It ain't home until you take the wheels off...

Daniel and I have recently become enamored with a new housing option. It's not only practical, it's also a Texas dream come true.

Yep, we want a mobile home.

We are always looking to save rather than spend. (More saving = more playing.) Housing costs, especially renting, are the bulk of our expenses every month. We have never bought a home - which would be the most economical way to go - because we have never wanted to commit to a place for more than a year at a time.

However, we are planning a move to Austin that should last for a few years. So we are looking into purchasing a home there, if we can find a good price in a convenient location.

Thanks to that interwebular crossroads of commerce known as Craigslist, I recently discovered a three-bedroom mobile home for sale in South Austin. It's clean with central heat and air conditioning, cable internet, big parks and bike routes nearby, and within two miles of downtown. The price? I could pay cash for it tomorrow.

With a mobile home, of course, you have to put it somewhere. So since we aren't in the landholding class yet, this does involve renting a piece of dirt in a mobile home park. However, figuring that we would live in this home-sweet-mobile-home for three years while we undertake further studies at UT, even if we sold it at a heavy loss, it would still be far cheaper than renting an apartment.

Plus, even better than ditching apartment life, we would enjoy the luxuries of: linoleum, faux-wood wall paneling, a gravel driveway, a patch of yard (until it burns up in July), acute spine-tingling excitement during every tornado watch, and perhaps, if not better neighbors than we have now, at least less offensive ones, since they would have their own yards to litter with hordes of empty Lone Star bottles and Pabst Blue Ribbon cans.

And let me not overlook the chief pleasure of mobile home ownership: telling our classmates at our ten-year high school reunion that we live in a sweet-ass SoCo single wide.