Blocks or Piers? How a Park Model Tiny Home Is Set & Leveled
Setup & Foundation
The day your tiny home gets set and leveled is the day it stops being a unit on a trailer and becomes a home. It happens in a few hours, most of it disappears behind the skirting, and almost nobody thinks about it again. That's a mistake.
Nearly everything you'll ever notice about how your home lives day to day, whether the doors latch, whether the floors feel solid, whether the windows seal out a January cold snap, traces straight back to how well it was set and leveled. So here are the basics: what setting and leveling actually is, the two main ways it gets done, what each one is good at, and how tie-downs turn a parked home into a permanently and legitimately placed one.
What "set and leveled" actually means
Your tiny home isn't poured onto a slab like a stick-built house. It's built on a pair of steel I-beams, the same frame it rode in on. Once it's on your lot, the crew lifts it, usually with hydraulic bottle jacks, builds a row of supports under those beams, and lowers the home onto them. Those supports are called piers, they're spaced every several feet along the frame, and they carry the entire weight of the home down to the ground.
Setting is building those supports.
Leveling is fine-tuning every one of them so the home sits dead level and each pier carries its fair share.
A good crew works to a fraction of an inch with a water level or laser. Get it right and the load spreads evenly across every support. Get it wrong and a handful of piers carry more than they should, and the home starts working against itself.
Here's the part people skip: an out-of-level home is the number one cause of accelerated wear in factory-built homes. When it drifts out of level, you see it everywhere.
- Doors that stick, won't latch, or swing open on their own
- Cracks in the drywall, especially at the corners and around windows and doors
- Windows that rack out of square and stop sealing, which drives up your heating bill
- Floors that feel springy, or humps along the center line
- Items that roll off a "flat" countertop
None of that is a defect in the home. It's a home that should be sitting level and isn't. Which is exactly why how it gets set in the first place is worth understanding.
The two ways it gets done: concrete blocks vs. metal piers
Two systems do the actual supporting, and both are great options. Most setups use one or a mix of both. The right fit comes down to your needs: your lot, the height of the home, the soil, and local code. A good installer matches the method to the job.
Both methods start at the same place: solid, compacted ground. Your home needs to sit on a compacted base, ideally compacted crushed rock or a hard surface like concrete or asphalt, not bare dirt that shifts and traps water. From there, each pier is built up from a footing, the pad that spreads its load into the ground and sits below the frost line where winters are cold, up to the steel beam. What changes is how the pier itself is built.
Concrete block piers
The traditional method, and still the most common. The crew dry-stacks 8x8x16 concrete blocks on a firm footing, caps the top, and snugs the small gap to the beam with hardwood shims. Short piers are a single column of block. Once a pier goes over about 36 inches tall, the blocks get double-stacked and interlocked so the column can't rack sideways.
What concrete blocks are good at:
- Proven. This is how factory-built homes have been set for decades. Nothing about it is experimental.
- Strong straight down. Concrete doesn't compress, so a block column carries serious vertical load.
- Cheap and available. Block is inexpensive and you can source it anywhere.
- Won't rust. Concrete doesn't corrode, so the material itself goes the distance.
- Easy to fine-tune. Shims let the installer dial in height and snug each pier tight to the beam.
Metal piers
A metal pier is an engineered steel stand that sits on a footing with an adjustable, threaded head on top. Instead of stacking block up to the beam, the installer turns the head up or down to the exact height.
What metal piers are good at:
- Adjustable by design. The threaded head is the whole point. Re-leveling down the road can be as simple as turning the adjuster instead of jacking the home and re-stacking block.
- Engineered and rated. Each pier has a known, tested load capacity, so there's no guesswork about what it holds.
- Fast. They go in quickly, and they come back to level quickly.
- Built for height and uneven ground. Where a tall block column gets fussy, a steel pier handles it cleanly.
- Bracing-ready. Steel piers can be mechanically bolted to the frame, which is what seismic and high-wind bracing systems depend on.
- Corrosion-protected. Quality piers are galvanized or coated to stand up to weather and soil.
So which one is right?
Often the answer is both. Plenty of homes are set on steel piers where adjustability and height help most, and block elsewhere, or all one way depending on the site. What matters isn't the brand of support under your floor. It's that the whole system was sized for your home and your lot, set by someone who does this every week, and leveled to spec.
What it costs. In our service area, most homes can be set for around $2,800 on concrete blocks or about $3,000 on metal piers. The crew we work with brings all the supplies, and we can roll the cost into your home invoice so it's handled in one place. Tie-downs are an optional add at about $1,400, and you can do them now or stage them for later. Your exact number depends on the lot, the access, and how tall the piers need to be.
Tie-downs: what holds it down
Setting and leveling is what your home sits on. Tie-downs, also called hurricane straps, are the opposite job: they're what holds it down. Leveling carries the weight to the ground. Tie-downs keep the home from sliding or lifting when the wind blows hard or the ground shakes.
