00:05I'm Victor. I'm Joanna. And he's William. And a few years ago we sort of quit our city jobs and
00:14stopped living in London to roam around the canals working on a cafe boat serving people
00:18towpath wanderers and dog walkers. And living on a bar too. Hiya. Can I please get a one-shot
00:25cappuccino. Yeah sure. Cappuccino coming up. We were living in Hackney in London and we were
00:32working sort of in central London. We were freelance TV editors. The long hours and the
00:36kind of lifestyle was slightly unhealthy or at least I couldn't find a way to make it
00:41seem healthy while also doing that job. It was stressful. There was a lot of deadlines.
00:48When I first moved on to a boat it was I was just looking for kind of more or less
00:52like anything
00:53new I think. At that time in my career I was kind of a bit of a stalemate. I felt
00:58like I
00:58wasn't getting anywhere. I went to a bank to see if I could get a loan. They gave me one
01:03which I was surprised about and I had moved out of my flat, quit my job and bought a boat
01:07within about a week. I didn't know anybody who lived on a narrow boat and I didn't
01:11know anything about them and the learning curve was steep but it gave me a lot of
01:16freedom and I've really enjoyed it. I've never looked back and I just found a lot of
01:22real bad. Here we go. A little cappuccino for you there. We were looking on Gumtree, we were
01:31looking on eBay, we looked on a website called Apollo Duck and we were just
01:36looking, we didn't really know what we were looking for but just something that
01:39looked a bit different and then when we saw this one and we saw the windows we
01:43were like, yeah, that would make a great cafe.
01:49We bought it for £20,000. The work that we did involved ripping out everything that
01:56was in here in terms of the wood and stuff like that that was in here, replacing
02:00all of that. We've done all the electrics and all the plumbing. We did a full
02:04repaint of the outside, I guess built the kitchen and turned all the bits that make
02:09turn it into a cafe at the coffee machine, fitted all that sort of stuff
02:12and we've spent ages on the engine. The biggest adjustments are probably like
02:16just all the things that you're plugged into in a house, electric and gas or
02:22something to cook with and hot water, all of those things like now take work to
02:27get. It's the narrowest that gets you. Yeah, closes in on you. Yeah. Privacy but
02:33you're on the towpath all the time. Be prepared to worry a lot more than you
02:38thought you were going to worry about your boat sinking, your boat catching on fire,
02:42water levels, running out of water, running out of cold. The best thing about living on the
02:47narrowboat is the travel, like moving around, seeing new places. You get to just
02:51travel the country and like live in some great places without sort of having to
02:57either commit to it or spend too much money to live there.
03:02So I'd say the financial freedom. You're afforded a bit of financial flexibility at
03:07least. You can kind of afford to go without a few things if you need to.
03:12William's favourite part about living on the canal is by far the geese. Yeah, the wildlife.
03:18You can get rid of boats. You can sell boats and buy boats much easier than houses. If it turns
03:25out it wasn't for you, you're not burdened with something that's too difficult to just change again. You can, within
03:32a week, probably be renting a flat somewhere else.
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