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Junior Davidson, 20, learned the hard way that you don't always get what you pay for.

"When I got there, it was just disgusting," said his mother, Mary Ferguson, for whom he bought a Lemon Creek trailer home. "It was horrid. The smell, like, slapped me in the face right when I walked in the door."

The trailer had rotting floors, moldy appliances, broken cupboards and mouse feces throughout. The toilet in one bathroom was falling through the floor.

Davidson, who goes to college in Wisconsin, found an ad on Craigslist for a 1979 trailer in Lemon Creek for $32,000 that looked decent. He and his partner, Aaron Belovsky, are coming back to Juneau for six months and his mother and three siblings needed a temporary place to move into by the end of the month.

"It was just a basic Craigslist ad," Davidson said. "The pictures online looked pretty decent."

Ferguson looked at the outside of the trailer in person and said it looked decent enough. Davidson and Belovsky decided to buy the trailer and transferred $32,000 into the owner's bank account. Ferguson said the seller, 30-year-old Young Nguyen, is a former Juneau resident now living in San Diego for military officer training.

Nguyen could not be reached for comment.

Ferguson picked up the title and key on Tuesday and went to look at the inside of the trailer for the first time later that night. She called her son and they immediately tried to reverse the transaction.

Ferguson said Nguyen had insisted on getting the money transferred before handing over the key or title.

"All of a sudden, he wasn't answering any calls, wasn't answering any of the text messages," she said.

They waited for two days with no response from Nguyen and decided they needed to begin remodeling the trailer because Ferguson and her three younger children needed a place to live before Nov. 1.

"We waited as long as we could hoping that he reversed it and realized, 'Oh my God, these are Juneau people,'" she said. She later realized she and Nguyen have mutual friends.

Davidson said he spoke with a lawyer and decided the fees would be too costly to pursue legal recourse. He said he feels more disappointed than anything.

"I just wanted to get my money back and he could have his crappy trailer back and we'd be all good," Davidson said. "It's kind of disappointing to see what money creates."

He felt he was doing a good deed by helping his family during a transition period, but only ended up with problems.

"I didn't think that it would be this hard to do something this simple," Davidson said. "It ended up being not what I thought it was."

Word spread about the transaction and friends of Ferguson and Davidson have stepped up to help make the trailer livable before the end of the month. A group of friends spent Saturday cleaning and repairing the trailer and have donated cleaning supplies, paint, lumber and time, Ferguson said.

"I'm just really happy that the community is coming together and helping out," Davidson said, who won't be back in Juneau until the first week of November. "It's really cool."

People should be wary of making large purchases over the Internet, he said.

"People purchase things over the Internet all the time and most of the time it's a safe deal," Davidson said. "I don't know, you should just research it more thoroughly. People should just be upfront and honest rather than being (greedy) and trying to get ahead."

Ferguson said he learned that buyers should look at things firsthand rather than trusting a picture on the Internet.

"Please be warned about online purchases, because even if you get pictures that doesn't mean that's what your getting, because the pictures that they sent obviously aren't what we got. ... You can't trust a picture. A picture I guess isn't worth a million words anymore."

• Contact reporter Eric Morrisonat 523-2269.