Living on a Boat in Marina del Rey
When Rob moved to California for graduate school, he decided to buy and live aboard a sailboat in Marina del Rey. He later met and married Rebecca, who now lives with him on the boat. In this interview, they discuss how they save money, live deliberately and enjoy the city and nature in this creative, small space. They also share advice for others considering unconventional housing.
Rob, why did you decide to live on a boat when you moved to the Los Angeles area for graduate school?
Robert: I’d grown up sailing small boats, and always thought it would be fun to live on a boat. So it was a fun adventure to try.
But the financial aspect is important. I knew I had at least five years in LA. When I looked at the cost differential between (1) renting an apartment and (2) buying a boat and renting the boat slip, I figured that over five years I would save enough money to at least break even. And I’d also have a boat, which at the end of five years I could give away or sell. The worst-case scenario was that it would end up costing me about the same as it would to rent an apartment. And at this point, the boat has turned out to cost me a lot, lot less.
Rebecca, why did you decide to live on the boat after you and Rob were married?
Rebecca: I was living in an apartment with a roommate before we were married. Rob already had the boat, and he had paid off the last dollar the week before our wedding. I told him I’d try it for three months, but if it didn’t work out we were going to move off the boat. And I didn’t want to hear a single word about it.
But it ended up working well. It has a great location. It includes parking, which is a big deal in LA. I don’t have to clean the bathroom. We don’t need air conditioning because we are literally on the water. When you really think about where you spend most of your time in an apartment or house, you’re either in the kitchen, on the couch, at the table or sleeping in bed. And we have a kitchen, a couch, a table and bed. That’s 90% of the space you use with two people.
How much do you save in rent by living on the boat?
Rob: If you add up the cost of the slip fee, the money we pay in regular maintenance, the Internet and our storage unit, I think we now save at least $700 a month compared to the cost of a one-bedroom we would rent. That’s money we can save or blow on something we would rather do.
Rebecca: When I compare what we spend on housing to the cost of our friends’ apartments, I’m like, you know what, every month I can bear with the boat — even if I don’t like it, and I actually do — is money I can spend on literally anything else. It doesn’t matter what it is. I could blow it all on hats.
How large is your sailboat?
Rob: It’s a 1970s Mariner Ketch. It has a 31-foot deck, but it is 35-feet overall in length. The extra four feet is a bowsprit, which is the bane of our existence.
Rebecca: We pay rent by the foot, so having that extra four feet means we pay for a 35-foot boat but have only 31 feet of living space. The deck has a little cockpit, which sits six pretty comfortably.
What is your interior living space like?
Rob: There’s no open space under the cockpit. So the interior is probably about 20 feet long, and it’s about nine feet wide at its widest point. I think we calculated once that we have about 150 square-feet.
Rebecca: At the front of the boat there is a triangle-shaped bed that works better than you would think. And then back from there, there’s a day bed that we use as a couch on one side. And then there’s a table with a U-shaped bench around it. Like a horse shoe. In the front is a kitchen. There’s a sink, and our one stainless-steel appliance is a gas stove and oven. There’s technically a bathroom, but at the moment it’s my closet.
Do you have Internet and water on the boat?
Rob: We have Internet. There’s an Internet provider that provides Internet for a lot of the boats in the marina. And we have a 40-gallon water tank on the boat. We top it off once a week with the hose outside, and then that water goes through a really nice charcoal filter. I think our water is delicious.
Where do you go to the bathroom?
Rebecca: At the top of the dock — 150 steps away from the boat — are the bathrooms. You get much more strategic about when you drink at night. You make sure you stop by when you are coming in or out.
Rob: There are also showers up there. It’s nice because they clean it for you and provide toilet paper and all that sort of stuff.
Does the marina have other shared spaces?
Rob: We also have a boater’s lounge, which is really nice. It’s a room with a big-screen TV, some leather couches, a big round table with four or five chairs, a computer, a printer, high-speed Internet, some bookshelves. We never use it, but we always think that we should.
Rebecca: It’s on the opposite side of the marina from us, not 150 steps away.
How do you do your laundry?
Rob: We technically have access to a laundry machine in our facility, and I use it occasionally. But we love doing laundry as a date night, because there is a really good Italian restaurant next to a laundry mat that takes credit cards. We drop the laundry in, order food, eat appetizers, change the laundry, eat our main course, walk around, fold the laundry and then go home. We do all our laundry in two hours, and I much prefer that to doing one load at a time, all of the time.
Rebecca: It’s one of those things that could be perceived as a negative but if you think about it a little more becomes a positive. I love laundry happy hour.
What is the marina’s live-aboard community like?
Rebecca: I love the dock. Everyone is really nice and pretty friendly. When I lived in normal apartments, I really didn’t know my neighbors. And now I know everyone who lives on our dock. Rob knows them much better because he is more social and outside more than I am.
