Coming Unmoored — Life in a Small Floating Home

I’m beginning to wonder if my ongoing posts of renovation angst are beginning to grow a bit stale. Since that’s where a great deal of my time and energy have been going, I’ve had trouble motivating to write about anything else. But one thing that continues to fascinate me without fail is reading about the creative solutions other small-housers have come up with.

So, while I continue to slog away at making my own place habitable, I plan to post brief write-ups every Friday morning on a variety of other small home examples.

Perhaps one of the most unusual solutions I’ve read about recently is a gentleman who’s decided to live in a seriously modified interior of a garbage truck. I love how he’s cleverly incorporated a sleeping loft, storage cabinets, a kitchen, and a work area into a limited amount of space. Plus, the concept of recycling a garage truck, of all things, makes me grin from ear to ear.

For additional photo and details, you can take a look at the story on ApartmentTherapy.

At the risk of some snarky comments from my best friend Wes, I’ll say that I’ve slept in some pretty strange places over the course of my life.

I’ve napped in the lowered sails of a 70 foot sailboat in the Bahamas. I’ve shared my bed with a very unhappy brown recluse spider. I’ve been in hotel rooms with multiple bullet holes in the bathroom door and a suspicious stain on the tile. But this is definitely the first time I’ve been in a hotel room that looks like it came straight out of a centerfold shoot for Ranger Rick. I kid you not.

I’m up in Portland to check on the status of the renovations on my house and to pick out colors for the new siding and roofing. Through my multiple forays back and forth to Portland this summer, I found a Quality Inn that’s two miles from the marina. That’s where I usually stay during the times I’m working from Oregon and dealing with the house.

Anyway, a new owner took over the place about two months ago. They’ve been redoing the rooms, which really needed some TLC. I’ve been in a couple of the remodeled rooms and, while somewhat bland, they’ve been fairly nice in terms of amenities.

This trip I had a bit of a shock. Instead of being on the ground floor, where I usually am, the desk clerk put me in one of the corner suites upstairs. So far so good. But my entire room is decorated to appear as though I’m in the middle of a forest manufactured by Disney.

There are clouds painted on the ceiling, pine boughs and tree trunks in every corner of the room, a bird’s nest tucked jauntily in the corner next to my lodgepole bed, and a picture of cranky-looking grizzly bear next to the desk. But the true highlight of the room has got to be the menagerie of lawn-ornament animals scattered with decorative abandon about the room. So far I’ve counted two deer, a raccoon, and a mallard duck who, for some inexplicable reason, is nesting in a heart-shaped basket woven of twigs.

I keep glancing over my shoulder expecting some demented version of Snow White to pop out of the shrubbery and offer me a freshly baked, Quality Inn cookie.

I have no idea how I’m going to manage to sleep here tonight. The only reason I haven’t run screaming from the room is that it also hosts the most spectacular Jacuzzi bathtub I’ve ever seen. This isn’t just a you-and-your-boyfriend-have-a-romantic-weekend-alone kind of tub. This is an invite-everyone-in-your-graduating-class-and-host-a-three-day-orgy kind of tub. (Don’t worry, Mom. I don’t know anyone in the area code who isn’t one of my contractors.)

Anyway, I intend to have a bubble-bath to end all bubble-baths tonight. After that, I’ll take my chances with the menagerie of woodland creatures. If worse comes to worse, I guess I can always sleep in the bathtub, right?

Early on after the purchase of my floating home, I posted an accounting of the estimated total costs of the purchase and renovations. Of course, that was written during the cheerful afterglow period of new home ownership before reality whacked me over the head with a 2 x 4. In other words, before the discovery of minor items like the fact that everything in the house was below code and that I had a colony of bats living beneath my siding.

So that no one goes into renovating an older floating home blindly bouyed on optimism by anything I’ve written, I plan on posting a series of updated accountings as the renovations progress.

Please don’t be too discouraged by my renovations costs, however. I’d like to point out that the same time my place was on the market, there was another house in the marina of about the same size, that had recently been restored, and was for sale for $65,000.

My home simply had what I felt was a much better view along the river, a rooftop deck, and a floor plan that I preferred. I fell in love with my little place, warts and all. If I’d chosen to operate from my head rather than my heart, I’d have been in a place several months ago for about half of what my place will eventually cost me.

Anyway, below is an updated accounting. As you will probably notice, there are several items on the list for which I have not yet gathered estimates. But here’s where things stand as of today.

