Coming Unmoored

One of the magazines I enjoy reading is More. It’s geared to 40+ women and tends to have a lot of stories about women reinventing their lives.

The April 2008 issue includes an article entitled “How Much for that Dream?” One of the people featured is Ingrid Rasch, who purchased a Seattle floating home on the same dock as Tom Hank’s house from Sleepless in Seattle. Ms. Rasch paid $765,000 for her home and then invested almost $200,000 more making upgrades. The article concludes that people should “expect to pay $900,000 for a houseboat in move-in condition”.

This had me alternately laughing and wanting to cough up the human equivalent of a hairball.

Now, it should be said that the Seattle floating home community is quite pricey compared to Portland, where mine is. A home in Portland that would go for $200,000 could easily go for over a million in a trendy Seattle location. There’s nothing inaccurate there. However, there are certainly ways to purchase and live in a floating home that are far more economical than this article portrays.

I’ve always been fascinated by Thoreau’s accounting in Walden on what it cost him to build his cabin which was broken down to the 1/2 cent. In the interest of others who might harbor a dream to someday live in a floating home, let me give you an accounting for mine to-date…

So, it took me $75,668 rather than $900,000 to get into my floating home. Moreover, if I hadn’t had my heart set on the place I did, I could have moved into a slightly larger, more modern floating home with less of a view for $60,000 in the same marina.

The purchase price of the house itself was $35,667 (with closing costs factored in). It was as low as it was due to its small size and, more importantly, to the fact that the house needed its float rebuilt. (Floats, if done right, have about a 30-year life expectency and mine’s was up.) Another $40,000 has gone into rebuilding the float and expanding the deck.

It is my understanding that if you’re willing to be patient, you can still find floating homes in the $30-$40,000 range that don’t need the extensive float work mine did. Although, the average price for a floating home in the Portland market is somewhere in the area of $200,000. That’s still significantly lower than the More article might lead you to believe.

I pay a monthly moorage fee of $512 in my marina. This covers my slip space, gas, sewage, water, and trash service. Electricity, cable, and propane are at my own expense. (I have a small stove that currently runs on propane. I plan to switch over to natural gas soon.)

Should you want to buy your own slip rather than pay monthly moorage fees, slips near my marina are going for around $110,000 right now. However, normally in that situation you will still pay a monthly Homeowner’s Association fee. I’m told those average in the $200-$300 range in Oregon.

In summary, don’t be so quick to give up on your dream to live on the water if you don’t have a spare million or two laying around. There are ways to make it happen with a little ingenuity and creativity.

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