Max Hart-Walsh, 32, and Sorcha Elspeth, 30 are living in a brand new 60-foot houseboat, instead of forking out thousands on a London flat.
The couple renovated the place by adding marble kitchen tops, bookcases and solar panels while still keeping enough space for full-size sofas, a TV, and beds for their pet dogs Pecan, Brenan and Stringer Bell.
Owning the houseboat was a logical choice for the pair of them.
They paid £58,000 for the houseboat and kept costs low to renovate as Max used the renovation skills he had learnt after accepting a job at a boat-fitting company to the test.
They are now saving over a 10th on what would have been spent to get a London Flat.
Sorcha told the Independent: “My dad left me a chunk of money – not much, but I wanted to do something important with it. I tried to get myself something to live on and wanted to avoid rent.
“You are close to the elements, and the water, you have a fire roaring in your house. You are surrounded by space and feel so close to nature. I grew up in the Highlands in the remotest part of the UK, so it is a way for me to cope with the city.”
Max took up a job at the BoatFit Co, based near Tottenham Lock, where he learnt the skills to do up other barges at the same time as working on his own home full-time for six weeks.
He said: “We’ve never had a blueprint. “We did it ourselves, but Calum [from BoatFit Co] has this amazing brain, like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. He saw what we couldn’t and did all the measurements.”
By moving into a houseboat, the pair escaped the dreaded reality that is the rental market.
London’s average flat price of £541,000 last year and the couple didn’t want to rent a flat the average rent outside London now standing at £1,278. This is 10 percent higher in September than last year – as the scramble for affordable housing intensifies.
Max says the pair also didn’t want to be weighed down with a mortgage – and that with three dogs to accommodate, they would have to live far outside London to be able to afford a suitable place.
He continued: “The time was right for it. Every boater, even the most middle-class, white-bread boater, has that pirate thing, where they don’t trust mortgages or credit scores. It was a boater who told me credit scores were invented in the Seventies.
“I feel for the first time that I’m not paying people back now. When I get paid now, that is all mine.”
