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.

So, I was able to spend the last week working for Portland, which let me check in on the progress on my house. I spent the better part of two days planning the next two phases of renovations. More on that in another entry.

I just had to share that while I haven’t been able to enjoy set up housekeeping in my little place yet, I can take some small comfort in the fact that, apparently, some of my local “neighbors” have.

A seagull took advantage of the fact that my office-to-be (formerly the boat well) still doesn’t have windows to build a nest on the framing between the back room and bathroom, where cabinets had been ripped out.

I found that pretty amusing but one of my handymen, Gene, has an even better story…

Gene is a soft-spoken older Portlander who usually turns up garbed in what I’m starting to think of as the obligatory work ensemble of paint-stained jeans, ratty t-shirt, black belt, and baseball cap with fishing logo. Gene is a wizard with anything wood and frequently does framing for my current contractor, Kenny.

Anyway, last week Gene was busy working on the framing for the new rooftop deck. He goes to pry back a piece of siding and out fly 30-or-so, small, but very indignant, bats–straight at him. I don’t know who was more upset by the experience, Gene or the bats. Either way, poor Gene ended tottering backwards into the water.

That’s right. I apparently have a colony of bats living between the siding and walls of my house. I’d really like to know how my myopic home inspector overlooked THAT little item.

I’ve always thought bats were interesting creatures. When I lived in Tucson, I never begrudged their drunken little evening parties where they’d clean out my hummingbird feeders or careen across the surface of the swimming pool at sunset gorging on bugs. I have to admit, though, that I’m a little less enamored with the thought of sharing the walls of my house with them.

I had already planned on replacing the siding, which is in lousy shape. Discovering the presence of my furry little flying squatters, however, has just moved that project to the top of the priority list.

The guys are under instructions not to hurt the bats but to ask them, very politely but firmly, to find new diggs. The bats are welcome back next summer for evening drinks on the porch, of course. They’re just not allowed to stay the night.

So I guess you could say that while some people have bats in their belfry, I, apparently, keep mine in my boathouse.

While I was up in Portland I had the opportunity to check on how things were going with the float rebuild.

The new plumbing was complete. Most of the electrical work is done but they’re still sorting out the rat’s nest of wiring splices in one of the interior walls.

The day I was there, my contractor, Randy, was putting the new insulation into the floor. The next step is to put the flooring back down and finish the new outside decks.

Once the float rebuild is complete, the next major project is to do the rest of the work to finish off the boatwell. While not expensive compared to the float rebuild, it’s going to be dramatic during the demolition. The back wall of the house and roof are going to need to be torn out. (I don’t plan to visit much during the demolition phase unless someone writes me a script for some pretty good drugs.)

The garage door will be replaced with three large windows. There are leaks in the roof deck portion of the roof. At Randy’s recommendation, they’re going to tear out the whole roof deck and expand/rebuild it over the boat well.

It’s going to be pretty ugly looking during the work. But I’ll end up with a roof that doesn’t leak and a bigger roof deck when they’re done.

Randy also broke it to me that sometime soon I’m going to want to redo the siding and other four windows in the house. The siding and window seams are both shot. That’s not going to be a cheap project. Although, on the plus side, it means I can put in more energy efficient windows and pick the exterior colors for my house.

This last project is probably going to wait until I’m up there full-time, however. As long as it gets done before winter, I should be okay.

Just as one last side-note, I was amused to see that Randy and the other workers have switched from cheap beer to Mai Tais as the drink of choice while on the job. I haven’t figured out what the electrican drinks, yet.

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.

So where the heck are you anyway?

This is the rather eclectic blog of a late-thirty-something woman in the process of overhauling her life in the wake of a short-lived and spectacularly disastrous marriage to the “Perfect Guy”.

If you don’t already know me, perhaps the most important thing for you to know, at this point, is that I’m in the process of moving from Tucson to a floating home in Portland. A very small floating home. Like, 600 square feet small. After renovations. (And, man, are there going to have to be some renovations…)

And, just to make life more exciting, I decided to make this shift in the wake of having been married to someone worth millions. Several millions. (It should be noted that with the finalization of our divorce, he’s still worth millions. I am nowhere close.)

Just to be clear, this is not a “Poor Me” tale. The precipitous decline in my net worth had very little directly to do with my decision to relocate and overhaul my entire lifestyle. I’m sure people out there will be skeptical, but my short-time amongst the wealthy was awful on so many levels I don’t know where to begin. I finally had enough and ran screaming. I guess, in some ways, I’m still running as fast as I can through the changes I’m making in my life.

Anyway, my next resting point is a former 1960’s boathouse outside of Portland.

So, I better give you the disclaimer at the outset…

This is in no way intended to be one of your sleekly-packaged, narrowly-focused, terribly-helpful blogs intended to draw lots of advertising dollars for its creator. While I love to browse through those, I’m far too ADD to create one myself.

If you decide to thumb through the pages on my site, you’re going to find a hodgepodge of subjects that are of current interest in my including, but probably not limited to: floating homes, simple-living, the small/tiny home movement, frugality, responsible financial stewardship, and living green.

I also guarantee you find more information than you ever wanted to know about my cat, Rumi, along with periodic commentary about the men in my life, past and present.

I will do my best to categorize entries by subject so you can avoid what doesn’t interest you. But consider yourself duly warned. A wide variety of things interest me and I tend to collect shiny odds and ends in my blogs like a magpie with a cache of trinkets.

Why did I feel compelled to add yet another blog to the multitude that already exist?

Because I’m enamored with the sound of my own voice and tale. I mean, how could there possibly be anything more interesting than me?

Alright. A little less tongue-in-cheek…

I created this blog, in part, so that my friends in Arizona–who are convinced I’ve totally taken leave of my senses—have an easy way to keep tabs on me when I relocate. It is my dearest hope that if I manage to post entries on a semi-regular basis that demonstrate some surviving grasp on reality they will resist the urge to drag me back to the desert and lock me away somewhere disgustingly cheerful with daily macramé classes “for my own good”.

I have also been a storyteller as long as I can remember. I enjoy sharing anecdotes from my life with others. My intention is try to tell some of my journey in the next year or so in an Eat, Pray, Love fashion. (And, if you don’t know what Eat, Pray, Love is you: #1 Probably have a Y chromosome. And #2 Have been nowhere near a bookstore in the last year.)

Moreover, I’m hoping some of the information I have on this site may help others who are traveling along a similar path. As someone who lives and dies by her high-speed internet connection, I was surprised at how little information was online about floating homes when I started trying to learn about them.

And, while there are quite a lot of helpful, how-to articles on how to go about simplifying various aspects of one’s life, I haven’t run across many sites that tell the story from beginning to end, gory failures and all, of someone’s attempts to put all this freely-available, well-intentioned advice to good use.

I can’t speak for anyone else. But I know, for me, I enjoy knowing the details of the unconfident journey, U-turns, dead-ends, diasasters and all. I mean, if one of Lewis and Clark’s men ends up getting eaten by a bear, you better believe I want to know about it. (And, if I’m honest with myself, I suppose my story has the potential to end up a Donner Party kind of tale.)

Either way, here’s one to add to the collection of personal journey travelogues…