Mobile Home Leveling & Releveling in Bullhead City

When a manufactured home in Bullhead City goes out of level, we fix it by finding which piers dropped, raising the steel frame back to true on hydraulic jacks set over cribbing, and rebuilding the low supports so the whole chassis carries its weight evenly again. Most singlewides land between $450 and $800 and most doublewides between $750 and $1,400, and we confirm the figure in writing from our pier readings before any jack comes out of the truck.

The usual reasons people call us: an entry door that has to be shouldered shut, a hallway that feels like it runs downhill, or a doublewide whose ceiling seam has split down the middle of the living room.

Start here: a two-minute check you can do yourself

Before you call anyone, walk the home with these in mind. None of them prove a pier has moved, but three or more together almost always mean one has.

1. Doors. Close every interior and exterior door slowly. Watch the gap along the top of the slab. A gap that is wide at one corner and pinched at the other tells you that wall has racked.
2. Windows. Slide each one fully open and shut. A sash that binds in the middle of its travel but runs free at either end is usually a frame twist, not a dirty track.
3. Floors. Set a marble or a round pencil on the floor in the kitchen, the hall, and each bedroom. Note which way it rolls. A consistent direction across several rooms points to one end of the home sitting low.
4. Walls and ceilings. Look at the upper corners of door openings for short diagonal cracks in the panel or tape.
5. The marriage line. On a doublewide, run your eye along the ceiling where the two halves join. A seam that has opened, or a floor ridge you can feel with bare feet along the same line, means the center supports have drifted apart.
6. Outside. Walk the skirting. Panels bowed outward or pulled out of their bottom track, with nothing having hit them, are often the home pressing down unevenly.

You can also try our online level check for a quick read on what you are seeing. If the list above sounds like your house, a pier survey is the next step and it costs you nothing.

What actually moves a home on this side of the river

Bullhead City sits at about 925 feet on the eastern bank of the Colorado River, and the ground under most homes here is dry desert alluvium with caliche layered through it. That is better bearing ground than a lot of the country. A home set on a properly drained pad can hold level for a long stretch. When one does move, it is almost always for one of these reasons, and the survey tells us which.

Water that has nowhere to go

The area averages only about 5.4 inches of rain a year, which fools people into thinking water is not the problem. It is the opposite. Desert ground sheds a hard monsoon cell fast, and between June 15 and September 30 those cells can drop a lot of water in a short time. Runoff off a roof edge or across a lot that was never graded will find the soft spot beside a pier pad and carry it away. Bullhead City’s own manufactured home guidance calls for the ground around an installation to fall away at one-half inch per foot for the first ten feet. Plenty of older lots were simply raked flat when the home went in, and flat ground lets water sit right where the piers are.

Ground that is hard in one spot and loose in the next

Caliche is a cemented layer, and a pad that happens to bear on it barely moves. A pad a few feet away that bears on looser material, or on fill that was never compacted, can settle into it. That is why we so often find a home where most piers are dead on and two or three have dropped. The result is not a home that sinks evenly. It is a home that twists, and twisting is what jams doors.

Heat working on wood

The average high in July is around 110.7 degrees, and the city sees 100 degrees or more on roughly 135 days in a typical year. The crawl space under a closed-up home runs hotter than the air outside. Wood shims and caps lose moisture all summer, shrink, and compress under load. A stack that was snug in the spring can have daylight showing through it by fall.

Wind and dust on the big storm days

Monsoon outflow storms that build in Mohave County can bring gusts the National Weather Service has forecast anywhere from 50 to over 70 miles an hour. That rarely knocks a home off its piers by itself, but it loads anchors and loosened supports, and it packs blown dust into skirting vents so the crawl space stops drying out after rain.

Homes nobody is watching

A good share of our customers spend the summer somewhere cooler. A pier that starts moving in July has three or four months to get worse before anyone notices. If that is you, our snowbird checklist is worth a read before you leave.

A releveling job, from our side of the skirting

Here is exactly what happens when our techs show up, so nothing about the day is a surprise.

We open up and get underneath. We pull enough skirting access panels to crawl the full length of the home. We are looking at every pier, every pad, every cap and shim, the anchor straps, and the condition of the bottom board while we are down there.

