by Kent Griswold, tinyhouseblog, November 29th, 2011
“We weren’t looking to buy a boat, we definitely weren’t looking to buy a tugboat, we were just looking. We have a home in Port Townsend, Washington but the commute into the city for work was too much to do everyday, so at the time we were renting a house in Ballard (a neighborhood of Seattle). It was a nice house in a great neighborhood, but we really weren’t keen on being renters. When we saw the tug on craigslist we were just curious, but once we looked at the boat we realized we could stop being renters and have a place of our own in Seattle. A place on the water with a million dollar view.…”
https://tinyhouseblog.com/floating-homes/tugboat-tiny-house/
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
“We weren’t looking to buy a boat, we definitely weren’t looking to buy a tugboat, we were just looking. We have a home in Port Townsend, Washington but the commute into the city for work was too much to do everyday, so at the time we were renting a house in Ballard (a neighborhood of Seattle). It was a nice house in a great neighborhood, but we really weren’t keen on being renters. When we saw the tug on craigslist we were just curious, but once we looked at the boat we realized we could stop being renters and have a place of our own in Seattle. A place on the water with a million dollar view.…”
Fantastic. I lived for a while on a primitively converted tug in Sausalito way back when. It had been stripped of it's engines which opened up a lot of room below decks. Most folks couldn't realistically afford to maintain and run those engines in any case. It sounds like this one still has the engines and by the look of it, the electronics. But look at all the deck space, a real nice patio, garden and barbeque setup there! Put a Tiki bar on it and you'll be very popular.
Unfortunately Seattle has suddenly decided to persecute houseboaters of all kinds, so even a self-contained greywater-recycling craft is under suspicion (while landowners dump hazardous materials into the sewers leading to the lake…)
For now boat owners in Seattle are off the hook so long as they use the boat "in a manner consistent with its use". Whether that means tugboat owners should nudge people along, fireboat owners should look for blazes, etc is unknown at this point.
Of course the Seattle houseboat communities have been around since the 1800's, and the first small boat owners lived aboard and cruised the world, but Seattle bureaucrats know nothing of maritime history – they just want the million-dollar views all to themselves!