Unmooring and unmoreing: How we've done it

Slightly cobwebby, but in good working order

This was the good, if slightly neglected, ship Alchemy a couple of days ago. Good, because I try to leave her ready to sail and motor at all times, but neglected, because several weeks of this rapidly expiring summer has been spent on processes and events both tangential and necessary to slipping the dock lines. Our levels of effort, labour, confusion and delay have been so high as to cause the greatest gap in blog posting (horrors!) of at least the last decade. But on that fact hangs a tale.

Had you asked my wife and I, say, three months ago, if we were particularly materialistic, we would have demurred. We've never owned a car, never had cable TV, and have not, having lived in half a house with tenants above, had the space to acquire much save books...or so we thought. But as the date of the close of the house sale approached, we realized that our nearby flat, rented for just one year so that our son could finish high school nearby with minimal disruption (and, to be fair, so we would be no further away from our boat and its later refitting stages) was in no sense large enough to accommodate our vast amount of "stuff". Furthermore, we needed to rent a garage from our new landlords just to hold my power tools, things migrating to the boat over the winter, things I would want in our new, out-of-town place (more on this below), and the sort of heavy-duty racking, sawhorses and bottle-jacks one hesitates to just put on Kijiji.

The new flat's living room was quite spacious until I put in a load of dining room furniture and six seven-foot bookshelves.

A particular struggle were my books. Bibliophilia is only a problem in confined spaces, and our old house only looked small because there were so many damned books. Maybe two or three thousand, down from four or five thousand before I did a radical cull a few years ago. Now, apart from service manuals, almanacs and "how to cruise" books, the approximate space budget on Alchemy for recreational reading in paper form is probably five paperbacks per crew. So disposal, even in terms of getting to the interim land-based habitations, was going to be a big deal. And so it was.

These are just two of the half-filled boxes of just sea-related books I either sold or gave to my club, which had to build a new set of shelves to bear them. The filled boxes numbered at least 15, all transported by bicycle cart.

So the Great Culling commenced with nautical books. Keeping in mind I run a business from home and am not actually retired, this took a couple of weeks, and, as is the way of such things, the idea of lifting boxes up a flight of stairs at the height of summer led to an increasingly unsentimental attitude to the keeping of books I would not be taking on the voyage. Off about 500 salty volumes went. Enjoy, National Yacht Club members and visitors: I did.

You know what's large? A windvane in an aft cabin is large.

Certain other pieces belonging to the boat had to vacate the garage also. The wind vane above was one. Oddly, because I have complex reno plans for the aft cabin this winter, I will likely install it on the stern, but not make it functional with lines until next spring's launch. I'll fashion a cover to keep the weather out.

Atomic 4 oil pan, one of the many valuable pieces that came, sales pending, to the new garage.

While I made a nice little packet in July on some Atomic 4 parts, I had to haul (via hand-cart, see below) a few items to the new garage, which we have rented only until November 30 and which is not quite filled, but certainly piled higher than I'd hoped.

The vast uncluttering included the running of a garage sale (once enough crap had been removed from the garage to permit the sale!); two separate visits to load up a van with scrap metal, surplus racking and far too many fence posts; the rental of a dumpster bin in which went a brim-ful collection of unwanted piano (I tried to give it away, as it was free to me 10 years ago, but you can't give them away); and a visit from a two-tonne "GOT-JUNK" truck we filled with the remainder of our crap.

Moved by mechanical advantage: it's good to be a sailor.

Amid all these focused efforts were a constant stream of chests of drawers, boxes of books, racking, flooring, fans, heaters and related mildly desirable acquisitions to the curb in front of the house to be sold, where the magic of big-city salvage made most of it vanish. We also used the garbage and recycling bins at both properties (our landlords are away on holiday) and some bins at the club to dispose of things like sails I'll never use.

Not materialistic, eh? Reality and the terrified housecat, who was moved last in an increasingly barren, echoey house, begged to differ.

She is not coming out until you've damned well finished moving.

But, painfully (for I was moving the three blocks from old house to new flat via hand-cart, the process of which ground down the turning wheel bearings to little shavings), the decluttering proceeded.

