New member with some questions

[nlsnrn]

Hi everybody,

This is my very first post on this forum and everyone on here seems very knowledgeable about mobile home repairs and i figure this would be a great place to start.

My wife and I are currently renting a mobile home from my mother in-law and she also has it for sale. We have thought and discussed about buying the home from her but, realize that there are a few things we would want to do to the house before we committed to this decision.

The changes we want to make i'm not sure if they would be possible with a mobile home and this is were your expertise come in...

Change #1
Increase the size of the Kitchen/Dining room
-Our current kitchen is very small and hard to cook meals in. There is limited cabinet and counter space.

Change #2
Increase the size of our Bedroom/Bathroom
-Our bedroom is a bit small I cannot have a dresser of my own and the one closet we have in our room is too small for my wife's clothes and mine so I am forced to keep my clothes in the spare bedroom closet. We have a bathroom attached to our bedroom that we would like to make larger and we worked out an idea to make both the bedroom, closet, and bathroom larger but don't know if it is possible.

Change #3
Open up the walls to view Living Room from Kitchen
-Our Mobile home has a full basement which is not finished. The stairs to the basement are between the living room and kitchen. In my opinion it makes the home feel smaller and much more of a boxed in layout which I do not like.

These changes wold obviously be major projects and would be done when time and money permits.

IMAG0049.jpg

This is our current dining room. The wall to the left of the dining room is the closet in our bedroom that we would like to make larger. The wall behind the dining table is were our bathroom is. The plan would be to basically remove this wall and the create a new wall in line with the wall on the left and create more of a hall way. By doing this it would give us another 4x7 feet to work with to make the closet, bedroom and bathroom larger.

IMAG0051.jpg

This is the outside facing the kitchen and dining room. The idea here to make the dining room and kitchen larger is to add a wall about 2' (Give or take) to the left of the small window since that is where the kitchen sink is. Add another wall on the right where the house meets the garage and basically make an addition. I'm not sure how far out we would want to make it yet but, that is the general idea.

IMAG0050.jpg

This is the kitchen and the door leads into the basement and the other side is the living room. The idea is to remove the door leading down to the basement and then cut out the wall from halfway up from the floor to the ceiling. So you would still have a ledge around the steps but not a full wall covering the stairs. This would make the basement more inviting since it will be finished.

Any advice or tips would be great and I apologize for a large post but, I want to make sure that everything is clear enough to understand.

Thank You,

Ryan

[Greg]

Ryan, Hi & welcome. For the most part Mobiles are very easy to remodel & change around. One thing that you need to remember with a double wide home, The center (Marriage) wall is always a load bearing wall. The other walls can USUALLY be removed with no problems, This make changing room sizes fairly easy.

Greg

[DCDiva]

Hi Glad you found us! I know this is a mobile home forum and I have remodeled mobile homes. My main experience is remodeling houses,we own many rentals and transform them,but we got all of our experience remodeling our house. If you want to send me photos or a floor plan I can help more, [email protected] --I am in the middle of a 6 bedroom house remodel plus working full time so I do not check this forum daily--but today is a light day for me.
Without more info--this will be just my option(JMO) what I would do:
1) do you have room to add on to the deck?
We took our deck- 20 x 50--added a roof,then as we could afford it we closed it in with walls and windows,add insulation,electric and drywall,took out one window,replaced with single french door. We closed in the bottom of the deck too with walls and windows and finished--we did it all over a years time and added over 1000 sq ft onto our house. The bottom became my office and activity room in my daycare,here is my web site you can see the daycare area www.lockyourhartonkids.com the upstairs of the deck became our family room and master bedroom--our old master bedroom became our master bathroom---the reason we did this we never used the deck,maybe 2-3 x a year--now we use the area everyday, plus we had a deck below this area.
Ok what I would do with your deck--close it in and expand the kitchen--take out the wall of the house but do it correctly,you might have to have a support post in the middle maybe make this a part of an island--the basement is unfinished so moving utilities will be easy. Do you have to have a formal dining room?? or would a great eat in dinning work for your family?
I will show you photos of my kitchen--we did not remove the wall--you can see where the window was due to it being a family room and we wanted to be able to not hear the tv in the living room--LOVE IT--we would like to push out the wall of the family room but not on the to do list right now lol
2) if you get rid of the dinning room by moving it to the new kitchen area--just make the deck bigger.
You can really add room to the bedroom/bath--by replacing the dinning room----and have a large walk in closet! Maybe save money by not changing the bedroom, (is this bath the main bath?) I would make a way into the bath from be bedroom and a pass thur to the walk in closet OR move the bathroom where the dinning room is and the it would be your bedroom/walk in closet /bath
Will add some photos or albums

[DCDiva]

165.jpg

This is some of the things we did to our house,I posted photos of my kitchen with the dinning room area and our family room that use to be a porch,in the albums is the other room that is now the master bedroom,the photos are old we have replaced the tiles with hardwood floors in the kitchen and my son is now 15 and over 6 ft lol
http://pix.kg/p/1951136090103%3A742570277/scl My Kitchen
http://pix.kg/p/5951136090103%3A2075268979/scl Some of the project at my house
http://pix.kg/p/6951136090103%3A748975219/scl master bedroom into a master bath

Not sure how the photos will show up lol but the same photos are in the albums but no new ones,need to download Kodak to my new computer
Melissa DCDiva