Coming Unmoored

I realize I’ve been slinging around the terms “floaters” and “stringers” quite a bit, so I figured I’d better talk a little bit more about the kind of floating system my house uses. At some point I intend to write a more detailed entry about all the various kinds of flotation systems you find being employed by floating homes. But, for now, I’m just going to talk about mine, which is a log float.

Log floats were the original flotation system found along the West Coast. That makes sense considering the original floating homes were bunkhouses for logging camps and you’re talking about an environment where logs and lumber were plentiful. Log floats remain the most common you find in Portland floating homes.

Log floats have a long lifespan which can sometimes be extended further by rotating which portion of the logs faces down in the water. Many floating homes are still using some of the original logs that were installed in the 1960’s. Log floats provide a firm, steady base for a home and can withstand grounding better than many other kinds of flotation systems which also helps to account for their popularity.

Western Red Cedar, Sitka Spruce, and Douglas Fir are all common choices for logs. I’m not certain what the older logs in my float are. I know the newer ones going in are Douglas Fir, which tend to be on the heavy side, meaning they don’t float quite as high as cedar or spruce. But with the declining availability of lumber, they’re still relatively economical.

A log float consists of a number of “floaters”, logs which provide the buoyancy. These logs are notched similar to what you might find in a wood cabin and wood beams, or “stringers” are inserted to cross-brace the structure. These are attached to the logs at the notch-points using long drift pins. (See smaller image above.) You can see the floaters and stringers in several of the pictures in my entry Remodel Hell.

Over this structure is usually built a subfloor of wood (which often includes some diagonal bracing), followed by decking. Usually things such as plumbing and electrical lines will go between the subfloor and decking. The floating home is built on top of all this. So, essentially, you have a house built upon an elaborate raft.

Not too surprisingly, if you have wood floating in water over a long period of time, you are going to have to deal with some rot. When done correctly, log floats have an average life expectancy of about 30 years. As you can imagine, it can be quite a production to then have to replace materials over which a house has been built. Particularly when the whole structure is floating in water.

Thankfully, marine contractors have figured out a number of innovative techniques to make the process easier, such as rolling new logs under a home with the assistance of lengths of fire hose.

Apparently, my little floating home is quirky enough to have drawn some attention from the small / tiny home community.

Kent Griswold is the creator of TinyHouseBlog.com which does a great job of covering various types of architecture that can be used for small housing. Along with your standard timber frame construction, he includes examples of all sorts of groovy things like domes, yurts, and straw bale.

I must confess that I’ve spent more than one afternoon poking through the pictures of different houses whining to myself, “Aww, how come I didn’t think of that?” So I think it’s more than a little neat that my “Floating Folly”, as I’m beginning to think of it, is the most recent TinyHouseBlog write-up.

A lot of the content came from here so don’t expect any shocking new revelations about my life but, if you’re curious, a copy of the story is here.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the difference between what constitutes a houseboat versus a floating home. It certainly doesn’t help matters that journalists who write about housing options on the water and water-dwellers themselves tend to use the terms interchangeably. In fact, entire books have been written about “Houseboats” which I would argue are actually floating homes because they lack any independent means of propulsion.

To further muddy the picture, you will often find houseboats and floating homes in the same moorages.

Perhaps this is my anal-retentive Virgo side showing, but here is my attempt to define the line between these terms. You are welcome to disagree in the comments below.

Houseboat

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a houseboat as: “a boat fitted for use as a dwelling; especially : a pleasure craft with a broad beam, a usually shallow draft, and a large superstructure resembling a house”.

To me, the operative words here are “a boat”. A boat usually has some internal means of propulsion and steering.

A good example of a house boat would be The Brandy Bar.

Most people seem to be acquainted with the existence of houseboats at least to some degree.

Floating Home:

In contrast to houseboats, floating homes are residential structures built upon some sort of flotation system. They have no internal means of propulsion and require the assistance of a water craft to be moved.

Floating homes can come in a variety of shapes and sizes: rustic cabins, cottages, suburban-style dwellings, elaborate town homes, even pavilions. The one thing they have in common is that they are all, quite literally, houses that float.

While the population at large seems to be familiar with the idea of houseboats, most people seem to have never heard of homes that are simply built on the water.

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.