<p>Fed up by the rising rentals in London, a 29-year-old woman shifted to a boat and has been living on it with her dog since 2023. Shannon Lane, currently based in Hackney, East London, revealed how she has saved herself over £1,200 a month by moving onto a narrowboat she bought three years ago. She shared the story behind the purchase and how this exciting journey has been equally challenging for her.</p>
<p>In an area where an individual pays an average rent of £1,600 for a one-bedroom flat, the freelance producer is now paying an average of £350 a month, including utilities for her narrowboat home, a British newspaper The Sun reported.</p>
<p>Lane explained that she wanted a “more affordable” space for her and her pug, Gilbert and that’s when she took out a loan to buy a 30ft narrowboat worth £24,000 in January 2023. She even shared that her mental health has drastically improved and that she no longer suffers from “depression and bad anxiety” ever since she moved to a boat. </p>
<p>But the shift from a house to a boat has not been a smooth-sailing ride for the 29-year-old, who recently shared with her 75k TikTok followers, what she has to go through when the temperatures plummet.</p>
<h3>Shannon Lane’s ‘Boat Blues'</h3>
<p>According to Lane, her unique home gets so cold from inside that even her dog’s water freezes to solid, and so does her tea and coffee. She even showed a cup of tea that she had left in the sink for a few hours before turning it upside down to show the viewers that the tea wasn’t coming out. She had to give the ceramic mug a good smack against the sink so that the leftover tea could finally came out, but only as a solid circle with a teabag fully intact inside it.</p>
<p>In one of the videos, Lane also filmed the frozen canal her boat was on, confessing that living on it during the harsher winter months wasn’t that easy, and that she had “almost quit the boat life” last year due to this.</p>
<p>Sharing the story behind how she ended up buying the narrowboat, Lane said that she was paying £900 a month for a room and found it “ridiculous”. She used to live with two of her friends in a shared house. Later, the landlord increased the rent to £1,000 a month, The Sun reported.</p>
<p>She then stumbled upon the boat in an advertisement while taking a stroll at the Kings Cross canal in October 2022, and was immediately drawn to it. The woman then decided to take a loan and worked out that her loan repayments would be £300 a month. She spoke with the boat owner and set up a viewing for the following week. Although her family was hesitant at first, they later trusted her judgement.</p>
<p>”As soon as I saw the boat itself I saw it was £24k and I worked out that paying my loan from the bank to afford it would be £300-a-month…That is a huge difference to what I was paying back in my house share and this is something I now own,” the report quoted her as saying.</p>
<p>The woman further said that living on a boat is not that easy as the challenges she faced shadowed the excitement that came along with the new experience of living on a boat. “It was a huge learning curve, I like to call it my boat blues,” she said.</p>
<p>”I thought it was going to be amazing and I would have all this freedom but when you come down to it you have all this hard work,” she added.</p>
<p>She recalled that it was freezing in London when she had moved and that she had no clue about how to even fill up the water or empty the toilet. But, the community helped her out in this situation. “The best thing about boat life is the community, it is so nice to each other – if it wasn’t for them I don’t think I could have done it,” she said, adding that she made some of her best friends in the community.</p>
<p>”I love the fact I can travel whenever I want and the summers are absolutely amazing,” Shannon said. The Londoner also said she loves the freedom that comes with living on the boat. </p>
Founder
Website: https://www.rahamatabad.com