Well, one year later and in the middle of a global pandemic we finally did it ! We completed on our house sale and have moved on to our narrowboat.
Over the next few blog posts I’ll fill you in on the details. If you thought moving house was stressful then doing so during a global pandemic made it even more so. We agreed the sale of our house on the 18th February 2020 five weeks before the UK went in to lockdown. We finally moved out on the 8th April 2020 – 2 weeks in to lockdown.
I had booked the removals company just before lockdown was announced but right up until the day we moved no-one could be sure that it would all happen. We were so dependent on the daily announcements from government detailing what was and wasn’t allowed to happen and who was still allowed to work…
A week after we had accepted the offer on our house we went boat hunting. We had both spent hours online looking at boats and researching what we thought we would need. At this point I still hadn’t set foot on a narrowboat. We narrowed down the possibilities to about four boats at three different marinas all around the Rugby area. Mum & Dad kindly offered to look after the dogs for the day and we went to look at boats.
Boat Hunting…
One thing I learnt quite quickly is that boat sales are very different to house sales. There seemed to be very little “selling” involved ! I will add one thing I really hate is the hard sell approach….
The first boat we looked at was the one that I had really loved when I saw it online and had really thought this could be the boat for us. When I walked onboard I knew I couldn’t live on it. It was cold, dark and really not what I was expecting.
That day we looked at a total of 6 boats, 2 at each marina and learnt that the age of a boat bears absolutely no relation to the condition it is in. We saw year old boats in far worse condition than boats nearly 30 years old….
The fifth boat that we saw I fell in love with. It was a bit longer than we had been planning, 62ft. This meant there would be parts of the canal network we wouldn’t be able to access but it just felt “right”. All we had to do now was hope that the boat would still be available when we had exchanged contracts on the house. Remember this was at the end of February and we had no idea what was building and the way things would turn out….
As we were leaving the marina the sky was really black. It had been raining on and off all day. I turned round and saw the most amazing rainbow. I just knew at that point that everything was going to work out and this would be “our” boat…. Little did I know what was round the corner…..