A quick guide on what to watch out for to avoid making mistakes.
Fast, fast, faster… Do you also feel that our daily lives are rushing by too quickly and demanding more and more of our attention? The number of tasks we have to squeeze into our 24 hours is growing relentlessly, seemingly exponentially, year after year, and the world around us is losing its last “bastions” of stability and permanence. Covid, war, inflation – all of this makes “uncertainty” the word we use most often.
On the other hand, each of us needs a sense of at least minimal stability, our own corner, a place on earth. A place we can always return to, feel safe. A place everyone can call home.
The costs of rising mortgage installments have buried the dreams of many of us for our own home. Hence, the noticeable growing popularity of solutions like modular homes. Homes that are built in a factory within a few weeks and can be easily moved to another plot or sold. Homes that are easy to expand by adding another block, because they grow with us.
See for yourself that the high standard of insulation allows you to use our mobile home all year round, regardless of the weather.
Year-round mobile home—what to pay attention to before buying?
When choosing a year-round mobile home, it’s worth checking the pros and cons of such a solution, so that after purchasing it, you have no doubts that it was a good choice. First and foremost, we need to consider whether we actually want to live in it all year round.
The second important aspect is answering the question of how big a home I really need. For some, an important question will also be how long I plan to live in this home—is it my final home, which I may eventually expand, or do I need something for a few months or years, and then I’ll want to sell or move it to another plot?
The last question we also need to answer is partially related to the previous one: how important is it to me that my home meets all the characteristics of a house as defined by building regulations?
Year-round or weekend? What do I really need?
Once we have answers to the questions above, we can get down to specifics.
We must remember that in the case of homes intended for year-round occupancy, there are minimum requirements and insulation parameters for partitions—walls, floors, and roofs—defined by regulations. Walls that are too poorly insulated will cause the mobile home to generate high heating costs. It will also cool down quickly. Current standards provide limit values for the heat transfer coefficient. Specifically for:
- walls of heated rooms: 0.2 W/m²·K,
- for ceilings/floors: 0.25 W/m²·K,
- for roofs: 0.15 W/m²·K,
This corresponds, in simplified terms, to a minimum amount of insulation—e.g., mineral wool, depending on its parameters, with a thickness of:
- 17 cm in walls,
- 20 cm in floors,
- 25 cm in roofs,
For our mobile home to meet these requirements, it must therefore have sufficiently thick insulation. However, we must remember that wall thickness is not just the wool itself. After adding external and internal cladding, our wall will ultimately have a thickness of about 25 cm, in the worst case. This affects the size of rooms in our home – in the case of mobile homes, which must be delivered in their entirety from the factory to the plot, the width of individual modules has a significant impact on transport costs. The larger the width, the more expensive the transport, often exponentially.
A year-round home also requires better, warmer window joinery with triple-glazed packages. Entry doors must also have a U-value ≤ 1.3 W/m²·K. This requires thicker door leaf frames and warm door frames, as well as their warm installation.
Recently enacted regulations for year-round residential buildings require solutions that allow heat recovery from ventilation—i.e., heat recovery ventilators—and energy-efficient heat sources.
These requirements, as you can easily guess, affect the cost of our investment. Hence the importance of the question: what do I really need—a home built “the right way,” or can I make certain compromises, keeping in mind that we treat our mobile home as temporary, accepting higher operating costs? Everything really depends on our needs and requirements. We can order a modular home from the factory that will meet all these requirements, and by obtaining a building permit or notification for it, it can be treated as a normal residential house from a legal standpoint. We just need to be aware of the need for the manufacturer to maintain a specific technological regime and the need to use sometimes more expensive solutions.
How big of a mobile home? 25 m², 35 m², 100 m², 300 m²? As big as possible.
But in reality, we need to determine: how many square meters do we need? The average apartment of a statistical Pole is about 48 – 52 m². For comparison, in the West, the richer part of Europe, the average apartment has an area of about 75 – 80 meters. So we must answer for ourselves how much space we need. A lot depends on our life situation and family size. A single person, a senior couple, or a family with 2 children will need different things.
People also have different preferences regarding the space they need. People with a minimalist approach to life will often feel much better in simpler, smaller spaces than people who need large spaces.
Therefore, when choosing a home for ourselves, we must try to imagine our life in a given model. Will there be enough space for us? Do we have enough room for a table? Will there be a corner for a closet for all the things I need? Will there be a place for a washing machine? Or perhaps this particular home is even too big. And I can look for something smaller.
It’s always worth visiting our company or a manufacturer and viewing homes in production—it’s easier for us to actually assess the size of individual rooms.
We must remember that buying a home is a significant expense. And while its size affects the cost, it’s often not a one-time expense but spread out in installments. So it’s worth making a conscious decision, tailored to your needs, so you don’t regret it later.
For how long? For a while, no less than 15 years.
When deciding to buy a mobile home, we need to at least roughly determine the purpose for which we’re purchasing it. Is it a transitional home for a few years, e.g., until we build a “real” brick house, or is it treated as the final one? This is related to the number of compromises we’re willing to make when choosing a home model.
In the case of homes for “some time,” it’s also worth keeping in mind the ease of moving the home when selling it to another plot. It’s much easier to arrange or commission the transport of a home consisting of one module than a building made up of 3–4 modules, which requires some labor and equipment for disassembly and reassembly. On the other hand, if we’re planning to expand our family, we need to anticipate the possibility of expanding our home with additional modules.
New or from the secondary market?
This is quite an important question. A new, brand-new, fresh-smelling home from the factory will require a larger investment. Unfortunately, the used home market in Poland is still in its infancy, and the choice is mainly limited to Dutch houses brought from the West from decommissioned sites. They’re often at quite attractive prices, but their renovation and adaptation to the parameters we need in our climate will more than consume the cost difference.
Buying a new home means the possibility of creating a project tailored to our needs and plot—we know from which side of our plot there’s an ugly neighbor and from which side there’s a nice neighbor. Such a solution, although slightly more expensive, will be perfectly tailored to our requirements. Then we decide on its size and room layout, making it easier to arrange individual rooms to suit ourselves. In the case of the secondary market, we have to choose from what’s available.
A new home is also often easier to adapt to the building conditions we have for our plot. There will be no problems changing, for example, the roof pitch angle or facade width. And it may turn out that we can’t legally place a purchased used Dutch house.
Approaching the finish line…
So, is it possible to live in a mobile home? Yes, it is. However, it’s worth making a conscious choice that suits our requirements and preferences. Let’s consider what we want and what we need. It will then be easier to make a decision within our budget. And if we agree to certain compromises, let’s do so with a full calculation of profits and losses.
And let’s try to buy without emotions. Although that’s supposedly practically impossible, but that’s a topic for another post.
