Mobile Home Leveling in Mohave Valley, AZ

Mohave Valley has a lot of homes that have been sitting on their original blocking since the day they were set, and that is the defining fact about the work here.

The home that has never been releveled

Manufactured homes are designed to be releveled. The blocking under them is not a foundation in the sense a stick-built house has one; it is a system of piers and shims that is meant to be adjusted as the ground moves. A home that has gone twenty or thirty years without that adjustment has not avoided settling. It has just absorbed it.

What that looks like when we get under it:

• Shims compressed to nothing, or gone. Wooden shims crush under sustained load, and in this climate they also dry out and split.
• Pads that have sunk into the sand unevenly, so the load is now carried by whichever piers happen to be highest.
• Piers doing no work at all. It is common to find a pier you can rock by hand, or reach a hand between the pier cap and the frame. Every pier not carrying its share puts its load onto the ones beside it.
• Anchors that predate current standards, or straps rusted through at the ground end.

None of this is a crisis and none of it means the home is ruined. It means the home is due, and a relevel at $450 to $800 for a singlewide is a maintenance item that has been deferred rather than a repair for damage.

What the valley ground does

Soils down here are sandy river alluvium: loose, fast draining, and low in clay. They do not heave the way Phoenix clay does. They consolidate under load, and they erode when water runs across them.

That produces settlement that follows the fill and the water, not the seasons. Wherever the pad was least compacted when the home was set is where it goes down first. Wherever a roofline dumps runoff or a wash carries sheet flow past the home in a monsoon storm, material leaves from beside a footing and the pier tips.

Monsoon runs roughly July through September in short violent bursts. Rain that arrives faster than the ground can absorb it runs, and running water in sand moves material.

Tie-downs deserve their own look here

Arizona is Wind Zone I, and the anchoring requirement is real regardless. On older homes in this valley we routinely find:

• Straps slack enough to move by hand. A tie-down only works in tension. A loose strap is decoration.
• Corrosion at the ground anchor, which is where the metal meets damp soil and where the failure happens.
• Anchors that were never there. Some older homes were set with fewer than current standards call for, or lost anchors during a later move.

Re-tensioning existing hardware is inexpensive. A full install runs $600 to $3,500 depending on the home and what is salvageable, and we will tell you which of the two you are looking at before any work starts.

The vapor barrier, which nobody thinks about

The sheet under the belly of the home keeps ground moisture out of the insulation and the floor decking. Heat makes it brittle, rodents tear it, and a shifting home opens seams at the edges. Once it is open you get moisture in the insulation, insulation falling out, and, over a long enough period, soft floors that are not a pier problem at all. Replacing it is far cheaper than replacing decking, and it is checked at every level check whether or not you ask.

What it costs

Published on the pricing page.

Book a Mohave Valley level check

Tell us the size and rough age of the home, whether it has ever been releveled, and what you have noticed. We also cover Fort Mohave, Golden Valley, Kingman, Lake Havasu City, and Bullhead City.