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Double-wide trailers are far from glamorous. But they are a house. A house that we now live in. A double-wide from the 1970s! Awesome, am I right?
To start, I am not the type to complain about where I live, unless something that I deem necessary is hindered. For example, we discovered several water leaks after we bought the place. Had to be fixed.
The foundation is caving in and cracked in several places. Too expensive to fix. So, we live with it. (I promise, the house is on supports, so it won’t crash on us)
But here’s the good news. We turned the drab paneling brownness into a home. The inside is where I spend the majority of my time and if cosmetic things are looking nice, I can sometimes ignore all the other foundational stuff that is too expensive to fix.
The first thing I did was to create a color/style board with paint and flooring swatches. I wanted to have something I could take while shopping to have a visual to see how colors and other things we bought were fitting together.
I like houses to have a somewhat cohesive look. The same went for our acquired double-wide.
Note: Still working on putting up pictures here and there and finalizing a few spaces. Overall, I am very pleased with how it turned out.
The space that I spend a lot of my time in, so it was important to me to update the cabinets and create a homey modern feeling kitchen.
We painted the cabinets and the back-splash, updated the rusty hinges on the doors, and cleaned everything else up. Oh, and replaced the kitchen sink.
We have two side rooms from the kitchen. One is more of a family room with the television, and the other a multi-purpose office/playroom/reading area.
I like the space I was able to create for an office. While it is not ideal having it out in the open with two toddlers, I still have a space that is mostly mine and works great when the kids are sleeping.
It took a while, but we finally came up with a situation in our family room that looked good and also felt comfortable and cozy.
The floor was rotting out in this space, so we gutted the vanity and shower and started from scratch, adding a new shower, a new (used) vanity, flooring, and painting to brighten it up.
It has easily become my husband’s favorite room in the house!
I fell in love with the swatch of color used on our Master Bedroom and tried to base everything else around this color.
The dusty turquoise gray was the perfect color for both that and our dining room. I tried to keep the colors neutral, cool, and relaxing.
We debated replacing the tub in here as well, but opted for just cleaning, taking out the glass doors, and painting the tub with tub n’ tile paint.
This flooring in here was fairly new, so we kept it to save a little money.
These rooms were identical in shape and dimensions.
We equipped them with the same light green paint and grayish-brown carpet. They are great little rooms for our kiddos!
I was so excited that we had room for a kitchen table that was the first purchase I made after signing the papers.
I found this beautiful table on Facebook Marketplace and secured a nice place for our meals and snacks.
Though a small room, it was so nice to have a little space just for laundry and cleaning things. We took out the heavy cabinets and installed shelves instead.
And of course, painted.
This was one room we left the existing floor since it wasn’t likely to be seen so much in public anyway.
The previous owners left all the curtains in the double-wide. The existing curtains were a white linen fabric and simply a bit old and yellowed from being in the house for a long time without residents.
I washed them up and found some gray and turquoise fabric dye to complete the look in both the living room and the family room.
Way cheaper than buying all new curtains for those spaces. (I did end up buying curtains for the bedroom and the entryway, which is a sliding door to a porch)
P.S. I am kind of a dyeing junkie. In college, I would dye white jeans and shoes all the time just for fun.
A super-easy way to save money is to spray paint old sturdy hardware to make it look new. I can’t even really that these pieces are double-wide original if you know what I mean.
Get a good paint + primer spray paint, and then also covered with a clear coat.
We used Rust-Oleum clear coat in a matte finish because I wanted a clean farmhouse look.
The mirror frames were plastic, but getting rid of the old green-gold grunge helped bring more modern vibes into our bathroom spaces.
Sometimes I get crazy ideas about how to make a certain piece of home decor. I spray painted the circle grids long before I got the idea to make words and spray paint them, too.
It ended up unlike I originally visioned, but I like the result anyway.
I love home decor printables, especially ones that give inspiration and encouragement. Therefore, I added several Bible-based quotes in our home, as well as prayers, sayings, and quotes that center around faith, family, and love.
Some of these prints I have created for others to purchase as well. You can find them in the Digital Store.
^^^^Get These Above for FREE!^^^^
If you live in a double-wide, you can create a homier feel as well. While I know that more modern double-wide houses are much more doable to work with space, the older ones can feel a bit closed in and brown, if they utilized paneling. (Why did that ever become a thing back then? Yuck. It’s still a cheap option, I guess, so I see the appeal in the price.)
Have faith in your vision of what you want your house to look like. It took a lot of work and planning, but we turned our humble double-wide into a home we can be comfortable, cozy, and happy in.
If you can, please pin and share!
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What do you mean when you say that the foundation is crumbling? Doublewides are usually on cinder blocks. I do know that some are put on a concrete foundation. Many people who buy older trailers will usually have to replace supporting beams. That’s fairly easy but time consuming. I guess it could get pretty expensive if you have to hire it out.
Hi Rhonda! They put our double-wide over a basement concrete foundation, so yes, the sides are caving in and crumbling! We are saving up to build a barndominium soon! Ours has been here for a while and it won't fit our family in a couple of years, so we are making our home as beautiful as we can at the moment.
Congrats on getting rid of your paneling!! We are renting a double-wide, but it is only a few years old, and we lone the space. Construction isn't high quality, but it could be a LOT worse. The main aesthetic thing is probably the chalky, unwashable paint.
Thanks, Sarah! We still have a few remnants of paneling, even on our closet doors! But it sure doesn't look as much like a brown house like it used to! We have to be thankful for what we've got, right?