Sometimes I have a dream and my husband's sold the boat
and bought a little house with no garden.
And we don’t know our neighbours.
And I hate it and I wake up and then we’re still on the boat
and I’m happy again.
I’m Katy Saunders and I live on this boat with my husband, my two children
and we live on the Grand Union Canal.
I don't feel like I'm in London.
OK, this is our boat, come on in.
This is the living room.
And
and then this is the bit that the kids like to do, really.
But this is where we sleep.
Before I was pregnant with my son, we did a lot of work on the boat. We had the boat
taken out of the water, chopped in half,
pulled apart, and we had another eight foot welded in.
So that we could get more space and continue living on the boat with children.
And when we did that, we redesigned
the middle section of the boat, so that we could have an extra room,
and a corridor
and we’ve made, or I mostly made, the bookcase when I was pregnant and
and they love that.
In fact it only ever gets shut just before someone new comes around
and then the children like to push it open.
Well, they pretend that they
that they don't have a bedroom before that happens.
So, this used to be our bedroom. So it’s the biggest space in the boat, but
we realised our bed fits in what was the nursery, so we’ve
squished ourselves in there and given them the most room.
Because you’ve gunnels going round the side of the boat, you get extra space which is much more useful
to them than to us.
So
she’s got her toys and her books in there.
She thinks it’s like a little princess bed.
And they love the boat because the don’t know any different.
They like the outside element of it.
They like that their friends think it’s cool.
We’re lucky because we have this space outside of our boat and this is what made it really appealing –
It's not just us inside the boat. So when it comes to the spring,
just come outside.
Hey, chuk chuk. Try that. What do you think of that? You can have it.
My parents were permanently doing DIY, or gardening.
And the weekends were work, it wasn’t looking for a way to entertain us.
We were entertained because we were building dens in the garden,
or building shacks, or whatever it was. So I’ve grown up with this
this feeling that life is work and if you want something you need to make it.
Yeah, you don’t get much time when the children are at school.
Bit of tidying, bit of gardening, bit of washing.
And if I have any time left, then that’s for me to work on my business.
So that always comes last, really.
Unfortunately, that’s spare time, that’s a luxury.
This is my spot. This is where I cook, this is where my children eat,
this is where they draw pictures, do homework.
I can see what they’re watching on telly, I can see what they’re doing.
We all live together and
that’s what I like about boat live, I like that we
we all live in the same space.
You know each other very well.
So I’ve got the water trough in the field,
out there, and the horses come to that everyday, so I get to see the horses everyday, I see my garden.
I can – what I like about this boat is if the children are outside, I can see
the whole garden through the window, so I can keep an eye on them.
And they know to stay on the mooring and then, if I’m in the garden, I’ll say, "You can go as far as
Lucy's mooring, or Jenny's mooring" and they'll come straight back.
Sometimes.
We have less, so we borrow more.
I like the idea that if you need something – if I need the long
tape measure to measure my boat, or the mooring, or measure a space up,
I go to Ben, who has the
longest tape measure on the mooring.
Someone will have a crowbar, someone will have
an angle-grinder, whatever it is you need
we all lend things to each other
Some people have moved here
through circumstance – so either they’ve lost a partner, split up with a partner.
A lot of the time it’s because they’ve looked for cheaper accommodation.
And somewhere to live that doesn’t cost so much.
Some of the people have done it for the lifestyle. They want to live a different life.
Some people have grown up with it.
I think some people have just always known boats.
And you get a real mix, there’s a people from all walks of life down here.
We needed something like this, I think it got
very
boring and stale living in a house.
Not that that is the case for everyone, just that that was the case for us.
We had a house
nearby and it was near the canal so we liked looking at all the boats
and we owned the house together, but in those days I was a chef, so I was working
60 hours a week. My husband worked
9-5:30 and as he came home,
I would be leaving for work and we never saw each other.
We somehow managed to do our house up, but
we never saw each other. And then we nearly broke up.
We did break up – we broke up for two months.
And we were going to sell the house. We were going to…
Tom started looking at what he'd do with half the money.
He thought about living on a boat.
I think we decided,
or Tom suggested, that
it wasn’t us that were broken.
It was everything else, it was the stresses of paying the bills, and
working, both working all hours, to pay a mortgage on a house you’re never in.
So
we decided to change it all – he suggested that I left work, I stopped being a chef
and we bought a boat together
and it's what we did.
And it was the best thing we did.
Because, since we’ve had the children, it means that I haven’t had to go back to work,
which is something that I didn’t want to do, I wanted to be able to be at home
for the children. I wanted to be able to pick them up from school.
And
I don’t think we would have ever
got a view, like we have here, or a garden, like we have here, or a community like we have,
if we were still in the house.
We would have had to probably moved somewhere completely different to be able to get that.
The kids are more boaters than we are.
They’ve lived here 100% of their life, whereas we’re newbies,
we’ve only lived her for 12 years.
And we've been married for 10 – nearly 10.
And we got married in the field just outside our mooring.
We’re planning to relive our wedding and put some tents
out in the field and have a firepit and some music and some drinks and celebrate
being together for 10 years.
It’s not much, but I think in this day and age,
we need a bit more celebrating.