To Cert or Not to Cert? Our Opinion—Not So Fast

I am a female manufactured home contractor specializing in manufactured home foundation repair. It’s not the most glamorous job in the world and mainly consists of crawling underneath the darkside of people’s homes, often in claustrophobic tight conditions and in poor air circulation environments. Some manufactured homes are set in a pit to give an attractive low profile curb appeal, much like a site built home. Others are installed above ground and some even on full basement. On the subset types, there’s not a lot of room for the configuration of the female form to navigate easily from one end of the home to the other. While trying to do the military crawl underneath, my bottom inevitably pops up and then when I try to balance out, my head often jerks up and whamm—straight into the I-beam. My male co-workers find this particularly funny and when they hear my yelps as my body parts bang and clang against metal, I hear uncontrollable laughter. Fortunately YouTube has yet to find me underneath the dank and dirty world that is the manufactured home contractor’s domain. Believe me, we see it all, spiders, snakes, rats, centipedes, scorpions, dead carcasses (cats, rats, bunnies, and yes even a coyotes) not to mention standing water, sewer leaks, falling insulation, splitting marriage lines, overextended screw jacks, shifting or compromised supports. I have yet to find any buried treasure but we frequently find several cases of empty beer cans which may be the reason many of the homes we work on seem to be set up off kilter right from the beginning. (more…)