HouseBoat Living
In the days during lockdown, where we have had no choice but to learn how to live in close proximity to our families. In these days of forced constriction, I have drifted back often to a time when as a family we chose to live this way - on a boat in isolation on Toronto Island, Canada.
Some years earlier we had stumbled upon some idyllic liveaboard boats along a soggy rain-drenched Scottish lock side: even in the bad weather, this chance encounter had sown a seed for an alternative life.
It wasn’t until as a family of four we moved to Toronto City, Canada with its high property prices, far from our English Lake District roots ( where stepping outside was a stone’s throw from a country footpath,) that we realised how much we missed the natural environment on our door step.
A visit to the public park of Toronto Island one spring day and seeing the house boats moored in the lagoon, triggered our memory of Scotland and the plan began to hatch from there. A year later we had found a boat and a mooring on the island. The process of scaling our lives down began, deciding what was important. If we were to live comfortably in a small space year round, minimalism was key. It had to work: the boat was our only home, with no escaping back to a big house.
The view from the island of the city over a February frozen harbour.
It took over a year of long hours, days and nights, to transform a worn but classic vessel to more than its humble caravan-style 60s interior.
Complete contrast: the kids lived in the water during the hot and humid summers.
Toronto Island is a natural sand bar, a car-free nature reserve, a park and home to a small bohemian community with several mariners. Our back door was a labyrinth of lagoons where our boys could run wild, skate to school across a frozen lake in the long winters and spend hot, humid summers canoeing, bike riding and den building.
The beauty of the frozen desolate landscape in the winter months
In order to live year-round, we needed a system that would allow us to switch winter to summer and back to accommodate the extreme seasons. We devised a storage system that literally meant emptying our wardrobes into big sealed tubs and storing them in the hull of the boat, switching to a new season’s clothing. We became good at editing toys and ‘stuff’ as sanity was completely reliant on space and order.
Our living room/fore cabin, with herbs growing on the sill in summer!
Every space under and over beds was a locker for storage; every piece of furniture had dual and triple purposes.
Wild life was never far away: aft cabin/bedroom, TV rec room, showing off the high lacquer lustre cherry interior and curved desk design and bandit visitor!
From a build point of view, the reality was a full-time, four year, exhausting journey of hard graft. My husband learnt on the job and became a master cabinet maker, electrician, plumber, engineer and I Girl Friday. Due to his dogged determination and perfectionist nature, we eventually created this floating luxury home.
Dining room/bed slash coffee table: this table had three functions and came with the boat!
Many unforeseen, time-consuming tasks were relentlessly undertaken, like acres of teak hand rails to be stripped and re-varnished eight times for protection - necessary to create the deep teak ‘yacht glow’.
The varnishing continued to the interior with the same vigour, with a deep traditionally lacquered, luxury yacht finish. Brass hardware that cost three times more than the ordinary guaranteed to not rust, and the most expensive toilet ever from Germany!
Definitely not sustainable from a materials point of view - but a life lesson in how to pare down and reduce.
One of our rare excursions out for the Canadian house and home photo shoot.
We wanted to live close to the elements and feel energised, and being mindful of our energy use and waste, heightened our respect for the immediate environment and our impact upon it.
Extended summer living on the quayside in summer.
I can say the habits and disciplines have ever since informed the rest of my life and the homes I lived in.
I could go on about all the extra attention and costs involved in transforming a relatively small space into high spec living quarters… but I will only dwell on a few:
Oak floors with countersunk brass screws, filled with matching plugs, custom cupboards lined in cedar to guard against mildew (damp and moisture being our biggest nemesis).
We had romantic notions to escape across Lake Ontario and down the Hudson to New York when the urge took us, as well as other adventures that never happened: our longest voyage was to circumnavigate the island a few times, the cost of fuel with two eight-horsepower petrol engines being the reality check.
For the most part, our lifestyle was transformed from city dwelling to rural idyll, but with a 10-minute boat commute to the city centre, it was a pretty rare best of both worlds scenario.
4 page editorial in Canadian House and Home 2001