The Drunken Boat

Having known for a year-and-a-half that we intended to convert a barge into our new home we’ve had plenty of time to watch the market and see any number of suitable/unsuitable candidates come and go.

Key to the project has been re-cycling/up-cycling and the last thing we really wanted to do was take a fully fitted-out working houseboat just to ‘retire’ it and put it on land – no, what we really wanted was something that was still solid but could be considered as a ‘project’ and in need of attention.

Price was also obviously going to be a driving factor but we also soon realised that other things would be equally as important. When we do the final pricing-up one of the major costs is going to be the transportation of our barge to where we’re going to be living – we can’t change the site position nor the fact that it’s going to take a huge lifting job to crane things into position so all we can affect is how close the barge is when we purchase it.

This has lead to plenty of ‘bargain’ barges being dismissed just purely due to distance away from us or their lack of a working engine. Or any engine at all.

The next core requirement was dimensions – the site being the shape of a turnip and really quite small means that there are very real restraints on how large we could go and the logistics of transporting our barge by road has put genuine restrictions on the height, width and weight of what could be brought to site.

Once we knew we were on the home straight with our planning application we started the online search in earnest. By far the best place to start looking was Apollo Duck as this is a bit of a catch-all for anything that floats – barges, houseboats, commercial – we scoured them all daily to check and compare suitable candidates (though having said that, it’s not a fast-moving marketplace) until one day we came across our dream home – a Lee Lighter that was unconverted, full of plant life and moored on the Thames in Surrey – as close to West Sussex as we could hope for.

An excited trip up to the Thames and we were soon jumping around on a 1930’s barge originally made for carrying goods around East London and the river Lee. All giant rivets and dents from ill-judge dock maneuvers – and this thing looked HUGE! A quick going-over with the tape rule and the figures didn’t lie – this beautiful and majestic steel mother was just what we were after.