00:00Hi guys! Welcome aboard the boat. Come inside and have a look. Mind your head.
00:11The boat build in total came to about £65,000.
00:15Two and a half grand to get it craned into the water and £10,000 to £15,000 on doing
00:21the interior.
00:22So welcome to the living room. I have an unhealthy obsession with leopard print.
00:26I didn't do the entire room because I know that there's limits.
00:29We have a wood burner and we absolutely love it in the winter.
00:32We have it on like full power which is probably actually a bit tropical in here.
00:37Great, we actually got made especially by another boater.
00:40She is a welder and she does the most incredible things.
00:44My sister bought this for us as a kind of housewarming gift.
00:48A great noisy toy for our young son.
00:51All of our son's toys are pretty much in this little box here,
00:54which doubles up as the coffee table.
00:58So this thing my brother actually gave to us and we decided to cut out the front bit
01:02to have somewhere to store all the wood.
01:04We've had to be slightly clever. Most things have dual purpose.
01:08Welcome to the kitchen. It's one of my favourite parts of the boat.
01:12I didn't want to just buy a kitchen, like here's your kitchen.
01:15I wanted to kind of build it.
01:16All of the cupboards I had found over a period of about three or four months
01:21whilst the boat was being built.
01:22And this one had come to us from an old school.
01:26And I guess there had been a load of them and they were all numbered
01:28and we just got number 13, 14.
01:30This white cabinet here, I bought it off a lady on eBay
01:34and I told her what I had planned to do with it,
01:36which was to use it as a cabinet in my boat.
01:39She sent me a message a couple of months later saying,
01:42you're never going to guess what you started.
01:45We've just put our house up for sale.
01:47We've been inspired by you and your story and we're buying a boat.
01:50That kind of always makes me happy kind of remembering that.
01:53So all the floors are reclaimed floorboards that my dad very nicely
01:58drove around London, finding them in skips and collecting them all together.
02:02They're all different sizes if you pay attention and actually look at it.
02:06So it was a bit of a jigsaw piecing them together.
02:08I think it kind of makes the whole boat seem more like a,
02:11floating home rather than an actual boat.
02:15Obviously the tiles are the crown and glory of this bathroom.
02:19I kind of wish that I'd actually kind of just done it everywhere.
02:22I think my boyfriend put his foot down slightly.
02:24The practicalities of having a bath on a boat are probably quite small.
02:29If you're in the bath and a boat goes past,
02:32it kind of rocks it very gently and it's a very kind of dreamy situation basically.
02:38The shower can be slightly impractical as we're both quite tall.
02:44So my boyfriend is six foot four and he generally showers sitting down now
02:47because he's just too big for it.
02:50Originally we had a bamboo curtain with Our Lady Guadalupe on it.
02:54But as soon as the baby came we realised it was super impractical.
02:57He was like pulling it down.
02:58It was mildly dangerous.
02:59So we took that away.
03:01Didn't have a door for about a year.
03:04And then designed these saloon doors which opened both ways.
03:07And I found this fabric and upholstered them so that you can see her from both sides.
03:13The bathroom is actually quite big in comparison to a lot of London flats.
03:17Most boats have one long walkway.
03:19I wanted to have it more kind of evenly spread out.
03:22Which is why you walk directly from the kitchen into the bathroom.
03:25Because it means that we've like maximised the space as much as possible.
03:29It's quite free flowing.
03:30This is obviously our son's room.
03:32My favourite part of the room is definitely the wall that we put up.
03:37Our son gets to look at it every day.
03:39Although I'm not sure he really appreciates it.
03:40Another one of my favourite things in here is the patchwork quilt that my friends made for me
03:45when I was pregnant and they each got a little square.
03:48It's just like a really special thing for me that I love.
03:51These are all our son's soft cuddly toys.
03:54They generally have all been presents from people or like the odd one that I've found in a charity shop.
04:00We tend to buy stuff kind of second hand or used.
04:03It's kind of in my nature.
04:04The only thing in here that has been bought new was the cot.
04:08I've dressed it up in like old vintage textiles and that will do for me.
04:13Colour is very important to me.
04:15I love colour.
04:16I love seeing it, being with it.
04:18And I think that a child's room should be really colourful and playful.
04:21It's like where they spend a lot of their time and it gets their imagination moving.
04:25Whenever people hear that we live on the boat with the baby,
04:27their first question is, how does that work?
04:31But it just does.
04:33I mean, I can't think of anything that we've specifically done that would be different if we didn't live on
04:37a boat.
04:38He's really adventurous, so he always wants to go outside.
04:40So we got one of those backpacks that's also a lead.
04:44We tied it to the bottom of the step so he could have an exact kind of radius of the
04:51deck.
04:51Passer-by's would feel nervous seeing this little baby peering over the edge like he's about to go in the
04:56water.
04:57I was like, don't worry, I care about my baby as much as you do. He's fine.
05:00And then this is our bedroom.
05:02I guess the most special thing about this room is on days like this in the summer.
05:07You can kind of just lie on the bed with the doors open.
05:10There's a little breeze coming in and you can just kind of bliss out.
05:15I don't think anything I've ever really done has a very structured plan to it.
05:21Everything just kind of comes together quite naturally.
05:24I knew I didn't want it to feel like a boat.
05:26Like the couple of boats that I had been on, you know you're on a boat.
05:29It feels very small and enclosed.
05:31It feels like you have to kind of edge your way around and that's what I didn't want.
05:35There's obviously inconveniences of living on a boat.
05:38We've run out of water in the dead of winter.
05:40The canal was completely frozen over.
05:42We had a four month old baby and no water for two weeks.
05:47And that's the kind of thing that we can just, we got around it.
05:51We figured it out.
05:52It's not always easy.
05:53I would recommend living on a boat, but it's not for the faint hearted.
