When my dad finally retired, he and my mother decided to move to smaller quarters from the two storey four bedroom house we had been living in for twenty-five years. They'd bought the house for $4,000 in 1941 (my, how times have changed!), and sold it for $18,500 in 1965 (it would go for at least twenty times that now). They had been investigating mobile homes (the stationary kind) and a couple of mobile home parks for retirees north of Seattle. If you provided your own mobile home (no travel trailers allowed), you could move it onto a lot there for something like $50.00 a month and hook up to water, electricity, etc.
So for the $18,500 they got for Ye Olde Homestead, they had a mobile home custom made for them and moved onto a lot in the park. It was a double-wide: 65 feet long, 20 feet wide (1,300 sq. ft.). Outside, it was your basic box. But inside, it was roomy and amazingly luxurious. There was a nice big living room, a formal dining room (complete with crystal chandelier), a big kitchen with a bar, two sizable bedrooms, and a bathroom you could get lost in. The park provided a large shed in back to store the usual basement or attic crap, and a car port, with enough room for a second car or guest parking.
I'd had an opportunity to visit someone who lived in a luxury apartment in the Madison Park district in Seattle. I was told the apartment rented for something like $450 a month, which doesn't sound like much now, but this was 1965. My studio apartment in the University District rented for $65 a month. My folks' mobile home was actually more luxurious on the inside than the apartment in Madison Park. And a smidgen bigger.
Some folks would wrinkle their noses at my folks and say, "You moved into a trailer park!??" And then, when they saw what mom and dad had (and how little it was going to cost them from then on), they wandered around with their mouths open and started revising their own retirement plans!
At the old house, dad had spent most of his weekends out in the yard, mowing the front and back lawns and doing battle with crab grass, weeds, and aphids. When they got the mobile home set up on the lot, there were two window boxes in front, along nearly 20 feet of living room windows (two windows in front, one on the side) in which one could plant flowers and such, and about three square yards of lawn in front.
Dad took one look at the window box and the lawn and said, "Now that's just about right!"