A typical array of Not Wanted on the Voyage.

We were astounded, as was the buyer of our house on her final walk-through the day prior to the scheduled close, at how much space was actually on the property once we'd nuked, shifted or otherwise vanished our ridiculous amount of possessions. 

The mancave returned to its original form as a stable.

The dark spot in the middle is where the horse-pee drained away to whatever sewer arrangements pertained in 1900.

Quite airy, minus mahogany accents and IKEA shelving.

Somehow, we managed to jam in an end-of-August day trip to the nearby town of Trenton. I had been surveying real estate there on the basis of several parameters, which can be summed up as follows:

• 1) We wanted to maintain a Canadian, and specifically, an Ontario, address while we were off a-voyaging. We did not want to "sell up and sail", but to keep a toehold in our native country. This would simplify certain interactions with the government if we had just one principal residence, even if it was a pied-a-terre in the basement of a place we otherwise rented out.
• 2) We needed this place to be within driving distance of a relative skilled in property management who would be our point person with said tenants and who could do, or arrange to have done, maintenance as needed.
• 3) We needed to be beyond the "halo of greed" generated by Toronto's insane house valuations in order to maximize our bang for buck of our Toronto house sale. We did not care to tie ourselves or our gotten gains to Toronto, with its high taxes but limited upside for rent (and ease of access to our possessions, when required). At the same time, we needed the place to be of sufficient size to have a train and a bus stop, and to be close to a major highway. Trenton has all three and it's 130 km. or 90 minutes by car east of Toronto.
• 4) We needed said house to be of sufficient value to hold its purchase price for the next five years in a town with both a tight rental market, but also with relatively high incomes. Trenton has a nearby university, light manufacturing, a big new marina and recreational industries (it's the start of the Trent-Severn Canal system) and a large airforce base (CFB Trenton).

So we saw five places with the rather odd request that "a separate entrance granny flat plus a garage and shed...the rest just has to be rentable" was the mandate. Our Trenton-area real estate agent complied as best she could in a place where maybe a couple of hundred houses of any type change hands in a year. A couple of hundred houses within walking distance of me, by contrast, are getting quarter-million dollar renovations as I type here in Toronto. Our old house is also slated for some version of creative destruction.

Just as an addendum to how we afforded the house (and, by extension, the good ship Alchemy) in the first place, I'll recap by noting that we paid off our house in 2006. It had doubled in value since 1998 when we bought it, paying it off via tenants' rental income and dedicated (bi-weekly mortgage payments) debt reduction, so once paid off, we borrowed against it to the tune of a 40% loan structured as a new, first mortgage. As we had paid off the house in seven and a half years once already, we got attractive terms of about 2.15%.

We had tenants paying down the mortgage and we kicked in a few thou a year as a top-up. Long story short, we were down to $60K owed (still at around 2%) last summer. We wanted to have the flexibility to sell the house, now valued at over a million due to location, so we converted that to a HELOC and the last pair of tenants conveniently moved on. We paid off the HELOC at $1,000/month and are once again mortgage-free. The line of credit also allows us to renovate in anticipation of sale, which we never actually did, opting for an "as is, where is" exclusive listing, and because we had so little to do directly with paying off the 2006 loan, we essentially consider the passagemaker we will shortly move aboard to be "a free boat".

Of course it isn't. There's tens of thousands in gear and (mainly my) labour aboard. But it was a smart way to afford a boat using the house as a successful and friendly bank. Let's face it, no bank would loan money for a 30 year-old boat! Also, few home owners would live as on-site landlords in the less appealing part of the house without car or cable TV or much in the way of vacations for years on end  in order to eliminate debt. But that was the only way to pull this scheme off, which I described to Mrs. Alchemy in 2006 as "a sleigh ride you can't leave once you've started down the icy slope." Which was, in retrospect, a little melodramatic.

