First, I tried painting the wood panel walls a green. This worked in our last house but it didn’t work in this one:

As you can see, the paint wasn’t covering and in areas where it was covering, it would just peel right back off the wall.

I didn’t like the green anyway.

Instead of paint, I ended up going with a paler green wallpaper and a set of bookshelves that I bought from Walmart. I didn’t get the cheapest bookshelves either because I wanted them to last. I’m glad I spent the extra cash because they have held up very well and look much better than the cheaper versions.

I moved an old antique table from dining room and positioned it behind the desk. I placed plants and small items on the bamboo table runner that has been used in several areas of the kitchen. Just enough filler for the table.

On the wall I took some rod iron candlestick holders that I received from my mother-in-law and painted them white and blue.

Reusing to make a whole new arrangement!

The picture to the left shows what we started with, the only room in the house that didn’t have flowered wallboard, but instead some nicotine covered tan stripe on top of a wonderful motif of wood paneling. Do you see that fabulous divider separating the entry from the so-called dining room? We randomly demolished that at ten o’clock one night. Best random demolish ever. The entertainment center armoire is now there being used as a closet.

Here’s the other angle. Because you didn’t get enough with the first one.

We painted the walls a light brown on the main end where the living area is and a dark chocolate in the area next to the front door, what is supposed to be the dining area. We also bought a new red couch, a chair, and entertainment center (thank you Craigslist and discount furniture stores!)

Do you see that yellow chair in that background? I love that chair. My sister has it’s twin. It gets moved all over my house and currently resides in the master bathroom. Here’s a close up. I loved working in that corner.

Did I say I love that yellow chair? Here it is at the other end of the living room with a gratuitous shot of Zoe. That’s a great trunk next to it. I got that for $25 at a flea market. I can’t believe that plant is still alive. I don’t have good luck with plants.

You can see the plant here, in the newest rendition of the living room.

I’m sure that sneak peak made you want to see the entire room so here it is.

Here’s the other angle. I wish I had better pics but my Canon battery died and all I had was my camera phone.

I am so excited to share the Frugal Home with all of you in a Kindle book! I spent a great deal of time compiling the best tips and advice from my years of frugal living and writing this website. For only $2.99 you can get all of the best frugal home tips and advice all in one book!

The Frugal Home book has frugal tips on beauty and bath, budgeting, cleaning, debt, decorating, entertainment, food, grocery shopping, health care, holidays and events, children, environmental tips, remodeling, home and yard work, and weddings.

Hope that you enjoy your read! Click the link to get the book!

The Frugal Home Ebook

Here is what we started with . . .

And we went here as quick as we could . . .

and replaced the floors with tile laminate, painted the walls a warm red to cover the horrible flower wallboard, and added some decor. The decor on the wall consists of a table runner with a glass vase filled with turquoise stones and flowers placed on top of it. The antique plate above the vase was given to me by my mom for Christmas one year.

That wasn’t enough so we . . .

took out the small center island and replaced it with the large island that the hubby’s parents built for us. We also stained the gold cabinets much darker to update the look of the kitchen.

And then I got sick of the red and decided to . . .

go green. We also traded our table and chair set for my sister’s table and chair set. Both of us got a new dining set that better matched each of our homes and decor and we didn’t have to spend a dime! I used an antique table behind the dining set to our fire extinguisher lamp and several pots of our plants, including the plant in the gravy bowl.

Mobile Home Remodeling Ideas We Did First

Mobile home remodeling ideas for a master bath for us meant first and foremost, getting rid of the bright blue carpet tiles that spread across the floor and up the size of the extra Giant Tub that came with the home.

The carpet tiles came up pretty easy and once we were down to bare floor we took stock of the room. First thing that had to go was the miniature stand up shower in the corner and the awful built in cabinets next to it. We purchased a new shower and it fit nicely into the same space the shower and cabinets did. Thank you to my father-in-law for coming down and helping us put in the new shower, plumbing, and putting up a new wall to enclose it.

I then painted the entire room, including the ceiling, and then spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how we were going to cover the outside of the Giant Tub after pulling off the carpet tiles. As the Giant Tub is round we needed something that would bend. We finally found this large sheet of white plastic and we cut it to size and nailed it to the side of the tub then I painted it the same color as the walls. It cost about ten dollars.

