I’ve been living in a 771-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath mobile home (that doesn’t move) in Los Angeles for nearly five years.
I purchased it for $140,000 at the end of 2020 and rent the space in the mobile-home park where it sits. The lot price is rent-controlled, so annual increases don’t exceed 3%.
Between the rental fee and my mortgage, I pay about $2,000 a month to live here — an especially good deal if you consider just how expensive LA can be.
Houses in my neighborhood regularly sell for upward of a million dollars, and it’s almost impossible to rent a two-bedroom apartment in the area for under $2,000 a month — and forget about getting one with perks like in-unit laundry or a dishwasher.
My home now is also far nicer and better-equipped than anything I could afford to rent in the area. I have two parking spaces, a fenced-in yard, in-unit laundry, and a dishwasher.
Although my home isn’t perfect, it’s comfortable and works with my budget.
I don’t have much space, but I make the most of it — especially my yard
One of the best parts of my home is the private outdoor space, an incredible feat in Los Angeles.
By adding camping chairs with cupholders and a projector, my tiny backyard has become an especially great spot for the monthly outdoor movie nights I host with friends.
We drink wine, share snacks, and watch a Hallmark movie on the large pull-down screen that’s mounted to the side of my house.
My home’s only real drawback is the limited storage: I have just two closets and a crawl space.
One closet contains most of my clothes, and the other has to hold, well, everything else: bedding for my guest bed, board games, offseason clothes, cat carriers, suitcases, craft supplies, holiday decorations, a Bissell, and much more.
The crawl space under my house isn’t big, but it does at least provide a home for my Christmas tree for the nine or 10 months of the year I don’t have it up. (Listen, if you lived alone and put up and took down your tree solo, you’d leave it up for at least two months, too.)
Since storage is lacking, I’ve tried hard to make the most of the dead space in my home with shelves, cabinets, and furniture that can pull double duty.
The hallway to my bedroom has my washer and dryer, plus a wall-mounted unit to hold my shoes. Another hallway has a nine-cube storage unit, where I keep a lot of household necessities like tools, extra chargers, and lightbulbs.
Since my guest bedroom also functions as my office and gym, I’ve gotten creative to make the space work.
I have a special queen bed that folds into a cabinet and a rowing machine that can be mounted on the wall when not in use. My table can collapse to be just a few inches wide and rolled right out of the room to make space.
It can be a pain to rearrange everything in the room for overnight guests, but it’s worth it to have a comfortable spot to host friends and family. Guests get their own full bathroom to use during their visits, too.
Honestly, living with minimal storage doesn’t feel so bad when I remember my mortgage payment is less than $900 a month.
At the end of the day, I love my home and am grateful to live in it
My storage troubles and limited space also don’t seem like such a big deal when I look at my neighborhood and remember what I paid for my home.
For reference, an adorable 830-square-foot bungalow around the corner from me recently sold for $920,000. It’s not much bigger than my place, and it only has one bedroom and one bathroom.
Sure, the resale value of that house is likely going to increase and mine probably won’t — mobile homes tend to lose value over time —but I can’t imagine shelling out close to a million dollars for a few extra square feet and much higher property taxes.
At the end of the day, we’re both living in the same beautiful neighborhood in the great city of Los Angeles — and I’m glad my monthly mortgage payment is as small as my closets.
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