Most of the people who live at the marina are male. The women’s bathroom is always empty. I look at what the guys have to deal with and, I’m like, it’s great over here where it is much quieter. Like I said, everyone is really nice, really polite. I never feel unsafe or anything like that.
What is the marina’s neighborhood like?
Rebecca: The marina is beautiful. It’s a very, very nice part of town. It’s all pretty much condos and apartments around us. And they’re going through a ton of renovation all over.
Rob: The marina is also within walking distance of the beach. And there’s really nice restaurants and grocery stores. It’s one of the best locations to live in, in addition to being really beautiful. The only reason we are able to access an area this nice is because it’s very inexpensive to live in the marina.
How much maintenance does the boat require?
Rob: When I bought the boat six or seven years ago it was in decent shape. But parts of it definitely needed a lot of work. For example, the masts are wooden and the paint had been peeling and cracking. So one summer a lot of weekends were spent completely stripping the masts down. There were a lot of big projects when I bought the boat.
At this point, most of the big projects are done and it’s just maintenance. The haul is fiberglass, which is extremely low maintenance. But there is a lot of wood trim on the boat, and wood trim is the bane of your existence if you do your own maintenance — and the bane of your pocketbook if you have other people do your maintenance. Its varnish only lasts for so long in the sun, so it either requires regular maintenance coats or being painted. But being painted doesn’t look very good.
We now have someone on retainer to do maintenance for us, basically to keep new coats of varnish on. When I was in grad school, I did it all myself. But now that there’s two of us splitting the rent, it frees up that money which we can now use to buy time back so that we can do other things in LA.
Rebecca: The other advantage of having someone do maintenance varnish is that it has to be done in the right weather and time window. The person on retainer works on boats all the time and has a lot more flexibility to make sure it gets done correctly. Because if it’s too cloudy, or too sunny, or too early on the weekends, when we have time, another weekend goes by before we can do it.
Rob, why did you buy a boat that required fixing up?
Rob: When I bought my boat, I wasn’t really planning on getting married. I was going to buy my boat, do grad school and then take a year off and sail across the Pacific. So while the boat was a fixer-upper, it was a very well-built fixer-upper designed to cross oceans. However, for about the same amount of money, I could have bought a very nice live-aboard that would have been a great day sailer. More spacious below, a little nicer below, a newer boat. It would have a little less fixer-upper, and by that I mean mostly no wood.
What is it like to live together in such a small space?
Rebecca: For me, this works because we are married and so sitting close to each other and being close to each other is like a feature, because it is very snuggly. You clean up more, but we we’re both fairly clean to begin with. I’m probably the least clean of the two, which is fine. I’m just less organized. Mainly with clothes.
Rob: I don’t think we’ve ever had an issue with the small space. There’s a little corner of the boat, and that’s where Rebecca is allowed to throw things. The nice part, though, is that no matter how messy the boat gets, it’s very quick and easy to clean, which is nice. I think once every month Rebecca goes and reads her book, and I go on a little cleaning binge. Which mainly involves me taking all of her clothes and throwing them onto her side of the bed.
Was it difficult to transition to small-space living?
Rob: I never had a lot of space. For me it was a really easy transition, because since moving to college I’ve never owned more things than I could fit in my car. When I had a car.
Rebecca: That’s pretty true for me as well. My college had this thing where we’d go to school for six months and then work for six months and then go back to school for six months. I took advantage of that a lot and used it to test out living in different places. So I was always moving, and got really good at purging and not accumulating.
In my previous job, I was traveling 75% to 100% of the time. And in some ways maybe that helped me ease into boat life, because I was around less the first six months we were married. I don’t travel really at all anymore now.
Rebecca, was it hard to pay rent for an apartment in which you spent little time?
Rebecca: That’s it! That’s why I always had roommates and stuff before this. It was too much money to never be there. And sometimes I’d get mad about it.
Do you ever find yourself wanting more alone space?
Rebecca: No. We both have jobs that keep us out of the house a decent amount.
Rob: Yeah, I’ve never felt the need for more alone space. I get my alone space largely on my commute home. I ride my bike back from work, so that’s kind of alone time.
How does living on the boat change how you cook?
Rebecca: We do not have a dishwasher, and everything is hand wash. We’ve mastered the one-pot meal.
Rob: I’d say our biggest obstacle to cooking is less our set up and more so the amount of time we have. But we have dinner parties where we’ve done multiple courses and delicious things. We’ve done popovers a lot. We usually do that in the winter so that the oven warms the boat. It’s too hot in the summer to have an oven in a small space.
How does living on the boat impact your shopping?
