Our Bohemian Family

Life on board, here’s the deal. I want to have the smallest possible negative impact on the earth. So I use resources with care. I grocery shop via bicycle or walking. I try to buy locally grown food. I use shared resources whenever I can. I patch my work cloths. I buy at thrift stores. I only buy used cars. I reuse and recycle. Our “tupperware” came with food in it. I bake my own bread in winter, because the oven is on anyway. My hot water comes from the stove too in winter. As a side note, home baked bread is about 1/4 the cost of store bought, tastes better, makes better french toast, grilled cheese, sandwiches, and uses less fuel!

Less space. A boat with the same floor space as your average American home cost a FORTUNE! Both to purchase and maintain. But what do you do with all that space? You fill it with stuff. Furniture to sit on and sleep on and eat on and store stuff in. Appliances to cook and store food, and wash your dishes and your clothes. You hang stuff on the walls, you fill your closets with cloths and towels and shoes. You might have enough dishes to serve a small army. Cabinets full of cookware you hardly use. On most boats the furniture is built in. There is storage under most of it. My living room has LOTS of storage space built in. Some of it isn’t readily apparent.

Living on a boat requires thinking about the things you buy. “do I need this?”. “do I want this, really?” “where am I going to put this?”. We keep the cloths that we use. We have a couple pairs of shoes each. We minimize our “stuff” to what we use and need. We save quite a bit of money just because we don’t have room for a bunch of crap.

Energy usage. House hold heating, cooking and lighting come from some combination of natural gas, fuel oil, and electricity. Up to 3 different bills to pay! Plus your water bill! Your toilet uses over a gallon every time you flush. It relies on gravity to carry its contents out of your house. Your sinks and showers mix relatively clean water with raw sewage and that nasty mix is piped to your local sewage plant in the city, or your septic tank in the country. Many cities end up pumping thousands of gallons of raw sewage directly into our rivers and oceans everyday.

Our galley (kitchen) is “compact” so we don’t have a bunch of kitchen gadgets. We keep what we use regularly. Our “food processor” is called a knife. Our “mixer” is a whisk, or spoon, or fork. Our “dishwasher” is a scrubby sponge and a sink. Our refrigerator is built into the countertop. It has more insulation than yours. It loads from the top so cold air stays in. Rather than falling out on the floor every time you open it. It uses about HALF the energy of a standard fridge. Our stove burns diesel fuel, which has more Btu’s per pound than natural gas. It also heats our whole boat in the winter. We actually know EXACTLY how much fuel we use in a year. In addition we can run our stove on bio-diesel. It is also the fuel for our engine, and at anchor is what we get our electricity from, currently. Our fresh water is stored in 3 tanks holding a total of around 300 gallons. Currently our water comes from our marina and is covered by dockage (rent) as is our electricity. Our toilet uses the water we float in to flush, and less of it than yours does. It pumps the contents to a tank. Our sewage, about 25 gallons a week, is stored on board in a tank. Once or twice a month it’s sucked out at the marina and ends up the same place yours does. (think about how many gallons of water you are polluting EVERYDAY!!!) Our sinks and shower drain overboard. We don’t own a washer and dryer. We use the local laundromat.