We take readings, not guesses. Using a water level referenced off the most solid pier on the frame, we record the height at each support along both I-beams. You end up with a pier-by-pier map: which ones are true, which are down a quarter inch, which are down an inch and a half. That map is what our written quote is built from.

We set up the lift. Bottle jacks rated around 20 tons go under the frame near the low points, each one sitting on solid cribbing. The cribbing carries the load. A home is never left sitting on a jack alone, and nobody goes under a raised frame that is only on jacks.

We raise it in small moves. We go around the home in fractions of an inch at a time, station to station, so the frame comes back up as one piece. Cranking one corner a long way at once is how walls get stressed, and it is the thing we avoid.

We rebuild the supports. Federal installation standards spell out what is allowed between the top of a pier and the beam, and we stay inside them. Under 24 CFR 3285.304, that means nominal 4 by 6 by 1 inch hardwood shims used in pairs and driven tight, taking up no more than an inch, with any bigger gap filled by a hardwood plate no thicker than 2 inches nominal or a solid concrete block of the right thickness. When a pier is too short to meet the beam inside those limits, we rebuild it to the correct height instead of stacking scrap on top. Piers taller than 36 inches must be double-stacked and interlocked under 24 CFR 3285.306, which comes up on sloped lots.

We test every support by hand. Once the frame reads level end to end, each pier gets checked to make sure it is actually carrying weight. A pier you can wiggle is doing nothing. On a doublewide, both halves have to match along the center row so the seam closes.

We put tension back on the anchors. Lifting a home changes how tight the straps are, so we re-tension them before we leave. If the anchors are rusted, too few, or missing, you hear about it with photos, and any fix is quoted separately as tie-down work. Then the skirting goes back on.

How the home type changes the job

Park models. The resorts along the river are full of them. The frame is small and there are fewer piers, but they rack and stick doors the same way a full-size home does. The process is identical and the price sits at the low end of the singlewide range.

Singlewides. Two main rails and usually 12 to 20 supports. A routine relevel takes our crew a few hours and usually falls between $450 and $800.

Doublewides. Two sections, plus a row of supports under the center where they join. That center row is the slow part, because it has to come up matched to both halves at once or the seam stays strained at the ceiling, floor, and roof. Expect a longer day and a range of roughly $750 to $1,400.

When releveling is not enough

A relevel restores height. Some homes need more than that, and we would rather tell you up front than come back next year.

• Crushed or tipped pads. If the pad under a pier has cracked or tilted, shimming on top of it just resets the clock. That support needs a new footing, which is pier and pad repair.
• Rotted or soft floors. A floor that gives underfoot can be a support problem or a decking problem. Our page on a soft or bouncy floor explains how we tell the two apart.
• Drainage that keeps undermining the same corner. If the survey shows the same pier washing out, the lasting fix is moving the water, not the home.
• Anchors that would not hold in a storm. Loose or missing anchors are a separate repair and worth doing while the skirting is already open.

Price ranges and what pushes them up

These are ranges, not a quote. Your real number comes from the readings we take under your home, written down before work starts. The full breakdown is on our pricing page, and the cost calculator will give you a rough figure from your home’s size and symptoms.

A word on who is allowed to do this

In Arizona, setting a manufactured home on its supports, repairing those supports, and repairing its ground anchoring all fall under installation, and the Arizona Department of Housing licenses the people who do it. Bullhead City’s own manufactured home guidance also notes that a separate Department of Housing permit application applies to installations. Whoever you hire for a relevel, ask for their state installer license number and look it up yourself, and ask whether your job needs a permit. Do that before anyone crawls under your home, us included.

Keeping it level longer

Our work fixes the elevation. What keeps it fixed is mostly what happens around the home:

• Point downspouts and roof runoff out past the skirting, and fill low spots so water moves away from the pier lines.
• Keep skirting vents clear of blown dust and debris so the crawl space can dry after a storm.
• After a big monsoon season, repeat the door and marble check from the top of this page.
• If you leave for the summer, have someone open and close the doors once in a while and call us if anything starts to stick.

We relevel homes across Bullhead City, Fort Mohave, Mohave Valley, Golden Valley, Kingman, and Lake Havasu City. Ask for a free level check and we will hand you the pier map whether you book the work or not.