Rebecca: Rob is always saying, “That seems great Rebecca, but where are you going to put it?” But the calculus does change. To buy something I have to get rid of something. I’m a lot more conscious with what I buy.
Every time we want something, we are like, well, that’s a point for whatever. There is no actual point value that you are working for. But it forces you to pause and think about it and say, “Do we actually need whatever?”
Do you store all of your belongings on the boat?
Rebecca: We also have a storage unit. We go at least twice a month, so it’s actually a very active storage unit / closet thing. We have some cooking utensils there. A bread maker that we use sometimes. And a KitchenAid stand-up mixer. The sewing machine.
Rob: And as the “seasons” change in LA — you know, as the temperature drops by 10 degrees — we switch clothes. I’ll put my shorts over there and grab my pants out. Things like that. The hiking gear all lives on the boat, because we use that essentially every weekend. But we also have backpacking gear. So the tent, the sleeping bags, stoves, etc., are all in there.
We don’t spend a lot of time at the storage unit. Our average time there is about 10 minutes, maybe. Because our backpacking and camping stuff all sits right on the outside. We just grab it all and walk out. It’s convenient. It’s on the way to the grocery store for us.
How does the boat impact your commute?
Rebecca: It hurts a little bit. I work 22 miles away, which in California means it is about an hour-long commute back and forth to work. Which is worth it. But.
Rob: We are thinking of getting Rebecca an electric bike. It would probably end up taking slightly longer as a commute, but it would be a consistent commute. It would take the same amount of time every single day. Which is the big problem with LA. Traffic is unpredictable.
My commute to work is actually sometimes longer than Rebecca’s, because I do mine by a combination of public transit and cycling. Except I get to read the paper in the morning while I’m on my bus portion of it, and if the bus is relatively empty, I’ll call people and chat with them. The ride home I almost do exclusively by bike. It’s really pleasant and nice because you have the wind in your face and you are kind of coasting. I know the side streets to take.
Has the boat impacted how you socialize?
Rebecca: It’s harder to have people visit. Three people on the boat is a little too much. My mom comes and visits when Rob is off at a conference or doing something else.
Do you take the boat sailing?
Rob: When I first got the boat it was multiple times a week. But it’s slowly tapered down to very rarely. It’s kind of a hassle. You have to get the boat ready to go sailing
Is there anything you miss about not having a more conventional house?
Rebecca: I occasionally miss taking a bath. And hobbies. That’s where the math comes in. It’s not even calculus, it’s addition and subtraction. I like all different kinds of crafts, but there’s just not room for it. We also don’t have a freezer so that I can meal prep.
Rob: If I had a more conventional house, I would have room for a laser cutter/etcher. But that’s about it. The thing is that having a one-bedroom is not really enough space to actually do a lot of these hobbies. If you really want to do hobbies like sewing or laser cutting, you really need another bedroom, which is suddenly a large rent increase. But, honestly, I could just join a maker space for my laser hobby.
Has living on the boat taught you something about yourself?
Rob: I feel like I’m living close to nature because we are in a marina. And I don’t want to live somewhere where I don’t have easy access to that sort of environment. You go home at night and there is no traffic. It’s quiet. Sometimes you see the sea lions swimming by. There’s herons that fish off the dock. It’s very, very pleasant to live there.
Rebecca: Yeah, that’s part of what makes the whole thing more pleasant. Because even walking to the bathroom, which seems like something that is weird and that I was uncertain about, you aren’t walking down the street. You are walking in the marina, and it’s beautiful outside. You go, you breath the fresh air. It’s an unintentional feature.
How do people react to hearing that you live on a boat?
Rob: Everyone thinks it’s really cool. A lot of people have the dream of living on a boat. It’s romanticized the way the Airstream trailer is. People just want their Airstream trailer to cruise America and see the National Parks.
Does the boat feel like home?
Rob: It definitely feels like home. I think for me the idea of home is much more fluid. Wherever I have friends or family around feels like home regardless if it is a permanent or temporary location. Like when we go camping and set up a tent, I kind of feel like it is home.
But the boat feels like home. And we have our vegetables. We eat a lot of very fresh vegetables. When we travel, we eat a much more meat and potato diet. And we always say, “Oh, we can’t wait to get back to California and have vegetables.” Because vegetables are delicious, fresh and cheap in LA.
Rebecca: Yeah, “home” is less place-oriented. When I was traveling a lot, even going back to the hotel at night, it was like, “Oh, I’m so happy to be going back home.” But then I also refer to where I grew up as home as well. I don’t know.
On the boat, all those things where you are like, “I can’t wait to get home and get back to my own bed,” definitely stand. And it’s nice being around all your things and being like, “Yes, I know where everything is.”
Could you see yourself living on land again someday?
