ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

I Bought a Houseboat

by Adam Fisher

Photos by Philip Harvey

Adam Fisher wasn’t shopping for a house. He ended up with a boat, and a whale of a renovation project.

I had no intention of buying a house, but I remember the day it happened as vividly as one remembers a car wreck. It was 2005 and—as I now recognize in retrospect—the peak of California’s real estate bubble. It seemed like everyone I knew was buying, but not me. I was a committed renter, someone who had felt the need to move, on average, every 18 months since graduating high school. House-hunting was just something I did on occasion, as a form of recreation. Besides, looking at houses was free. Or so I thought.

That Sunday afternoon in December, I found myself staring at a simple shack, 20 feet by 20 feet, which was somehow balanced on top of a steel ship’s hull—itself not more than 14 feet wide. It wasn’t a house but rather a houseboat, or in the upscale parlance of my real estate agent, “a floating home.” Houseboats are a form of real estate almost unique to the San Francisco Bay Area. A funky neighborhood of 400 of them float in the sheltered waters of Sausalito, the small town just on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Some look like condos, some like cottages, others like alpine lodges. But the one I was standing in front of was literally half house, half boat in the same way that a centaur is half man, half horse.

The price was a quarter-million dollars for six rooms in 650 square feet. That made it just about the cheapest house in the wealthiest community in the richest state in the richest country in the world—a bargain, and waterfront property to boot! At least that was the story I told myself as I signed away my next 30 years of income at the closing. The truth is that I’m a sucker for eccentricity, for the ocean, for charm, for character. It was love at first sight. It was a $250,000 impulse buy.

*

Since I wasn’t planning to buy a place, I rented it out and moved to Brooklyn to become a long-distance landlord instead. (Trust me, it seemed to make sense at the time.) I was there for two years, just long enough to see America’s real estate market start to crack—and to learn the hard way about the joys of houseboat ownership. What galled me the most were the property taxes. There is nothing “real” about my real estate; in a legal sense it is nothing more than a glorified trailer in a glorified trailer park. And yet I still had to pay a yearly property tax to the county of Marin. This “bargain” was bankrupting me, and I came back two years later wanting out.

And yet, walking around the place, holding my nose and inspecting the damage that my renters had managed to incur, I got that floaty feeling again, and it wasn’t the tide coming in. The boat was a wreck, but it was my kind of wreck, and I could still see the potential. Again, I gave in to my gut and acted on impulse. I asked my girlfriend to move in with me. She nervously said yes. She could see the potential too.

My New York friends thought that running off with my girlfriend to live in a houseboat on the San Francisco Bay was a romantic fantasy come to life. But I knew the reality, and it was starting to smell. My former tenant’s cat hadn’t much use for a litter box, and what’s more, the complicated plumbing under the toilet was on its last flush. If there was to be any hope for my relationship, I would have to turn a tired mess into a charming retreat. And because
I no longer had a job, I would have to do most of the work myself.

*

Job one was to get rid of the stink.

I ripped up the pee-soaked carpets and hired a cut-rate plumber to replace the septic tank festering in the boat’s engine room. It was a disaster. The man was a crook, and worse, he turned on the bilge pump after demolishing the waste lines, flooding the back of my boat with raw sewage. The first half of the worst day in my life was spent in a blind rage, screaming bloody murder and chasing him off the dock. The second half was spent putting an ax through the floorboards, in order to get to the filth—human filth—which pooled at the bottom of the hull below.

I moved on to undertake a top-to-bottom renovation. The houseboat was made largely from used materials: scrap and salvage. The wiring, my electrician commented, showed evidence of having been stolen from the Navy. My carpenter took the paneling off the one structural wall in the house and gasped: There was not a 2×4 in sight. Even the hull—which holds the house together—was once just trash. The sash windows likely came from a Victorian house in a neighborhood pulled down in the 1960s as part of a slum clearance program. The boat itself was a lifeboat, made obsolete by newer technologies and likely sold as scrap steel.

More than a month of full-time scrambling around the houseboat gave me plenty of opportunity to meet the neighbors. Most of them, at least on my dock, are respectable, solid citizens: a bank regulator, a photographer, a sign maker, some retirees. But I learned this had not always been the case. The neighborhood loomed large in the Bay Area’s radical history: The Weather Underground had escaped to the boats after declaring war on the federal government. The neighborhood was the favorite hideout of rock stars, bohemians, drug dealers, and artists of the ’60s and ’70s. Back then there was no pier, just boats lashed together by the dozens into ad-hoc communes. Electricity was pirated from land, the lines strung just under the surface of the water through the handles of corked wine jugs used as buoys. Most boats were heated with wood stoves. There were floating organic gardens, and chickens and even pigs were raised in floating pens. It was wild, and the frequent clashes with the local authorities became known as the “houseboat wars.”

