Best Way to Remodel a Mobile Home to Look Like a House
How to Remodel Your Mobile Home to Look Like a House (Exterior)
Make your mobile home look and feel like a house on the outside by making these renovations:
- Your Mobile Home’s Roof and Eaves
Your Mobile home Roof pitch can be an aesthetic and useful upgrade. By having a higher roof pitch, your mobile home will look more like a traditional house, and it helps rain and snow slide off more easily.
Site-built homes typically have wide eaves to help keep water away from the siding and windows; they are usually 12 to 16 inches wide. Most mobile homes, on the other hand, have smaller eaves and gutters (typically 6 and 5 inches, respectively). Adding wider eaves in addition to a higher roof pitch can help the outside of your mobile home look more like a house.
- Mobile Home Doors
Another way to make your mobile home’s exterior look more like a traditional house is to install larger doors. Normally, manufactured home doors are around 32 inches wide, 76 inches tall, and made out of aluminum.
Installing 6-panel, insulated exterior doors on your mobile home can make it look more like a traditional house, and it isn’t a difficult upgrade at all.
- Mobile Home Foundation
If you’re installing a new mobile home, an excellent way to make it look similar to a traditional house is to install it on a basement foundation; it’s more affordable than you might think.
Not only does putting your mobile home on a basement foundation make it look like a house, it gives you the added benefit of having extra living space. Manufactured homes might require slight modifications to allow access to the basement, but it’s nothing your contractor can’t handle.
- Add a Garage
Adding a garage to your mobile home, whether it’s attached or not, gives it the look of a traditional house and gives you added utility. Your garage can be a simple covered breezeway that creates a cohesive look, or you can create an entryway from your garage to your manufactured home to make it look even more like a regular house.
- Boost Curb Appeal
There are many small things you can do to your mobile home’s exterior to make it look and feel like a traditional house. You could:
- Install vinyl railings on your patio
- Plant a tree or two in your yard
- Plant bushes and flowers around your patio
- Install lattice underneath your patio
Small landscaping projects can make your mobile home look like a house from the outside — the sky’s the limit!
How to Remodel Your Mobile Home to Look Like a House (Interior)
Make your mobile home look like a house on the inside with these tips:
- Mobile Home Walls
Remodeling the walls in your mobile home can instantly change the entire feel of your house — from a manufactured home to a traditional house. Many mobile homes have old-school paneling that was popular in the 60s and 70s. If your mobile home has paneled walls, the easiest way to update them and make your manufactured home look like a house is to:
- Remove all of the trim from your walls
- Prime your walls using an oil-based primer
- Fill in all of the line gaps left by the paneling with drywall mud
- Tape and mud the wall joints between the sheets of paneling
- Use an orange peel texture spray on the walls
- Prime the walls again, this time with a latex primer
- Paint the walls your favorite color!
This is an excellent, simple, and affordable way to renovate your mobile home and make it look like a house.
- Mobile Home Ceilings
Most mobile homes, especially older ones, tend to have low ceilings that were made with acoustic panels separated by molding strips. Those acoustic panels are durable, but they are susceptible to warping due to water damage. Painting these panels a bright color can help them look much better.
Later on, towards the 80s, mobile homes began to use drywall for ceilings, and some of them were vaulted, making the space feel more open and more like a traditional house. Similar to stick-build homes, these ceilings used popcorn texture. You can give your mobile home a modern look by scraping off the popcorn ceiling and retexturing it, giving it the feel of a high-end traditional house.
- Mobile Home Trim
Mobile homes notoriously use trim and molding excessively at every corner, including separating the drywall panels in the walls. Having your mobile home covered in plastic molding, from the floor to the ceiling, is one of the biggest things that gives it a “trailer” feel rather than that of a traditional home.
Luckily, this is a pretty easy upgrade you can do yourself. If you plan to tape, texture, and paint your walls (or even just the paneling), you can remove all of the moldings and replace them with traditional stick-built molding around the windows, doors, and baseboards.
- Mobile Home Cabinets
Cabinets in mobile homes are typically durable but inexpensive and made out of more affordable materials. This has changed massively over the years; most new mobile home have options for high-quality, modern cabinets like those found in stick-built homes. If you have an older manufactured home, where the cabinets are made out of particleboard, and vinyl or plastic, installing new ones can make your mobile home look and feel like a house.
You don’t even have to replace the particleboard boxes that the cabinets are made out of; you can install solid wood frames, doors, and drawers to give them an updated, modern look.
