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"Wes Johnson combines personal experience with extensive research in a powerful 'must read' for anyone considering buying a manufactured home or currently living in one. The Manufactured Home Buyer's Handbook really is a wealth of information." -- Peter Tabak, Homeowners Against Deficient Dwellings Considering how interest rates are going to affect your bottom line? Financing is often the most important factor when you buy a new home, and financing for manufactured homes often differs radically from that offered for site built home sales. The Manufactured Home Buyer's Handbook covers finance options and predatory lending more thoroughly than any other guide. Here's a handy little tool that can help you, too: Find today's mortgage rates on this page!
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Do you know what's hidden in your walls? Manufactured housing brings many special considerations into play when it comes to lumber. The HUD "performance" code allows many features which might be considered substandard or inadequate in comparison to "site-built" housing. These include the use of 2" x 3" wall studs and 24" on-center spacing in interior walls, and very small (as small as 2" x 3") pre-fabricated roof trusses which may also be 24" on center. (Typically, in site-built homes 2" x 4" are the smallest support board used, and 16" is the maximum distance between boards.) These are all factors you need to consider, and you may want to custom order your home from the factory to upgrade these minimums. For instance, you may specify that all construction in your home be 16" on-center. Lumber problems can run deeper than these basic considerations, however. The studs pictured above were all visible in the same home, and aren’t the only bad ones visible. Roughly one-third of the exterior wall studs in double-wide homes are exposed during set-up. If you see a dozen bad studs, chances are three dozen are defective. (Unless you make a point of being at the right place at the right time, you won't see any studs.) My theory on how this sad state of affairs results is that the factory starts with the inferior 2" x 4" stud grade / utility grade lumber that HUD allows in manufactured homes – they freely use studs you would never buy for yourself at Lowe’s (unless they were half-price and you really needed firewood!). Then the home is delivered, often being transported hundreds of miles before crossing over multiple ditches or curbs en route to the final installation site. This results in excessive flexing; far more frame-flex than the engineers allowed for. The required heavy duty ramps are almost never used for ditch crossing because they are expensive and a pain for set-up crews to use (they are extremely heavy). This combination of inferior lumber and flexing is disastrous for the homeowner. Everything in the home is negatively affected: roof load capacity, wind resistance, resistance to settling, wallboard and ceiling sheetrock splitting, etcetera. Furthermore, almost all the serious stud splits seem to occur right in the crucial middle third of the boards – right where engineers tell you defects are most detrimental to structural integrity (again, something that to me implicates the effects of flexing). I’ve seen a number of boards which were split completely into; cracks which ran for three or four feet through the mid-section of the boards! The set-up foreman's response when I pointed them out (including some of the boards pictured above) was an incredulous look and a lackadaisical: "What's wrong with them?" Does it really take a degree in engineering to tell? Who's looking out for you when it comes to your home? Get The Manufactured Home Buyer's Handbook and learn how to be your own guardian!
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