Rob: What I’m really hoping for, and they’ve started this a little bit, is that they have these tiny home communities now. There’s like 20 or 30 tiny homes and large communal spaces, so if you want to host a big party you can reserve these spaces. I could see us doing something like that more than just a standalone apartment somewhere.
Do you think about raising a family on a boat?
Rebecca: Yeah. It would have to be slightly bigger than what we have now. I think as a kid you don’t know how weird you and your family’s situation are because everyone’s family situation is weird inevitably. Everyone is unique. I feel that kids on a boat wouldn’t know any differently. And there’s tons of advantages. Obviously below cost and everything. It buys us additional freedom and ability to do other things.
How are you impacted by gentrification and development in the LA area?
Rebecca: The marina is going through a wonderful new redevelopment. Which is great, because it is becoming steadily more beautiful. And we will have access to a pool, a clubhouse, and tennis courts and gym.
Rob: But even though it was already gentrified and expensive, it’s becoming even more gentrified and expensive. Marina has already been extremely unaffordable for most people for many years, so that’s just becoming worse. Rents for boats have traditionally not been very expensive, but when they finish redevelopment our rent is going to increase.
So our debate right now is if we are actually going to use the new amenities. If we are not going to use them, then do we just get a one-bedroom? There’s some pros to that. One is that we could live closer to work. Realistically, what we are going to do is stay on the boat and see if we use them, and then if not we will move away. But moving away will cost us more money. And then all of a sudden we have beds and dressers. And then the question is how long are we going to stay in LA.
It seems like opportunities to own or live (comparatively) inexpensively on a boat may diminish as the area redevelops. How do you feel about that?
Rob: I actually think it’s really unfortunate. I feel that they are pretty much catering now to people who have more money to buy bigger boats. And there’s reasons for that. People who have more money are able to maintain boats better and hire people. But today you actually could be an LA middle-class person who is also a boater. And that’s not going to be an option anymore.
Do you have any regrets about not owning real estate in LA?
Rebecca: LA was expensive and pretty unaffordable when I moved here, and now — it’s just like a joke. I wish I had found a way to buy a property, because the run-up in real estate prices has been ridiculous. So I think the major regret isn’t that we haven’t enjoyed living on the boat — it’s just sort of the financial return we could have had if we’d owned property. And I really do love living on the boat.
How do you feel about the fact that both of you are working and yet owning real estate seems unaffordable?
Rebecca: A lot of my friends are young professionals who are far along in careers, and the joke is that we are “LA poor” because we can’t afford to buy. And that’s really annoying — abstractly, and just not to be on the property ladder. I think it bothers me less than some of my friends because I don’t think LA is my forever home.
What should people learn from your housing situation?
Rebecca: You need less than you think you do.
Rob: Unless you have a giant space, and then you have to fill it.
Rebecca: You are like a gas. You expand to fill the space available.
Rob: You actually need very, very little. Like when we cook, we’ve got a pot (which has now been replaced by a Dutch oven), a frying pan, a spatula, a spoon, a cutting board, a couple knives, and that’s all you really need in your kitchen. Everything else is extra — and nice — but you don’t actually need that.
I think it’s always hilarious when I see people’s enormous kitchens filled with thousands of things they probably haven’t used in two years. I would love to have that kitchen and, to be honest, to have all of those things. But I see people buying homes and looking at apartments, and they are willing to pay an extra couple hundred dollars a month to store a couple kitchen things they rarely ever use. For all the money they could save with a much smaller kitchen, they could just go out and eat.
What would you say to people considering an unconventional housing situation?
Rob: People are very hesitant to try things that are new. And I think that might be preventing a lot of interesting housing options. They are like, “Oh, living on a boat sounds like so much fun.” But they wouldn’t do it. Or one of these co-op situations. Or a tiny home community. I think there’s a lot of people who this really appeals to, but they don’t have the little whatever it is to give up their apartment and sell everything.
Rebecca: It’s a risk. People are bad at change.
Rob: It’s a big risk. I think some of the really interesting housing innovation that we need to make places affordable will happen when people let go of their preconceived notions of what housing is and be able to take that risk.
Do you think living on a boat has high barriers to entry because people think they need certain skills such as knowing how to sail?
Rob: I think that’s a huge thing. Living on a boat is a whole different ballgame, but it’s not just living on a boat. For example, they have the tiny homes that are built on trailers and have a solar panel and a battery. Unfortunately, people don’t understand how solar power battery systems work well enough to be confident having one in a tiny home. I think the basic skills necessary for a lot of these interesting housing things are very minimal, but people have never had to do it before. And because of that they are unwilling to take the risk.
Interview conducted December 27, 2017
Interview has been edited and reorganized for clarity, privacy and brevity. Rob and Rebecca are relations of the Author.
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