The Drunken Boat

Cutting out the first access door in the side of the barge With all of the steel we’ve been cutting out, inside the barge, alongside the piles of...

Starting the process of cutting out some steel   One major part of the project at this early stage is the cutting out of the two large bulkheads...

Getting to grips with 90 years of rust With a project that is anything else but straight forward, life has recently decided to also put it’s own special...

Can we dig it? Yes, we can! Or, more accurately, yes we need to in order to move the project along. Having held out ’till the end of...

In case you don’t follow us on YouTube we’ve just uploaded a quick barge tour video to our channel for all to see. I would normally do a...

Though it would appear that we have done NOTHING on our project for the whole of the summer, the truth is more mundane. The day after our barge...

Our Thames barge finally makes it to site So it’s true what they say – time flies when your stress levels are off the scale and you can’t...

Lifting our barge for its last great journey… So – the scene was set. On the very day that the building-works started on the land where we were...

Preparing our self-build site It was the start of the new year and we were happy in the knowledge that we’d got a few months of engineering calculations...

So to save you any kind of drain on your time we have distilled the last year and a half of site clearance down to a handy pocket-sized...

So with the project about to move into the realms of big things happening (big diggers, big lorries and big cranes) we’ve just quietly been getting on with...

There is one area of creating your own dream (nightmare?) home that you never see on television – the mind-numbingly long and unhelpful full planning application process. Then...

Looking through the site progress in the blog, it’s all starting to look like a typical building site where the area is turned into some kind of muddy...

A few weeks after viewing our potential new home and we returned to clear out some of the debris in the barge to allow our surveyor a chance...

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...

Knowing that our planning application and subsequent appeal would take forever we made busy with getting to grips with our site. Most of the plot being the ubiquitous...

If you’re going to clear a site of plant life (even a site as bereft of wildlife as ours) then you’ll want to be re-planting to provide the...

Or, to put it another way, if you turn your back for five minutes on blackthorn it will put out suckers to start a new tree or simply...

Finding our self build plot “It’s a carrot!” “!?!!” “It looks like a giant carrot!” Maybe not the best way to start focusing in on your dream self...