Two Gorgeous Canadian Mobile Homes

They are lovely.
However, the position of the faucet on that soaking tub? Weird, and in the way.
Definitely a danger to getting in and out.
Also, in the first home, that little island looks really close to the stove, with just
enough room to open the oven door while standing to the side. Not a great idea,
IMO. But again, they are very nice.

I live in a mobile home in Canada 🙂
We found a great deal on a 2011 16×76 SRI through our local classifieds. I can’t comment on ease of financing because we paid with cash from the sale of our stick built home (mortgage free!!). Insurance was super easy to get, just one stipulation was to have tie downs underneath the home.
You would think that because we get such cold winters here it would feel cold inside but it’s well insulated and our heating bills last winter were compatible to our previous house (taking square footage into account). We did spray in insulating on our skirting so the floor stayed warm as well.
Because we moved it onto a farm we don’t have to deal with the stereotype that those who live in mobile home communities may be faced with. There’s lots of farms in our province that have mobile homes on them as secondary dwellings (like our farm). Living in a mobile home was something that I had to get over though since having our super cute house in town. I used to be nervous having someone over for the first time but I think how we have it decorated makes it not feel like a mobile home inside. It’s nice to get comments on how much people like it. After living in it for a year now though I am happy we sold our house in town and bought the mobile home. Although we’re still trying to purge our stuff that we don’t have room for (and probably don’t need anyways) It’s cozy and it’s home.

Canadian girl here 🙂
With an average “traditional home” averaging $400,000 in the city I live in (and I am not in the most expensive city in the country) mobile home living is, by far, a much more affordable option. I moved into one in 2014. I paid $102,00. The layout is much like the single wide shown above. (very open concept with bedrooms on either end) It needed some work. (It had good bones and was structurally sound, it just needed some life put back into it.) I , by myself, have spent the last two years tearing it apart room by room, right down to the studs and rebuilding it. I have replaced my exterior doors, moved walls, replaced walls, dry-walled, taped, mudded, replaced all of the interior doors and closet doors, scraped off all of the popcorn ceiling, painted, have replaced two bathrooms from the ground up (tub, vanity, sinks, lights, tile, toilets…you name it and may I add, all from Lowes and/or Home Depot…no specialty stores needed.), replaced windows, replaced my kitchen (IKEA cupboards, island, sink, quartz counter-tops…coming in a couple of weeks). I am in the process of just finishing up plywood plank flooring throughout before finishing it all off with new baseboards and casing. It has been a labor of love, sweat and tears. I am a single female with no budget to have a contractor come in and do the work. My bathroom alone would have been in the neighborhood of 12K-15K had I gone that route. In doing the work myself and shopping smart I came in between $1800-$2000 for each. Do people think I’m crazy?? I think after the shock wears off when I tell them I do ALL of the work myself, they do think I have a screw loose. Lol.
I got lucky in that I owned a traditional home prior and when I sold, had enough equity that I did not require a mortgage/loan. I do know that we have a couple of big banks that do finance and I know that most of the people in my community are financed. Insurance is not an issue. My home was manufactured in 1989, and has 2×6 walls. It sits on piles (no permanent foundation). Yes, I’ve researched and I’ve read all about the risks regarding drywall. It was a risk I was willing to take. Most of the drywall has been up for 2 years and I have yet to have a single moment of regret in making my home exactly what I envisioned it to be.
I think that there will always be a stigma attached to mobile homes but here, I think it has more to do with the park community that you live in verses the fact that it’s a mobile home. I believe we have 6 or 7 Park communities in my city and out of those I would only consider living in 2 of them. Out of the remaining, 2 are pretty old parks with much older mobile homes on them (1960’s & 1970’s), one was on city property and is being shut down due to poor infrastructure and the other 2, I would rather live in a box under a bridge before living in them. They represent every stereotypical remark ever associated with mobile homes. I chose the one I chose based on the distance I was to work and that the majority of homes were manufactured in the mid 80’s through to 2012’s . It’s well maintained, quiet, clean and most of the people put a lot of “pride in ownership” into their places. For those who do look down their noses at me…have at it. My place is beautiful, uniquely me and I never get tired of them dropping their jaws when they see what “I” have done.
PS…The only housing shortage we have here is affordable housing.

Canadian mobile homes are very nice and they have a pretty high build quality. They’re also more expensive. Normally the further north it’s built, the better it is (cheap trailers won’t endure bad weather), except the ones built for the super expensive part of California, they’re amazing and worth checking out.

Their beautiful homes. The one I’m buying is a single wide and it needs repairs. I am purchasing it for only $1000 dollars , it was built in the 1950’s. I just found out the landlord is waiting for me to pay it off so he doesn’t have to finish fixing the repairs. I liked living in this trailer park, but it’s gone down hill since we got new owners. I want to move just not sure what into now. Or what to do about this trailer mess. I’m going to be stuck with alot of repairs that are expensive and I don’t have those kind of funds being on Disability.

Financing: this was a bear for us. We bought a 1974 Olympic Single Wide (14 feet x 68 feet plus an addition). It was complicated by the fact that it wasn’t on a lot we rented from a trailer park: it was on its own city lot. You can get a chattel mortgage on mobile homes in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada if they are less than ten years old (and presumably on a rented lot). But this was 40 years old, on its own dirt. Servus Credit Union is apparentn. ly the only outfit that handles this sort of thing, so they gave us a “raw land loan”: basically, trailer is worth zilch, and we are just buying the city lot. Unfortunately this meant we had to cough up 25% of the purchase price up front. Yikes. Thank you, bank of Mom…
Insurance was a bastard, too. We only found one outfit that covers trailers. Insurance is about 660 bucks a year, and they required photos of the roof before they would insure us.
Oh, well. I’m glad we own the lot (this is a very rare thing, to have a trailer on a city lot.) It means when the expensive houses get built around the trailer park and the trailer park owners start getting itchy fingers to maximize their investment by selling out to the developers, we don’t get that bad news announcement: ” you have 3 months notice to move your mobile home to another trailer park”. That happened to a friend of mine. The further away I am from a trailer park, the happier I am.
And yeah, there’s doubtless a stigma to being a trailer-liver. I’m sure it would really, really hurt if I didn’t regularly remember the mortgage/city taxes difference once a month when I do my bills. My taxes are a FRACTION of yours, stick-built owner. And you don’t even want to compare my monthly loan payment. It’s less than apartment rent. If I wasn’t paying taxes and all the bills, I’d actually be saving money on the single bedroom apartment we lived in for years!

Great post! Thanks for sharing!