Most Florence County setup calls start with one number, so we'll start there too. On a pad that's already prepared, budget $1,500–$3,000 for a single-wide and $3,000–$6,000 for a double-wide — the wider figure covers the double-wide's marriage-line bolt-up and the seal down its second section. A large share of these jobs are storm-recovery work: after a hurricane or a Great Pee Dee flood pushes families out, a replacement unit has to be landed, leveled, and anchored fast, and that demand keeps our crews moving across the county year-round. The county seat is the City of Florence, the Pee Dee's commercial hub at the I-95 and I-20 crossing; Lake City is the farm-and-arts town to the south, Johnsonville runs out toward the Lynches River, and Timmonsville, Pamplico, Coward, Olanta, Scranton, and Quinby dot the surrounding tobacco-and-soybean country. The set itself is the craft that converts a delivered box riding temporary blocks into a level, anchored, code-legal home, and it decides most of how a manufactured home performs over the next twenty years — a distinct trade from the haul, which is finished the instant the toter pulls off the driveway. Mobile Home Mover Pro handles the whole sequence — positioning, piers, leveling, the marriage line, tie-downs, then the county permit and the Florence inspection — with no hand-off between trades where mistakes slip through.
The price, and what pushes it up
The $1,500–$3,000 single-wide and $3,000–$6,000 double-wide brackets above assume graded gravel or compacted-soil bearing that's ready to build on. Costs rise when a site needs extra piers spanning a wide wall opening, augers driven deeper, or a poured runner footing beneath the beams. Ground is the swing factor here just as it is on the haul: a well-drained lot in the middle of Florence or Timmonsville sets quickly, while the loose sandhill fill and river-bottom soil around the Great Pee Dee and Lynches demands a wider footing so piers don't sink and drop one corner within a year. Storm-recovery placements add their own line item — a replacement home going back into the flood-prone bottoms usually sits on a taller elevated pad above base flood elevation, which means more blocking height and more piers. Bundling the set with the move is nearly always the cheapest route, since the toter, blocking, leveling, and anchoring share a single mobilization; see Florence County mobile home movers for transport and how much it costs to move a mobile home statewide for the wider breakdown.
How the county permits and inspects the work
Nothing here rides on a verbal agreement — every set is filed and signed off. Florence County processes permits through its OneStop portal at planning.florenceco.org, a custom platform with an advanced permit search filterable by permit type, date, and parcel and used for building, trade, and manufactured-home setup records. That Florence County permit portal already carries upward of 1,997 manufactured-home permits — 1,767 new-home setups and 50 relocations/moves, submitted by roughly 101 distinct licensed installers and movers — so we know exactly how the county classifies a placement like yours before the quote goes out. When the unit is also being hauled onto the site, a separate moving permit issues under S.C. Code § 31-17-360 once the treasurer confirms the prior year's property taxes are paid, and SCDOT permits the oversize load on the public road. After the home is down, a local building inspector measures pier spacing, leveling, anchoring, and utility connections against the manufacturer's installation manual and the federal install standard, and only then is the certificate of occupancy granted. We file the OneStop setup permit, line up the § 31-17-360 moving permit with the haul, and meet the inspector in Florence, so no one is left chasing paperwork through the county building. For the wider legal frame, read our South Carolina mobile home moving laws.
Piers under the beams, then dead-level to a quarter inch
Everything begins beneath the floor. A manufactured home carries its load on two or more steel I-beams, and each beam has to bear on a pier system that routes the full house weight down into firm ground. Our crews stack piers from 8x16-inch concrete block on a footing pad — poured or precast — sizing that footing so the soil never carries more than it can bear, which is a bigger deal than most owners realize on the loose sandhill and river-bottom soils ringing Florence County. Piers land under every I-beam at the interval the home's manufacturer installation manual calls for, typically 8 to 10 feet apart, plus extras along the marriage line, under wide wall openings, and beneath concentrated loads such as a masonry fireplace. With the blocking in, the home is leveled: hardwood shim plates and wedge pairs on each pier bring the chassis true to about 1/4 inch end to end, confirmed against a water or laser line run the full length rather than judged by sight. This is structural, not cosmetic — let the frame run out of level by half an inch and it twists, doors quit latching, windows bind, corner drywall seams split, and the low end of the roof holds water. Do it dead-level up front and it still reads level years on; skimp on Pee Dee fill and you'll be booking a re-level before the first cold snap. Once the frame is set, the leveling gets verified and the crawl space is ready to skirt.
Joining the halves, closing in, hooking up utilities
A double-wide brings one operation that single-wides never see: mating the two halves. Each section travels and permits on its own, then is pulled together at the pad and locked along the marriage line — the centerline where the floors, walls, and roof of both halves bolt and lag into one structure. Our crews close it with lag bolts on the manufacturer's schedule, join the ridge beam, and seal the run with gasket and roof flashing so the joint stays dry. Level and joined, the home gets its utility stub-outs tied in — water, sewer or septic, power, and gas — and the crawl space closed with skirting over a 6-mil vapor-retarder ground cover. With well over a thousand new-home setups already on the county's books, concentrated through Florence and Lake City, joining a double-wide's marriage line is everyday local work here rather than an unusual request. Nail the bolt-up early and the center ceiling seam holds, even as the Pee Dee ground swells and shrinks with every wet-and-dry cycle beneath it.
Tie-downs sized for the inland Pee Dee wind zone
Leveling keeps the home standing; anchoring stops it from sliding or lifting when the weather turns — and the federal rule matches that requirement to where you build. Under HUD 24 CFR 3280 Subpart G, every manufactured home is constructed and must be tied down to an assigned Wind Zone. Florence County, along with the rest of the inland Pee Dee and Midlands, falls in Wind Zone I — rated for about 70-mph design wind, one tier under the Wind Zone II standard the coastal Grand Strand and Lowcountry counties answer to. A Zone I set relies on auger ground anchors and frame-tie straps at the manufacturer's spacing, lighter than the tighter anchoring and over-the-top straps the coastal Zone II counties require — though soft river-bottom soil may still demand longer augers or stabilizer plates to reach firm bearing. And the storm history here is no abstraction: Florence County holds 28 federal disaster declarations on record, driven by hurricanes and Great Pee Dee river flooding — which is exactly why so much of our work is storm-recovery replacement, and why a home tied down below its data-plate rating will neither ride out a named storm nor clear inspection. We check the home's data-plate wind zone against the install county before any anchor turns; the complete tie-down spec sits on our Florence County anchoring page. (Source: FEMA OpenFEMA disaster-declaration data.)
Pad to occupancy, handled by one crew
A Florence County set follows a set sequence: park the home over the pad, raise the pier system on footings, bring the chassis level to a quarter inch, join the marriage line on a double-wide, tie it to Wind Zone I, close in the skirting, and connect the utilities — followed by the OneStop setup permit and the building inspection. We close out setup, leveling, and anchoring as a single unbroken job, frequently in the same week the home arrives. Whether your particular unit is fit to set at all, or whether a pre-1976 home is better cleared with Florence County demolition or carried off whole through Florence County removal, is the first question our crew settles on the pre-set site visit. Setup anchors our Pee Dee coverage within mobile home services across South Carolina, from the Upstate lake country through the Midlands to the coast.