Giving myself permission to leave fourteen skipped. It’s a big deal, right? Don’t make it up, cowboy. Just get back on the horse.

I got home yesterday while it was still light out. I mostly unpacked the car, fed the cats, and then napped off the white line fever.

Slept again for real from ten until four, and intended for that to be a good start on reintegrating the Rituals. But I didn’t feel all that good, so I crashed for another four. It’s ten in the morning. This is the first real thing. Hello.

What Was Learned: The main thing

Down in Las Cruces, the dealer markup on a doublewide is Forty Thousand Dollars.

So in the case of the favorited Champion New Moon 2842j at 1120 square feet, it’s actually worth, top dollar, $90K.

But the dealer says No, the price is $129,000 out the door.

For that forty thousand, you get the trailer delivered to your lot, and the wheels taken off it, and you get the thing skirted like the city requires, and some handwaving about making sure the utilities are properly connected (by someone else, or at least for an extra fee, or at least not including digging the trenches to bury the lines).

It seems like bad news, but if you’re buying instead in Santa Fe, you can pretty much double that forty thousand. Why? Because ‘we’re the best’. Because, in other words, ‘we can’: the market will bear it, so you have to pay it.

So is there a different option? Yes, and no.

***

No, in the sense that so far, there doesn’t seem to be a way around the dealer system and the way it extracts money from you. (You’ll remember we encountered the exact same thing looking at A-Liners: yes it’s worth 15K, but you’d be paying $25K anyway).

However: we did learn of at least one other model that checks all the boxes and even offers 300+ more square feet, up to 1456 total before the included and absolutely essential view porch. This is the Champion ‘Prime’, model number P3252H32P08. It’s worth 75K. Add the forty thousand for the dealer, and it comes in a $115,000.

Right now it slots in above the New Moon, solely based on the smaller price, even though it lacks the perfect mud room on the better long side of the home, and even though the initial porch is only half a porch.

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We also learned that in Silver City, it costs $3500 to ‘tap’ into the water system. The gas people are working on a number. We don’t know yet about electric and sewer.

We did learn that grading the lot isn’t going to be that big a deal, about a form of substrate that’s cheaper than pouring a pad or putting it on piers, and that what needs to be poured (a driveway) could end up being smaller and cheaper than previous imaginings.

***

Will the bullet get bit? Well, not until September at the earliest, and realistically not until next spring.

In the meantime, more research on other cheaper options. In the meantime, maybe a drive to Texas to actually be able to tour a Prime and a New Moon in the flesh and see how they feel.

We now return you, and my own self, to our regularly scheduled dusty interstate town programming, where there are still far too many cats in the house, and the July bills to be paid, and a whole lot of vacuuming to be done.

To:

Who I really am, like I said.