Living Aboard

It's been a couple of months since we arrived and settled in Kingston. Our blog has been quiet since then, mainly because we have been working and getting accustomed to our new surroundings.

When we moved here, we made the decision to live on the boat for the summer and nor worry about finding an apartment until fall. So, for the past two months, our address has been the Collins Bay Marina.

Living on the boat hasn't really been a big stretch for us since we have spent most of our time on the boat for the past couple of summer's anyway. However, it's always been interspersed with stretches in our house. Although we've worked on board in the past, we would generally try to focus our work time on those stretches when we were home. But not this year. It's full time on the boat.

So what's it like living on the boat?  Pretty much the same as living on land. The only difference is that  we have to walk up to a building to take a shower first thing in the morning. Other than that, it's the same thing.

Michelle has an office down town, so I normally drive her in every morning. 15 mins each way. Then I come back to the boat and try get to work.  I'll often tackle a little job on the boat if there's something to fix at some point during the day, but mostly it's just work.  Later in the evening I have to pick her up again.

Living and working in a tiny space has not been too difficult. Every once and a while I feel a bit cramped, so I move off to a coffee shop to work for a few hours. But other than that, I don't mind the small space.

There are certainly some advantages, particularly when it's time for cleaning. It only takes about 10 minutes to clean the inside of the boat instead of the couple of hours that the house took. And it's easy to pack up and head out for a weekend - all we have to do is slip the lines from the dock and we're off.

One of the compromises we have to make is in the galley. Instead of a large kitchen with lots of counter space, we have a very small galley and extremely limited prep space. This means that meals have to be a bit simpler than what I might try at home, although I still manage to make homemade pizza regularly. Also, the small refrigerator means we don't normally buy groceries very far in advance, so we make a trip to the grocery store at least every second day when we're in the marina. If we go out for a few days, we find room for what we need, but our storage is pretty full at that point.

Living onboard also means that we don't have our own washer and dryer, so there is a weekly trip to the laundromat. I had thought that this would be a real pain, but it actually isn't too bad. There is a laundromat just a few minutes drive away, and we can do everything simultaneously, so we're in and out with our laundry totally done in 90 minutes. And there's even a Tim Hortons next door to grab a coffee to pass the time.

What do I miss from home?  Friends and family mostly. But I find I don't miss all the stuff that we collected over twenty years.  Kind of makes one wonder why we spent all that money on it in the first place.