I’ve always wanted to live on a houseboat — now I know it’s cheaper, too!

 Posted by on 6 January 2010  Modern Life
Jan 062010
 

I don’t know why I’ve always been attracted to the idea of living on a houseboat. Maybe it’s the romance of the sea. Maybe it’s the possibility of escape — or of wanderlust. Maybe it’s the sheer absurdity of the house/boat mashup. Or maybe it’s because of some dimly-remembered action movie where the main character lived in a houseboat (Lethal Weapon? or a Dirty Harry?).

Either way, something about houseboats has always tugged at my heart.

Now I learn that it can be surprisingly affordable, too!

Many big cities — built up around rivers or on seashores — have long since become unaffordable for me. I simply can’t buy a million-dollar apartment. But mooring fees are a lot cheaper than rent. Consider the case of Rainer Cole, in London. Fifteen years ago, he bought an old fishing trawler for £5,000 and had it towed up the Thames to Vauxhall (I’m no London geographer, but it looks to be pretty central). He pays £500 a month in moorage fees. That’s ridiculously cheap.

Now, after 15 yaers of sweat equity (Cole says he’s spent very little money fixing up the boat, just time), the old trawler has had a complete facelift.

And it looks awesome — engine room and fuel tanks ripped out and replaced with kitchen and bedrooms; floors that used to pile up with gutted fish are now amazing living areas.

Check out the New York Times article — and don’t miss the slideshow. So, how does Cole feel about river living?

“It doesn’t really have any disadvantages,” he said. “London has become so compressed, with more and more people living in a small area nowadays, and living on the river is really quite an escape.”

Colour me jealous.

Grant Hamilton

  • Mike Waddell

    I have always wondered why no one appears to have even a shantyboat anywhere along the Assiniboine near Brandon. While lakes such as at Rivers, Minnedosa, Even Oak Lake could easily provide a relatively inexpensive getaway compared to the price of waterfront cottages. I would imagine that keeping a houseboat maintained for actually motoring around could be a challenge dollar wise but compared to taxes and purchase of a cottage it might make sense.

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

    I’ve kind of pondered the same thing myself — at least, idly. My guess, though, is that there’s a lack of big-enough boats, coupled with the difficulty of winterizing them. Couple that with the *relative* inexpense of having a cottage at any one of the 100,000 MB lakes, plus the *relative* inexpense of rent/housing, and I suppose the economics don’t quite make sense.

  • Mike Waddell

    Yes, idle pondering is all that has occurred in my mind on the matter.

    While mountain biking several years agi, I will not reveal the location, I did happen upon a campsite beside a body of water where someone had set themselves up quite an elaborate setup.

    Still not sure if they were squatting or if it was just an inexpensive camping place. If a person is serious about finding themselves in a rustic shelter environment there are options that will work, even year round in our climate. I seem to recall a book in my childhood entitled “My Side of the Mountain” in which a young man runs away and lives in the Adirondack mountains on a subsistence basis.

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

    Based on the drafts in my house, I’m pretty sure it qualifies as a “rustic shelter environment.”

  • Mike Waddell

    I can relate having lived in two of those myself. The house we brought back from abandonment in 1986 had a small room in the back of the second story that was really an attic of sorts. It was so cold in there I would wake up with frost on my blankets.

    When we moved into the house previous to our current project, in weather like this we would wake up to temperatures less than 10 degrees in the house…. That was with the electric furnace chugging full bore once the wood fired portion of the furnace burned out for the night.

    Yes, a starter home is exactly that. You should enter the online RBC contest for 25,000 dollars towards energy efficiency reno’s. Maybe one of us will win ;) .

  • http://seattlehome.com/houseboats Seattle Houseboats

    Finding moorage near a big city is the hardest part. We have houseboats in Seattle for as little as $60,000, but an owned slip might cost you $200,000. Rentals slips are sometimes available at $500/mo plus a few hundred in maintenance fees. Not bad for waterfront living.