I am lucky that my parents own a flooring store and even luckier to get some flooring from them for almost the entire house. Thank you to my Dad for coming down and laying the vinyl in our master bath, and the bedrooms, especially as it had to be cut all funky to fit in arount the shower, walls, toilet, and the Giant Tub.

After all that we just had to decorate. I love to use items that have been handed down from either of our families and most of the decor in our bathroom came from my mother-in-law. The scrolled pieces came from her mother, and the two framed pictures the hubby and I got in the clearance section of Walmart several years ago for seven dollars each.

Mobile Home Remodeling Ideas for the Master Bath Still To Come

If you hadn’t. already noticed, we have a Giant Tub in our master bath and it isn’t a good thing. This thing is huge and it is just a tub, no jets, nothing fancy, just a big hole that fills only a few inches or so before the hot water heater gives out and you’re left with ice cold water. I’m not a huge tub person in general and this thing is a huge waste of space. I’ve been in it twice since we moved into this home two years ago and the first time was because there wasn’t a shower to get in to.

When we took out those awful cabinets to put our larger shower in I didn’t think about the extra storage I was giving up. Taking out those cabinets left us with no where to store linens at all. I ended up putting all the towels on the corner of the Giant Tub, since we’re not using it for anything else, but we knew we needed some better mobile home remodeling ideas than just stacking towels on a tub corner. Our lack of money at this time meant we had to just deal with what was there.  

Fast forward  a year and a half, we still don’t have the money to do what we want but we do have an idea and a free cabinet coming. My parents are remodeling their home and are giving us their old bathroom cabinet. It is very nice, darker wood and a marble top, maybe too nice for a mobile home but I’ll ignore that part! It is about a foot smaller than the cabinet we have in there now, a horrid baby blue topped plywood monstrosity so it will leave extra space. We have decided to pull out the Giant Tub when we get the cabinet and replace the floor. We will then have to lay new flooring in that room . Taking out the Giant Tub leaves us a space of about six feet by six feet. I have decided to put up bookshelves either open or with doors and a bench in the space left after taking out the tub. This will give us a place to sit and get dressed as well as storage for our linens.

I think that once it is done this will be one of my favorite mobile home remodeling ideas and I will post pictures as soon as it is done!

We slept in our living room for quite some time, partly to get the bedroom done before we moved in and partly because we no longer had any living room furniture after I had decided the old furniture wasn’t coming into the new house.

Our first mobile home remodeling project for the room was to take off those fancy strips that line the walls of most mobile homes, then tape and mud over them. I did this for both our bedroom and the bathroom. It was a lot of work and I only ended up doing it in those two rooms but I did like how it turned out. I got impatient and didn’t do this to the other rooms!

The second mobile home remodeling idea was to paint the room. My family came up one day and helped me. It took several coats to cover the wallboard and then I decided the ceiling had to be painted as well and that took some time as well. Thank goodness for family!

The carpet was pretty new and a nice neutral color so we didn’t do anything to it. I did put up a closet organizer in the closet which was a big help but other than that we did nothing to the closet. Just having a walk-in closet was huge for us as our last mobile home closet was just a pole stretched across one end of the room.

The final part of any mobile home remodeling effort is the decorating and putting the room back together, or in our case, putting it together for the first time. I used all of the décor and window coverings from the living room of our last home. I had gotten tired of it but putting it to use in the bedroom gave it new life and saved me from having to purchase anything.

The dresser in our room I picked up at a resale shop for $30 and the chair I got off the side of the road. Our end tables were found at a nearby flea market at $12 for one and $7 for the other.

I love our room and this time I have tried to keep it simple and not clutter it up like I tend to do. It is a peaceful room and it cost us less than $100. Not bad for the master bedroom mobile home remodel.

These tips aren’t just for mobile home remodeling, you can do them if you are just looking for a frugal way to change your room.

We lived for over three years in that trailer and many of my mobile home remodeling ideas came from trying to make that place liveable. We decided to upgrade when we heard about last years home buying incentive (though I’m a little jealous of those who buy this year since this years incentive includes not paying it back). We began looking in the beginning of 2008, before everything came tumbling down.