A tie-down system is heavy galvanized-steel straps tied to the home's steel frame and connected to earth anchors. The anchors aren't just stakes in the dirt. The common kind screws deep into the soil like a giant auger, or drives in on cross-stakes where the ground is hard, and the strap then tensions over the frame so it can't work loose. The hardware is rated to hold serious load: HUD-spec strapping runs about 1¼ inches wide and resists a working load north of 3,000 pounds per anchor. Factory-built homes need this more than stick-built houses do, because they're lighter and they sit up off the ground on piers, so wind can get underneath and push up. Your piers are excellent at holding weight down. They don't resist uplift or a sideways shove. Tie-downs do.
Here's the part most people don't realize: tie-downs usually aren't required to get your home set and lived in, and you can add them later. We don't require them, and the majority of counties don't either. Plenty of owners skip them up front to keep initial costs down. Still, this is a zoning question, not a guess, so confirm your county's requirements before you decide. Some areas, especially in earthquake and high-wind country, do require them, and even where they're optional they're a smart add. Treat leveling as the must-have and tie-downs as the add you can stage when it makes sense for your site and your budget.
The part that actually matters: who sets it
On paper, this looks simple. Blocks, shims, a laser level. And in theory, it is. In practice, setting and leveling is the one part of this whole process worth paying a professional for, and it isn't close.
First, a point that trips people up. Your home is a Park Model RV, not a manufactured home. It's built and certified as an RV to the RVIA / ANSI A119.5 standard, so in most places it doesn't go through the state installer tag and setting inspection a manufactured home does. The RVIA certification the home already carries is the certification, and a standard placement is closer to setting an RV than permitting a house.
The installer licensing does exist where it applies. Washington certifies manufactured and mobile home installers through L&I (RCW 43.22A), and Oregon licenses manufactured dwelling installers through the state Building Codes Division. Whether any of that reaches your park model depends on your county and on whether you're placing it permanently. Some Washington jurisdictions do require a certified installer for a permanent setup, so confirm with your local building department before you set.
Requirement or not, who sets it matters enormously. A good crew has this down to a science, stands behind the work, and comes back if something drifts. On a home that will settle a little over its life, that last part is the whole game.
And here's the one that costs people real money if they get it wrong. Your manufacturer's warranty leans on a proper install. If the home isn't set correctly and you start seeing the classic signs of an out-of-level home, drywall cracks, doors that won't latch, windows racked out of square, the manufacturer can deny the claim, and you lose the courtesy callbacks a professional setup comes with. A few thousand dollars saved on the set can cost you the warranty on the whole home.
That's how we do every home. An experienced crew sets it, we're there for the initial set, and we come back for the touch-ups.
Going permanent? This part is local. This guide is for park model owners all over the country, and the rules for turning one into a permanent, legally placed dwelling vary a lot by state and county. In Washington, a permanent install is done to the ANSI A225.1 standard and carries the Washington L&I insignia, which is part of what lets a park model qualify as a detached ADU under the state's rural ADU rules. Oregon treats them as RVs, and some places allow them as ADUs or residences, Portland and Salem among them, with a 2023 state law letting rural counties opt in. Plenty of other places allow no permanent placement at all. The through-line everywhere is the same: who sets it, and to what standard, is what makes it count. Confirm your county first, and our zoning & permits page is a good place to start.
Your home will settle. That's normal.
One more thing worth knowing up front. Even a perfect setup moves over time. Soil shifts with moisture and frost, shims compress, the ground does what ground does. Manufacturers recommend having your home checked for level every three to five years, and re-leveled if any pier has drifted more than about a quarter inch. It's routine maintenance, not a flaw in the home. Catch it early, before the doors start sticking and the drywall cracks, and it's a quick, cheap fix.
This is exactly the kind of visit one of the crews we work with, Re-Leveling Pros, handles, so when it's time for a check or a re-level you're not figuring it out alone.
The bottom line
Setting and leveling is the least glamorous and most important few hours in your tiny home's life. Whether it lands on block, on steel, or a mix of both, what matters is that the system fits your home and your lot, that it's set by an experienced crew that stands behind the work, and that anchoring gets added when your site or your county calls for it. That's the difference between a home that's parked and a home that's properly placed.
That's the part we handle
We coordinate transport, leveling, and setup so your home lands level, anchored, and done right the first time. And if you're still figuring out whether a tiny home is for you, the best way to understand any of this is to stand inside one.
Walk through a model in personMore on setup
- See how setup works: nwtinyhomes.com/delivery
- Read the full Buyer's Guide: nwtinyhomes.com/buyersguide
- Book a model walk-through: nwtinyhomes.com/scheduling
NW Tiny Homes · Snohomish, WA & Portland, OR