Property taxes, I would soon learn, were the price of peace: part of a compromise that pulled the houseboaters into proper docks and hooked them up to water, electric, and sewer systems. Most of the 400 or so floating homes in Sausalito now are built not on top of boats but on buoyant concrete foundations. From the water on up, they’re just like their land-locked cousins. Fixing up my houseboat—a survivor from the outlaw days—gives me a lot of cred with my neighbors. Though all law-abiding nine-to-fivers, they’re nostalgic for the good old days when American Zen pioneer Alan Watts and Henry Miller’s  painter friend  Jean Varda shared a 100-year-old wooden ferry boat, when Otis Redding plopped down at the end of our pier and wrote “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,”  when the chronic was still Mary Jane.

Some of those original houseboaters are still around and never surrendered to the man, his taxes, his piers, or his plumbing. They’re the  “anchor-outs” who live in the bay and off the grid. To be anchored out means that all life’s necessities—including water to drink and usually firewood for heat—must be ferried from shore, while garbage and human waste go back to land. Most of the anchor-outs do all this work under human power, with a rowboat. It’s a hard life, and those who live it tend to be saddled with other problems too: poverty, addiction, and just plain orneriness.

Most of the houseboaters dismiss the anchor-outs as crazy squatters and interlopers, but as one of them once said to me, “Sir Francis Drake was an anchor-out.” There have been people living in floating shacks on the bay since the 1880s, and the old-timers who still do are largely veterans of the houseboat wars. They’re the founding fathers (and mothers), and some of them actually remember my boat when it was new. At one time it was painted Pepto-Bismol pink from top to bottom, with stuffed animals poking their heads out of the skylights just like Noah’s Ark. Some mention a brothel, while others say no, the owner was just a stripper. My anchor-out friend Robin, who’s blind in one eye like a pirate and missing most of her teeth, used to live in it with half a dozen of her friends when they were young and beautiful, before it was tied down to a dock. She even remembers the original purchase price: $500.

*

My girlfriend and I moved in just over a year ago, and we’ve chosen to decorate the place in a period style: beanbag furniture, Moroccan poufs, a giant fuzzy flokati rug. The former engine room is now a cedar-lined walk-in closet, storage being the key to living in a tiny space. I’ve stashed my power tools deep in the hold, and we both work from home. It’s an idyllic life, and a long way from Brooklyn. I sometimes look up from my desk to see a mother duck and her ducklings paddle by, or a great white egret picking through the shoreline mud. My girlfriend and I like to throw fondue parties, and because we don’t have a dining room, we just invite everyone to pull up a pillow. Invariably conversation turns to the houseboat.

“How did you ever find this place?” they ask, seduced by the sheer funkiness of it all. “It was all a big mistake,” I tell them. The best one I ever made.

(UN)REAL ESTATE: An Owner’s Guide to Houseboat Living

1. Plumbing
A houseboat is connected to city water and sewer pipes that run under the pier via flexible hoses that can move with the tide, making an on-board bathroom indistinguishable from a land-locked loo—until the power goes out. Houseboats are equipped with holding tanks and electric pumps that move wastewater up from the lowest point in the boat and into the sewer system. So when the lights flicker out, you’ve got to turn off the water. If you don’t, every forgotten flush or shower risks filling up the boat’s holding tank and causing a sewage spill.

2. Floating
The great technical breakthrough in construction was the invention of the concrete hull in 1972. Picture an empty swimming pool that has been dug from the ground and dropped into the water. The flat bottom means that they stay absolutely stable in the water—except for the strongest storms, the boats never convey the sense that they are actually floating—and the reinforced concrete construction makes them totally maintenance-free.

3. Financing
Buying a houseboat is easy. In Sausalito, at least, they’re listed in the MLS. It’s financing one that’s a bit tricky. There are only two banks that will lend houseboat buyers money at a reasonable rate—and even then, there is about a 4 percent premium over a regular house loan. And after shelling out the money houseboats are worth, you still have to pay rent to the marina where it is permanently docked because you’ve only bought yourself a boat, not land. Then there is insurance, the standard policy that all mortgages require, as well as an additional liability policy that protects the marina. On the upside, there’s no need to worry about earthquakes.