(5) Our house is a what??

When we purchased our house, the bank (who owned it at the time) and county both listed it as a manufactured home. So from looking at the roof and the base from the outside and inside, it appeared to be a modular home. You know like the ones you can pick out of a catalog and they just come out and assemble it for you wherever you choose. They’re relatively inexpensive in comparison to new construction. Modular homes are very common in rural areas around here. So no big deal right. When Jake was renovating the living room, the ceiling was bowing just a bit. You could see a slight sagging right through the middle. Well there are two ways to fix it, the expensive way, rip it out and totally re-do it, or cut a few holes in the ceiling and then using cables attach it to the roof framing in the attic to lift and stabilize it and ensure it did not bow even more over time. (Disclaimer: I know relatively NOTHING about construction, so this is just my dumbed-down version of what would be done. Don’t judge!)

We did not have the money to re-do the entire thing, so Jake cut the holes in the ceiling that we would use to stabilize it then had to go into the attic to do the rest. Problem #1 there was no attic access point in the house. So he cut out an access point in the hallway where it would be easy to use a ladder to get in and out of it. As he cut the drywall layer of the ceiling out and it dropped down, much to his surprise there was a plywood layer.. a thick plywood layer above it that he would also have to cut out. So he cuts the hole through that as well and when that piece comes out there are shingles on it… yea like the ones on the top of your roof. Problem #2 Our roof has a pitch and this was in the center of the house, so it wasn’t the actual roof. And if it wasn’t the roof, what the hell was it?! As he climbed up into the attic space, and looked around, he realized… we hadn’t purchased a modular home… oh no… this was an old single-wide trailer that someone had built an addition on to. I wasn’t home so he calls me to tell me that what we thought was a modular home was really a (if I don’t use his exact words it’s just not the same so excuse me) “A fuckin single-wide trailer with an addition! Who fucking builds an addition onto a trailer?!” But, they fooled us, they did a pretty good job from the outside, it was the inside that was a mess to renovate.

Can you imagine if a realtor were to try to sell it for what it really was: “As you can see this “vintage” single-wide trailer has a lovely addition that has been built on to it with a two inch step down into the new addition. Just enough to trip you every time, but not enough for an actual step.  And the hallway and door frames on 1/2 the house are too narrow to fit anything through as they are old trailer width doorways, however, the addition has standard doorways.” I’d have loved to see that!!

My first encounter with country wildlife in the next post!