US Today, SFGate, Hunker, and several other well-known brands.
Ironically, a few years after buying the domain from them I was asked to write an article for GoDaddy’s blog. I was putting together a website for Joe at that time because he was about to start his own plumbing company, so I wrote about plumbers needing a website.
Oh, and Bob Vila has mentioned us. Bob Vila, Y’all! I grew up watching him.
I’ve never accepted a dime from any builders or dealers for articles, links, or ads. The display ads are through an ad service (Adsense and/or Ezoic) so I don’t handle anything on it.
We are a respected resource that takes the advocacy of mobile homes and the people living in them seriously.
I’m proud of this blog and I’m super excited about Mobile Home Living’s future. I’m proud of the good it’s helped do but we have a lot more work ahead of us. If you can help us or if we can help you please contact me using the contact page.
Thank you!
Crystal G. Adkins
