Life on a narrowboat

So I have been meaning to post this blog post for a while now, but just never got round to doing it, anyways. I moved onto my narrowboat back in 2015 with my husband, and have loved every minute of it. Soon after moving in we got are first dog Buddy, who to be quite honest is our child ( well he is spoilt like a one).



We brought our boat from Northampton way, and moved it up to Leicestershire, were we both work. Most typical boats will take a week if not long to travel the distance which we did, however due to time constraints we did it in three days. This consisted of very early mornings and late nights. The good thing out it though, is that when we brought are boat it was during the summer, so mornings were lighter and the evening we longer which help. As you look at the pictures below you will see the boat that we live in now when we first brought it. However it is a lot different now, let just say its a working progress. But it's something that we are happy with and works for us.

When we purchased the boat we had some money left over and had a plan on how we wanted our boat to look, but over time we have learned that it wasn't possible to do things the way we wanted. That's not to say that we won't be doing them it just takes time and we change our minds on how we want things to look, or how we may want the boat layed out. 

So you maybe thinking why buy a narrowboat? Well we did think about renting, however we didn't see the benefits of it, if anything we only saw the restrictions. Yes when renting there are lots of options do you go for a flat or a house, do we want a garden, do we want three bedrooms or a studio flat. There was lots of options to consider but we wanted to own something rather than renting, as the way we look at it, you're paying into something but your never going to truly own it at the end. Not only this but a lot of landlords don't allow pets and that was one thing we said from the beginning we wanted.

As you can see from the pictures this is how we got the boat, very basic but at the same time something we can work with.  I like to call it a blank canvas. Over the last 5 years we have done a lot of on the boat. We have built things torn things down which we put up, at the end of the day it has been a learning curve and we have learnt from are mistakes. This is going to be one of many posts about our boat as I want to bring you all along for the journey. I want to show you the things which was have done on the boat, if that massive posts like this one has been or just small posts and pictures on my instagram account, I  want to show you the journey I am on. So what have I been up to on my boat? Well like I said for the past five years we have been living in Leicestershire working and doing the odd job on the boat to maintain it, however it was until last year we have really started doing some work on the boat, inside and out. With all boats every fews years they have to come out of the water to be black. This protects the boat rusting as well as algae, there are a lot of other things which you need to be careful or take into consideration, but that's just a few. So back in July last year we got our boat out to be blacked, which we painted ourselves. Again you can pay someone to do this, but it is something that we wanted to do ourselves. As you can see from the pictures this is how that boat looked like once it had come out of the water and been pressure washed down. However we wanted to take it back even further due to the fact there was a lot of different levels of paint on the boat and we wanted stripped back to the steal. This took a lot of work, luckily we had just over a week to strip it back and repaint the boat. It was a lot of work but at the same time we are glad that we have done it.