Sticking with the real estate component of making the crusing life possible, I won't bore my long-suffering readers with the saga and photos of the somewhat odd places we saw, but they were all of a price that our house sale in Toronto would have allowed us to buy all five, with a bit left over. But we settled (very rapidly; having Mrs. Alchemy's retired home inspector father's input helped here) on a house very reminiscent of my youth in the suburbs. Behold: The Storage Locker.

I am easily swayed by proper drainage.

This house has everything we wanted, save for the separate entrance. We will have to sort that out with whatever tenants we acquire, but it's no biggie. Some of the features were fated to appeal to me: a separate, automated 17 KW, natural-gas genset that will heat and light the house should the main power fail...

It's called a Generac, and it looks clever.

 ...plus "hydronic heating", which the home inspector deemed a very tidy installation.

I like tidy installations.

The tenants will have to pay off all the utilities, and we'll handle the taxes. We'll be doing some minor repairs and will have to shift the garage contents from here to there by November, at which point we will know how much space the rest of our possessions will take up. This crazy plan may actually come together. In the meantime, we are renters who will also be owners who will be prepping to be landlords who live on a boat.

A colourful symbol of hope and refraction.

So now we are ensconced in the new and frankly very nice apartment. Boxes are being (finally) unpacked, and after a titanic struggle with the idiot phone company, my landline is working.

One of the five technicians over four separate visits dispatched to fix what was essentially a work order screw-up. Can't wait to install my SSB.

We are enjoying the balcony off our bedroom and have recreated, sort of, the "fire pit" area of our former back yard, minus the fire, save for a candle or two.

At night, the trash pandas sing.

Now that I am beginning to unwind from the ridiculous level of dirt, detail work, sweating and hauling and lifting that this interminable process has demanded, I've come to the realization that all those who intend to cruise must come to terms with: possessions not directly related to the safe operation, repair and maintenance of the boat must be ruthlessly reduced and scruntinized, because there's not only limited space on a boat, but you can't leave most things unstowed when underway, because of the rather good chance they may become projectiles. Extending this (minus outside of earthquake zones the projectile consideration) to houses has made us realize that the urge to acquire, whether it be through inheritance, scavenging (much of our furniture was cleaned-up curbside acquisitions or bargain-hunting (we have enough tinned food to last a year) is, or can be, pathological. Material goods can save your life, but they also have the power to restrain your life. Sentiment can be a set of chains, and so can fear of poverty: we gave to charity about a dozen full bags of surplus clothing but really, the boat's only got room for maybe 10 days' of t-shirts and shorts and two sets of "shore clothing"; the rest is foulies and boat-specific gear. So there's still work to be done on that front. We all need, I feel, to "unmore" our lives. This process has taught me that less is more.

I have also come to terms with not, in the usual sense, anticipating missing our house much. Partially, this was because we paid it off (twice) via rentals to a rotating cast of tenants of varying degrees of aptitude; we lived in the dimmer, less renovated, more cluttered half and while I enjoyed and continue to enjoy the surrounding neighbourhood, the house was a means to an end. It's certainly paid off in the monetary sense, but that same advantage is driving us out, ultimately, of our home town: we didn't want to own another "crap shack" at Toronto prices just to rent it out for five years for little return when we could spend a fraction of what we've cleared down the road and make about two-thirds in rental income. The arbitrage wasn't sentimental, either.

On that personal front, while all but about 12 months of my marriage was spent in the sold house, not all the memories I have of it were positive. One of the reasons I have a free hand to sail away today is because my mother, father and only sibling have all died since 2002. There's not a lot holding me here now...my nephews live elsewhere in Ontario, as do my wife's extended family. A lot of friends have, prompted by the increasingly hard logic of overpriced housing, moved away from Toronto. So unmooring in terms of sentimental attachments has been made easier.

Long-haired hippie crew with the infamous cart on its 100th shortcut from Crap Shack to Chateau Nouveau

My wife and son put in Herculean efforts to make this happen: the phrase "worked like a two-dollar mule" was not used figuratively this summer: I thank them both. And now we return to boat-fixing and, I hope, a few sailing expeditions prior to haulout at the end of October. More to follow soon.

Cabin Boy's "back to school" haircut, done at his request.