Hi guys, welcome aboard the boat.
Come inside and have a look.
Mind your head.
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The boat built in total came to about 65,000 pounds.
Two and a half grand to get it craned into the water,
and 10 to 15 thousand pounds on doing the interior.
So welcome to the living room.
I have an unhealthy obsession with the leopard print.
I didn’t do the entire room because I know that there’s limits.
We have a wood burner and we absolutely love it in the winter.
We have it on full power which is probably actually a bit tropical in here.
Grate, we actually got made especially by another boater.
She is a welder, and she does the most incredible things.
My sister bought this for as a kinda house warming gift.
*LOUD BELL RINGING*
A great noisy toy for our young son.
All of our son’s toys are pretty much in this little box here,
which doubles up as the coffee table.
So, this thing my brother actually gave to us, and we decided to cut out the front bit
to have somewhere to store all the wood.
We’ve had to be slightly clever, most things have dual purpose.
Welcome to the kitchen.
It’s one of my favorite parts of the boat.
I didn’t want to just buy a kitchen, like here’s your kitchen.
I wanted to kind of build it.
All of the cupboards
I had found over a period of about three or four months
while the boat was being built.
This one had come to us from an old school,
and I guess there had been a load of them
and they were all numbered, and we just got number 13 and 14.
This white cabinet here, I bought it off a lady on eBay.
And I told her what I planned to do with it,
which was to use it as a cabinet on my boat.
She sent me a message a couple of months later
saying you’re never gonna guess what you’ve started.
We’ve just put our house up for sale.
We’ve been inspired by you and your story and we’re buying a boat.
That kinda always makes me happy, kinda remembering that.
So, all the floors are reclaimed floorboards
that my dad, very nicely, drove around London
finding them in skips and collecting them all together.
They’re all different sizes if you pay attention and actually look at it.
So, it was a bit of a jigsaw, piecing them together.
I think it kinda makes the whole boat seam
more like a floating home, rather than an actual boat.
Obviously, the tiles are the crown and glory of this bathroom.
I kind of wish that I’d actually kinda just done it everywhere.
I think my boyfriend put his foot down slightly.
The practicalities of having a bath on a boat are probably quite small.
If you’re in the bath and a boat goes past,
it kinda rocks it very gently, and it’s a very kind of
dreamy situation, basically.
The shower can be slightly impractical, as we’re both quite tall.
My boyfriend’s 6 foot 4,
he generally showers sitting down now, because
he’s just too big for it.
Originally, we had a bamboo curtain with Our Lady Guadalupe on it.
But as soon as the baby came we realized it was super impractical.
It was like pulling it down, it was mildly dangerous.
So, we took that away, didn’t have a door for about a year,
and then designed these saloon doors which open both ways,
and I found this fabric, and upholstered them so that
you can see her from both sides.
The bathroom’s actually quite big in comparison to a lot of London flats.
Most boats have one long walkway.
I wanted to have it more, kinda evenly spread out.
Which is why you walk directly from the kitchen into the bathroom,
because it means that we’ve, like,
maximized the space as much as possible.
It’s quite free flowing.
This is obviously our son's room.
My favorite part of the room is definitely the wall that we’ve put up.
Our son gets to look at it everyday,
although I’m not sure he really appreciates it.
Another one of my favorite things in here
is the patchwork quilt that my friends made
for me when I was pregnant, and they each got a little square.
It’s just like a really special thing for me that I love.
These are our son’s soft, cuddly toys.
They generally have all been presents from people,
or like the odd one that I found in
a charity shop.
We tend to buy stuff kind of second hand, or used,
it’s kind of in my nature.
The only thing in here that has been bought new was the cot.
I’ve dressed it up in old vintage textiles,
and that’ll do for me.
Color is very important to me.
I love color.
I love seeing it, being with it,
and I think that a child’s room should be really colorful
and playful.
It’s where they spend a lot of their time,
and it gets their imagination moving.
Whenever people hear that we live on the boat with the baby
their first question is, “How does that work?”
But...
it just does,
I mean I can’t think of anything that we’ve
specifically done that
would be different if we didn’t live on a boat.
He’s really adventurous,
so he always wants to go outside.
So, we got one of those backpacks that’s also a lead.
We tied it to the bottom of the step,
so he can have an exact, kind of,
radius of the deck.
Passerbys would feel nervous seeing this little baby
peering over the edge, like he’s about to go in the water.
I was like,
“Don’t worry! I care about my baby
as much as you do, he’s fine.”
And then this is our bedroom.
I guess the most special thing about this room
is on days like this in the summer,
you can kinda just lie on the bed,
with the doors open, with a little breeze coming in,
and you can just kinda bliss out.
I don’t think that anything I’ve ever really done
has a very structured plan to it.
Everything just kinda comes together quite naturally.
I knew that I didn’t want it to feel like a boat.
The couple of boats I had been on, you know you’re on a boat.
It feels very small and enclosed.
It feels like you have to kind of edge your way around,
and that’s what I didn’t want.
There’s obviously inconveniences of living on a boat,
we’ve run out of water in the dead of winter,
the canal was completely frozen over,
we had a 4-month-old baby,
and no water for 2 weeks.
And that’s the kinda thing that we can just-
we got around it, we figured it out.
It’s not always easy.
I would recommend living on a boat,
but it’s not for the faint hearted.
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