Mobile Home Carport & Screen Room Repair in Lakeland

Most carport and screen room problems on a Lakeland mobile home come down to one joint: the place where the aluminum roof meets the side of the home. We repair leaking house joints, sagging pan roofs, loose and rusted fasteners, torn screens and rotted posts, and we check whether the room is resting on your home instead of on its own posts. A rescreen typically runs a few hundred dollars and up to about $1,000. A new carport or screen room is a bigger project; the cost table below gives published typical ranges.

How an add-on is supposed to be built

A carport, screen room or Florida room next to a mobile home is supposed to stand on its own. Florida’s Mobile/Manufactured Home Repair and Remodeling Code, Rule 15C-2.0081 of the Florida Administrative Code, says additions, including add-a-rooms, roof-overs and porches, “shall be free standing and self-supporting with only the flashing attached to the main unit” unless the addition was designed to be married to the home. The same rule says additions must be built to state and local building codes and anchored like similar construction.

HUD’s model installation standard points the same way. Under 24 CFR 3285.903, HUD recommends that a home’s installation instructions state that each attached add-on is designed to carry all of its own live and dead loads, unless the instructions cover it or a registered engineer or architect designed it.

In plain words: the posts and footings carry the roof. The home carries nothing but a strip of flashing that keeps rain out of the gap.

Why a settling home and an attached room fight each other

Your home sits on piers, and piers settle. The carport or screen room sits on its own posts, often on a slab. When the home drops a half inch and the room does not, three things happen:

• The roof joint opens. The flashing was sealed with the home at one height. Now it is at another, the sealant tears, and water runs down the inside of your wall or into the ceiling of the room.
• The room racks. If the room’s header was screwed into the home’s wall instead of flashed, the home’s movement pulls the room out of square. Screen doors stop closing and panels pop out of their channels.
• The home gets loaded. A sagging room roof that is fastened to the home hangs part of its weight on a wall that was never designed for it.

So we check how every add-on is attached before a relevel, plan the lift around a room that is fastened where it should only be flashed, and reseal the joint once the home is back on the line.

Repair or replace

If the frame is sound, repair is almost always the better spend.

Hurricane season and aluminum add-ons

After Hurricane Charley in 2004, HUD published a field survey of manufactured homes in the damage area. It found that add-ons such as screened porches, carports and garages “generally performed very poorly across all age groups of construction,” that in most cases the add-on’s connections failed and damaged the home, and that aluminum roofing from add-ons was a common source of wind-borne debris. The add-ons that held up were the substantially built ones, such as garages sheathed with plywood and anchored to a foundation or slab.

That is the case for keeping the room on its own posts: if a room tears loose, you want it to take its flashing with it, not a strip of your home’s roof and wall.

The Florida Building Code’s aluminum chapter (Section 2002) requires screen enclosure framing to be designed for wind from two directions, and it requires vinyl, tempered glass and acrylic panels in an enclosure to be removable, with a decal saying the panel shall be removed when wind speeds exceed 75 mph. If your Florida room has removable vinyl windows, taking them out ahead of a hurricane is what they were designed for.

Have the home’s own straps checked too. A room that stays put does not help if the home under it shifts. Our tie-downs and anchors page covers what that check involves.

What to check yourself

You can do most of this from a step ladder and the ground:

1. Look at the house joint after a hard rain. Stains on the room ceiling along the wall, or on the home’s wall inside, mean the flashing has opened.
2. Sight down the roof edge. A carport roof should run in a straight line. A dip between posts means a beam is sagging or a post has sunk.
3. Check where the room meets the home’s wall. Flashing only is how it should be. A row of screws or lag bolts through a header into the home’s wall is worth asking about.
4. Push on each post. It should not move at the base. Look for rust, rot or a cracked slab around the foot.
5. Count missing screws and look for rust streaks. Loose fasteners are cheap to replace and expensive to ignore before a storm.
6. Check your skirting under the room. Water from a leaking roof joint can end up behind the skirting and under the home.

Permits and licences in Polk County

Polk County’s Building Division lists “additions, repairs, alterations or accessory structures to mobile homes” and “all carports or similar structures with rigid roofs” as work that needs a permit. So do screening a space that needs new structural or infill framing, installing or replacing vinyl or acrylic windows, and enclosing a carport or porch to make it living space. Replacing screening with like material in an existing structure does not. If your home is inside Lakeland city limits, the City of Lakeland Building Inspection Division issues the permit instead, and its list includes carports and porches or screen rooms.

On a rented lot in a park, Polk County will not let you permit an addition as an owner-builder without notarized landowner consent, so talk to the park office early.

Aluminum structure work has its own state contractor licence, separate from the mobile home installer licence (see the licence question below). Ask whoever quotes your job for their licence number, check it on the state’s licence search, us included, and ask who is pulling the permit.

What it costs

These are typical published ranges, not our quotes. The real number comes from a look at the room and how it is attached.

When we find an add-on hanging its weight on the home during a leveling or general repair visit, we tell you and price the fix separately, so you can decide.

If your screen room leaks at the wall, your carport roof dips, or you want the room checked before hurricane season, call or send the quote form with a photo of where the room meets the home.