Some downsides of living in a trailer

Blogged on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 by Rachael. Filed in Blog365, Philosophical.

Ha, I know you must all be thinking - what are the upsides? I mean, COME ON, a trailer?

If you’re a new reader, you may not realize that trailer living is actually pretty new for me. We moved in here in June last year, and before that I have always lived in either houses or apartments, and those only rarely. I honestly don’t have many problems with trailer life, although the health hazards of living in a home manufactured from these types of materials does often concern me (and that is a whole post by itself, which I will write soon).

Last night, one of the most annoying downsides happened again. If you hadn’t heard, it’s been EXTREMELY FREAKING WINDY here in Michigan since yesterday, and in fact it was so windy that many towns in this area, and north of here, are out of power, or were up until recently.

The gusts of wind are so large that you can hear them begin off in the distance, like a freight train coming closer, and then they whip around the buildings and through trees and under anything that is stationary (or not). The skirting that is put up around each trailer to keep you from seeing the hilariously ugly undersides was ripped off at least thirty-nine trailers in our park alone, including ours, and we have a pretty small park - less than two hundred trailers.

The most affected area was the end where the boys’ room is. It got so loud and so shaky on that end of the house (never was I so thankful for the big bolts that keep us fastened to the concrete slab underneath) that I was positive they would not be able to sleep. At about one in the morning, we moved Joey and Ian to our room, and after a little while we managed to drop off to sleep. We were all pretty restless, however, because the window in the master bedroom sounds like it’s a subway tunnel wall when it gusts like this. Whistling, howling wolves of night-dark wind keep us awake more often than not.  It was still quieter than their end of the house.

Surprisingly, Lissie’s room is very peaceful and quiet even when the rest of the house feels like it’s shaking, so she slept better than the rest of us, which is good, because somebody should get some rest around here.

By morning, the maintenance man’s wife (who doesn’t even work here any more, but that’s a story for another day) was driving around taking photos of all the wreckage. Pieces of broken, split skirting are all over the place, and she is telling everyone not to bother trying to fix any of it, besides picking it up off the street and maybe making a nice pile of broken vinyl in the yard. They are submitting the photos to their insurance company, and demanding that they pay for the damages, because as it turns out, the people who put these trailers together did KIND OF A BAD JOB. Huh. I would never have guessed it. (Sarcasm, anyone?)

(Apparently, they call this ‘being put together on a Friday’.)

Among other hilarious mistakes and slipshod work inside the trailer, we found the following things when we moved in last year:

• The master bathroom shower pipe leaked from the threads because it was manufactured badly, causing mold to grow inside that wall panel and into the carpet and floorboard
• Troy has had to caulk ALL the walls where they meet the ceiling, because we could literally see daylight through the cracks
• The trim has had to be nailed back in because it was barely fastened, and this includes the vertical trim that makes the walls SO CLASSY (lol)
• The boys’ closet door had to be fixed because it was about one inch too wide and wouldn’t close
• The stove had to be shimmed up with a piece of folded over leather on the left front side because it was uneven and banged up and down when touched
• The back door latch is not lined up with the latch-hole in the frame, so we have to lift it up to close it properly
• The outlets in both bathrooms had to be fixed before they would work at all (loose in the wall)

And other things that I can’t remember at the moment, but my attitude about it has been a mixture of ‘WHAT THE FUCK!’ and ‘Well, it IS a trailer’.

The only reason (it seems to me) that trailer park life has such a bad reputation is that many of us live here because we are poor, and many of us are poor because we’ve made a lot of bad life choices, and many of us have been poor for so long that we don’t even know how to change things; so we act badly and we drink too much to forget and we yell at our kids because everything seems hopeless and useless, and then we bicker with the landlords about why we shouldn’t be able to put our old couch in the side yard because we can’t afford a storage unit.

I have an advantage in that I did not grow up poor, so being here, and being poor right now, does not feel “normal” to me. I know that it will change, even if it takes me a long time. I know what it feels like to have enough and more than enough, and I know what it feels like to work hard and be rewarded in kind. I also know now how it feels to work harder than you thought you ever could and still not have enough.

There is so much despair in this place that you can literally feel it. Say what you will about the poor, but just remember this: when you are at the bottom, more things fall onto you than on anyone else. I live here, right now, because astounding things have happened in my life in the past year. I lost a good job, I kicked a husband out, I waited far longer than I expected for unemployment money. I had a disastrous split with my family, and used the money I finally got to get the hell out of Dodge. I only got this place because I had just enough money to put down on it, and at the time, I was making enough money to qualify for the payments.

Since that time, my income has fluctuated SO much that I would not, at this point, qualify for this trailer again if I tried. I am lucky and more than lucky to be here: I am blessed. And say what you will about the poor, but we know better than anyone the value of what we have.