We looked at building a home and quickly realized that was out of our price range as well as where we would live while it was being built. We moved on to modulars and quickly found them willing to give us a large house at a decent interest rate. On paper we could have afforded it but I knew better and didn’t want to come even close to stretching ourselves that far and I had plenty of mobile home remodeling ideas still in my head.

I found what looked like a brand new home on Craigslist listed with a dealer. We went and looked at it and knew it was what we wanted. It was big, especially after the 900 square feet we had lived in for three years, three bedrooms, two baths and it was in excellent condition.

We immediately began preparations. Lets just say that the process of getting this home onto our land, living without electricity or running water for a month, and dealing with the company we bought the home from left a lot to be desired. The end result was great and we have been able to put our mobile home remodeling ideas into place over and over again.

While this house was in great shape it was also a 1988 and severely outdated. If I never have to see flowered wall board again I’ll be happy! I will explain our mobile home remodeling ideas and how we updated our home for very little money and a lot of grunt work! Mobile homes themselves can be difficult to work with and often you have to take into consideration certain aspects you wouldn’t have to with a site built home but many of the mobile home remodeling ideas I will share you can use in your own home whether you live in a 1970s single wide or a brand new site built!

Check back as I will begin posting (ok, you got me, trying to post) regularly on the mobile home remodeling ideas we used in our home that you can carry over to your home!

Mobile Home Remodeling Ideas for Each Room Of Your House

Mobile Home Remodeling Ideas for the Master Bedroom

Garage Remodel

Mobile Home Remodeling : Kitchen

First, a garage remodel is not easy, parts of it are not fun, it can quickly become not cheap, and it takes a lot of time if you are doing it yourself instead of paying someone to do it. This garage remodel was mostly completed by me and my father-in-law with extra help from my husband, my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and nephew. We definitely could not have done it ourselves but we did and there were only a few tears (I worked very hard at physical labor with in-laws living in my home for several months, a few tears were bound to happen).

We were able to even start this process because we recieved the first time homebuyer credit. Unfortunately for us, we received the credit that has to be paid back, yet it gave us the jump we needed to actually start on it. Before you start check with your county and city for permits and such.

We made the garage remodel as cheap as we could, though with effort, we could have made it even cheaper. Our garage remodel consisted of doubling the size (the new part basically being a nicer looking lean-to), a new roof, and new siding.

Here is how we made our garage remodel cheaper:

We did it ourselves. Not paying a company to complete the garage remodel probably saved us thousands of dollars alone.

Use what you already have. We had many boards sitting around looking for a use as well as a deck that we had taken off the old house. We were able to recycle the old lumber into the new garage. My favorite part of the entire garage was the use of the two old windows that had been in our barn since we bought our land. Those two windows really completed the addition and helped the appearance of the garage as you come up the driveway.

Shop around when completing a garage remodel. We went to several different stores, including the Habitat for Humanity Restore in our area. We planned well and window shopped first. While most items were cheaper at one store there were a few that were cheaper at the other making it worth are while to drive back and forth (luckily the stores were less than a mile apart).

Use rebates where you can. The shingles we used were not only on sale but we also found a $50 rebate coupon at the customer service desk.

Use cash and when you can’t use no interest credit cards. While we did have a couple thousand from our housing credit (we didn’t pay that much for the house itself to get a very big credit!), we also put about three thousand of our savings and cash in. It didn’t take us long to realize we hadn’t planned as well as we thought and were a few thousand short (so tip #346 is to plan better than we did!). Our only option was to use one of our store credit cards to finish the garage remodel. We chose the one with no interest and no payments for six months.

With our savings, cash, the no interest credit card and the housing credit we essentially will have paid cash for an extensive garage remodel.

It wasn’t easy and if necessary we could have spread the building process even farther and paid cold hard cash as we went but emotionally and phsically I was done!

This garage remodel could have been done even cheaper. For instance, we could have only used materials that we got for free, from job sites or places like craigslist or freecycle. What else would you have done to have a more frugal garage remodel?