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Thread ID: 101526	2009-07-18 00:20:00	Hemet	tut (12033)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
792678	2009-07-18 17:51:00	Sounds like a great home Joe. I like the earthquake-resistant features. Being in earthquake-prone Napier we tend to get quite a few. Just after I moved here last year I was greeted with a 5.9 magnitude one. It was quite a shakeup I can tell you! (pun intended). You may have read that NZ's South Island had a 7.8 the other day, with a series of aftershocks over 5. They even had a smallish tsunami, with ripples seen in Australia.	Greg (193)
792679	2009-07-18 18:00:00	So what's a mobile home like that worth Joe? Compared to a, um, non-mobile home? If we compare square-footage to the same variable in a "stick" house, or one that is built from nails and wood on the ground, then a mobile home can typically be about 1/3rd the cost. One thing I like about the mobile home is that it has a lot better quality control as it is manufactured in a factory setting under the eyes of management and safety engineers - unlike a stick-house that is built in the field (we can call that a "tract of land" for understanding), and with various trades doing their thing and many times not driving enough nails or installing all the insulation and taking cheap shortcuts in the general construction. Our roofing material (10-year rated asphaltic shingles) are very poor quality and I have bought a few (30) 120-lb packs of 30-year types to replace them all when I feel like it - some day. I should do it soon though as they are getting rather weather worn by now. We've been in this house since Aug, 1999 when it was new. It's a quality-control thing making for the better insulation and airtight construction that makes MHs so efficient nowadays. Unfortunately - and there's always an "unfortunately" - the mobile home loses value like a car when it goes off the showroom floor. It drops in value immediately, yet they get the same financing as a permanent home on a foundation, so who knows the reason for that. I doubt with the current down-turn in housing values, that I could get $20,000 for it now. There have been some rising real estate bubbles, but they are in multi-family units (condos) as this single-home market is still in the toilet here in SoCal. Things will change or not - I do not care. Life- and useful-life expectancies for a mobile home is/are slightly less than a conventionally-built home though. Since my floor is not a cement slab, there is some flex in things during an earthquake - but I see that as a big plus. Rigid foundations crack - mine just rolls with it all. In the olden days, mobiles were rather sloppy and poorly built with aluminum siding, aluminum wiring, little or no- insulation and 2-inch thick external walls, poor frames and pressed-photo-patterned wood wallboard that looked like the inside of a coffin and was twice as dark and dungeon-y. Ceilings were barely 6½ feet and you could not hang a ceiling fan without the expected promise of a haircut if you stood up under it. Bright - seriously pristine drywall/wallboard treatments and coverings are all the rage and the walls in my place rival those of custom-built stick homes right now. There are no tacked-on seam strips to cover where the wall and ceiling panels meet each other and the walls are a smooth, contiguous surface. My place listed at $60,000USD - but that's not typical since the park here was trying to revive a dying MHP and get some new blood into the place and fill the vacancies from the days of yore when the park was new. It (the MHP) was built about 1959 or so, and had gone through a massive deterioration trend for a long while when new management took over, tore out the old single-wide mobiles and razed the semi-foundations, allowing and even buying new homes to install on the park's "spec" - to get new customers and residents into the place. This took place at the cusp of the current down-trend of housing in SoCal, and we got in on the very beginning of the situation. Although it is NOT the best to usually be on the leading edge of a trend, this has worked out pretty well. Here's my take on the situation: I had to live somewhere and as such was either to be committed to paying dumb and no tax-creditable/refundable rent, house payments or pull a trailer to an RV park and "go camping" for a smallish fee plus gasoline to get there. I have very little invested in the home, the land is rented to me for a monthly fee and I am not out-of-pocket a lot of money should things really go South and the economy take a very steep nosedive. The house owes me nothing. I will have lost very little as I consider the payments are a lot lower than what I would pay for renting an apartment with little privacy area or allowances for expression of my own tastes and stylization in color, lawn, garden and/or fencing. I have no neighbors over my head or under my feet as an apartment or condominium would afford to me and although my lot size may be limited, it is sufficient and all I want to take care of as I age. I have a work shed with my arc welders, 10 horsepower air compressor and most of my past 47+ years worth of mechani-days tools left plus new saws and woodworking stuff that I have recently acquired. I even have a small lawn to mow and edge and a small garden where this year I raised purple cabbages and artichokes, my wife having another garden with spices, tomatoes and squash. There are roses in the front yard, a beautiful pine tree I imported from (shhhh!) the US National Forest in Siskyou and even some California Golden Poppies (State-protected) growing wild wherever their seeds "pop" to. I cannot really hear any neighbors unless they start shooting each other again with large caliber handguns. LOL - but that's all over and a few years back when they plowed down one of the meth-labs about twenty sites away from me. We've been pretty clean in the neighborhood since that night! That site is still vacant too. If I factor in the tax rebates and credits, I am 'way ahead in the housing game - but the problem is that I do NOT own the land. An actual down payment never existed b/o some "creative financing" by the escrow company - so I can walk away with little remorse or pain; none, actually if I think about it a moment. I only just picked up payments that are a lot lower than a stick home could ever be with the same rights and tax status as a land baron or duke of a kingdom could also get. We are a gated community - needing a magnetic card for ID in a reader/slot to open the gates and that affords a lot of security and keeps the salesmen and vacuum cleaner peddlers out. We have a 24-hour security force (useless I feel as they won't come out after dark) but we also have the local police (Riverside County Sheriff), State and County and even the city- fire and paramedic companies to provide emergency service for free. We have 911 service (US Intra-country emergency services) and unfortunately a hospital "facility" where "patients check in, but rarely check out" that I call "The Hemet Morgue-Auxiliary" for emergency surgery and care. I go to the V/A in Loma Linda and would self-drive there with an artery gushing out of my neck before I'd allow myself to be transported by the ambulance to that local butchery. My first wife died there with a missed diagnosis that was fully treatable, but was not done so. I hate that place with all my heart. I would not go there to be urinated upon if I was on fire. Mail delivery is centrally-located in a wall of mail boxes that insures that some of the neighbors at least get to see their other neighbors and perhaps chat with or learn to recognize them anyway. Most people in the US don't know their immediate neighbors, but that has never been a trait of mine as I am somewhat gregarious. I have room for my three vehicles and they are all under cover and I am snug both cold and hot weather-wise - and really quite content to live in a MH, which was NOT one of my fondest dreams. If I really - REALLY want to, I can pack this thing up for a fee and move it all to a better clime or place, but I am not so sure that I will follow through on my threat and do so now. I might just decide to chuck it all and really move into a "trailer" behind my Chevy Blazer (K5) and say shuck to it all and become a REAL trailer-person! PS: We actually have 240VAC/60~ in our homes - it's just that we divide the legs and use the 120 volt split to power our small horsepower things and lighting, saving the 240 for heavy and higher draw equipment. My "pole-drop" from Edison is 117-COMMON-117, and we can use the two 117 legs combined to get the 240 single-phase. The voltages are really 117-120 per leg, but we refer to it as 120 anyway. Modern Delta-core is 208 with 113 on the legs, but I also have a 277 Triad (three-phase) line drop too for some silly reason I do not understand as 277 is a commercial voltage reserved for three-phase systems. There is no meter on it though and I use it for my arc welding stuff. I feel it was a mistake by the park as that same 277 runs the High Pressure Sodium street lamps all over here and somehow I got a freebee.	SurferJoe46 (51)
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