All about Online Classified

I was living in rented rooms on the periphery of Wokingham in Berkshire. This is a notably expensive area to buy a house in and at the time I was a contract worker for a software development company. It suited me at the time to be what is usually called a “Weekend Commuter”. I would stay in my rented accomodation in the week from Monday night through to Thursday night and then make the substantial hike down the M4 to my proper home which at the time was a large house with land in a rural hamlet in South Wales. Occasionally We Buy Homes on a bit of a whim and I had surely done that as in that particular spot of Wales there wasn’t much work anyway let alone my sort of specialised IT work. It didn’t stop me though and I was used to staying away from home during the week and didn’t consider that as you get older you can start to tire of this sort of thing.

My digs were OK . Well sort of OK. In fact they were like any other sort of temporary accommodation, a room in somebody else’s house. My temporary job seemed to be extended into the foreseeable future and I began to dream of getting myself a small house in the Thames Valley as a second home. Maybe I could even let out a room or two and get the complete thing to pay for itself.

But I didn’t really want to Sell My House in the country . It gave me much better accommodation than anything I could get in the Thames Valley and after all when We Buy Homes we normally consider value for money. And in fact considering what I could get for my money the last thing I wanted to do was Sell My House in the country and move into a one bed flat in Reading. So I elected to extend my finances to the limit, keep the property in Wales and buy something half decent in the Thames Valley. After all when We Buy Houses it’s such a huge commitment that sometimes you just have to let yourself go a bit and very occasionally more is less.

I walked miles through many neighbourhoods and found a property adjoining the Kennet and Avon canal. It was a two bed terrace and backed onto the canal itself. I submitted an offer and waited for the process to go through. But after hiking up and down the towpath for a while I managed to clear my thoughts to the extent that I realised that I actually didn’t want to buy another property – I wanted to live on the river . A boat! Could it be done? I bought a copy of Waterways World, saw an advert for a forty foot narrowboat, withdrew my offer on the house and started my year on a boat.

Of course it wasn’t all that easy. First I had to find the finance for the boat which was close to the same as the deposit I had for the house , well after all when We Buy Houses we have to have some sort of deposit. I wasn’t too bothered as the narrowboat I was buying was constructed in the seventies, was in really good condition and was unlikely to depreciate any further so my rationale was that I was already involved in the property market and was not going to lose any large sums on the boat so I might as well go for it.

Second quandary was the mooring. Residential boat moorings are a bit on the rare side but I managed to get a non residential mooring outside a boatyard. There were only a few other boats there and I decided, correctly as it turned out, that nobody was going to notice as long as I didn’t start hanging my washing out or holding wild parties etc. The mooring was in the order of a thousand pounds a year. Cheaper than the rent I had been paying.

Thirdly was the cost of the license from British Waterways. I was on the Kennet and Avon so the license was in the order of four hundred bucks a year. But this gave me the right to up sticks at any given moment and cruise all the way from Reading down to Bath if I wanted to.

The final hurdle was my own personal comfort and the day to day living on the boat. And even though this was the bit I was most worried about this turned out to be the easiest of the lot. The heating could be run from the engine or from the wood burning stove on board. Even in the snows of winter the boat never really got cold as it was well lined and even the tiniest of flames in the wood burner kept it all cosy. The shower was fine as long as I ran the engine every day for a while – easy enough when you are on red diesel and don’t pay wasteful Government taxes.

Every month I would take the boat round to the boatyard to have the sewage tank emptied. Easy as one of the yard hands would do it and the fees were much more reasonable than paying for water and sewage charges on a house!

The greatest problem was electricity. There were leisure batteries on the boat but the AC inverters I had were not up to the job. Given my time over again I would have invested in a diesel generator as these are cheap to run on red diesel.

Would I do it again? Of course I would! There’s nothing quite like it. The guarantee of a boat trip every weekend or summer evening. The fellowship of the other boaters. Being woken up by moorhens gently pecking at the weed on the side of the boat in the morning. My river had a pub about one and a half miles from my mooring and it had a small jetty outside. Wonderful for mooring up on a Sunday afternoon for a few drinks and a meal. And when it comes to summer holiday time , well , you’ve got it made!