My contractor Kenny recently mentioned the fact that he could have built me a new home from scratch faster and cheaper than what my little place will require. There are several reasons why that wasn’t an appealing option to me…

To begin with, one of the things that initially drew me to floating homes is the diversity of quirky architecture you find in the Seattle, Portland, and Sausalito communities that sprung up in the 1960’s onward.

Many of the first floating housers were colorful, anti-mainstream characters and you saw this reflected in the homes they created for themselves. Unfortunately, many of these same people were working with extremely limited funds and cobbled together living spaces that were neither durable nor anywhere near land-based building codes. Forty years later, many of these early homes have been torn down for scrap or carted off to landfills.

While my little cottage isn’t likely to appear on a National Trust registry anytime soon, part of its appeal to me was that I could invest my housing dollars into resuscitating one of the increasingly scarce survivors from early American floating home history.

Purchasing my home also allowed me to give new life to existing resources. Not all of the materials that were in the home at the time I purchased it are salvageable, but I’m reusing whatever I can. For example, we were able to rotate most of the large logs in the float, buying another 20 years or so of use rather than chopping down more large trees. I’m trying to ensure that when I replace materials it’s with more energy-efficient and earth-friendly options. I’m also donating materials that might be reuseable by someone else such as the propane stove.

I also liked a lot of the space-saving ideas and lines that were in my little home. I doubt I would have been as creative if I’d had someone draft a place from scratch. Instead, I’m building upon a history of prior homeowners’ innovations and ideas. I like that my home comes with its own prior history. My relationship with my new home is sort of like a midlife marriage. We’re both having to figure out how to adapt to one another’s quirks.

Perhaps the most important factor in my decision to salvage this house, however, was the realization that if I decided to build a new place from scratch, very few of the marina owners or floating home communities with homeowner associations would allow me to build anything under around 2000 square feet. I’m serious about my desire to downsize and didn’t want anything even close to that.

Similar to what you see on land, charming, small floating homes are being torn down and replaced with floating McMansions everywhere you turn. These new houses use every last inch of their slip space and tower two, and even three, stories above the water. Some even go so far as to rent or buy two adjoining slip spaces so they can expand even further. I wouldn’t want anything that big as my regular home but many of these houses are vacation homes. (Who the hell needs a 3,000+ square foot vacation home they use only a few time a year??)

No doubt part of what is feeding in to this phenomenon is the fact that floating home communities are usually situated in highly desirable locations as far as real estate goes. (I mean, you can’t get anymore waterfront, can you?) In addition, because floating homes are viewed as a form of personal property rather than real estate, property taxes are considerably less per square foot than what it would be for the same house on dry land.

Also, floating home slip spaces are now a finite commodity with increasingly rising value. Most cities in the U.S. have passed laws restricting any further expansion on the water. And, as these communities become not only accepted but increasingly trendy with the mainstream (thank you Sleepless in Seattle), real estate developers have sniffed the potential of a profit and started to move into the picture.

A perfect example of this phenomena is the marina next to mine. A real estate developer (responsible for the Anthem community in AZ) and a real estate agent went in on buying the marina that was in need of some TLC. Over the course of a few years the small, older floating homes were all “relocated” (translation: evicted). They are now selling off the slip spaces for $130,000+ a pop—but only to people who have submitted blueprints for homes that are approved by the new owners of the marina. And, as one of the two owners made clear to me, nothing is going to pass that isn’t 3,000+ square feet in size and $300,000+ to build. Apartment Therapy and The Oregonian both recently did stories on this community, if you’re curious.

Don’t get me wrong. They’re beautiful homes with sweeping views of the Columbia River. They’re driving the value of any home within eyesight of their community, including mine, increasingly upwards, even in these rocky times for real estate. But the whole project just gives me the creepy crawlies. I would far rather see the eclectic mix of styles, colors, and sizes you find in historic floating home communities than these homogenized neighborhoods of floating McMansions. Moreover, I have to wonder if my developer neighbor next door looks over into my marina and views it as the next “decrepit shantytown” he’d like to take over. (As his marina was described in The Oregonian piece.) Milk jug planking on the ramps or not, I’m not thrilled at what they’re up to.

I had dreamed of escaping the housing nightmare you see on land but it has followed me to the water. It looks like I may have to settle for the hope that my little home, rebuilt and restored to last another 30+ years, can serve as one, small outpost against the rising tide American real estate rapacity.