Houseboat

It is April 29, 2023, and I am again living on the houseboat on Bethel Island.

I finally got someone to take this photo.
This is my bed. Just out of sight is the entryway into the interior. On the far left in the center of the page is the corner of one step to exit the houseboat.
I call this shelf my charging area. It is across the hallway from the bed. On the far right is the waste basket. Next are tall fold napkins. Various charging options for my cell phone, Apple Watch, and my Oral-B toothbrush are in the middle to the left.
This is the bathroom. The black floormat is new, and I love it.
This is where I eat my Vegan food. The table will fold against the wall, and the two seats will fold flat to make a bed. I haven’t done this yet during my short time living here. I moved off a lot of items that normally live here. I am not usually this neat.
When it is hot, and I run the heat pump for cooling, I sometimes need to take a nap. This works quite well.
In the center is the TV screen. The reflection is me taking the photo. It took me an hour to mount the TV screen and only a few minutes to hook up the cables. They were all the wrong length since they were moved from Rod’s house. Fixing that mess took me an hour.

Under the round wheel to steer the houseboat are two items. In the lower right is the second Fridge. The houseboat fridge wasn’t nearly large enough to hold everything. More about that fridge is below.

The round item is my Vornado fan which I use daily. A portion of the heat pump is in the far upper left corner. I will heat or cool it. Electricity is provided as part of the rent, so using this pump to heat or cool doesn’t add to my cost. I try to use it as little as possible so that Dan, my cooperative landlord, doesn’t get upset.

This photo shows the desk where I am sitting to write the update for the houseboat. The monitors show the work being done now.
This is the kitchen area. The unit on the left is the 4-burner stove, and above is the oven. I haven’t used either as yet and may not. I moved the clutter off, so it looks like I keep it neat.

The houseboat has a fridge and freezer. The fridge doesn’t have enough capacity, so I added two more.

This one was donated to me by the Bonson family. It even has a tiny freezer that would hold one tray of ice cubes.
In the center is a small building that holds the second fridge.
This photo shows the open door of this fridge. I bought this from Lowe’s several months ago after I returned from Texas.

I have enough capacity with the original houseboat fridge and these two extras.

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The original solar lights failed to stay on all night due to being old and having low battery capacity.

The solar lights have performed poorly. I ordered another set of four lights. They are the four to the left. The last one on the right is an original that keeps working very well. My test is to get up before it gets light and walk along the dock to see if they still work. This is a test to see if the batteries are in good condition. They are working very well.

I have no idea how they will perform once we go into winter and the daylight is shorter. A cloudy day could cause the batteries only to get a partial charge.

The batteries supplied with the lights are rated at 1200 ma. I purchased 8 that are rated at 3200 ma. This winter they are performing very well no matter how short and dark a day has been

To get to the houseboat, I must walk across the top of the levee. I kept getting serious stickers in my shoes. They often ended up in the houseboat and then in my bare feet. I installed stones to give me clean places to step. That solved the issue.

The original stones for stepping across the levee to the houseboat were too small. That made them hard to use. In September 2023, I removed the old small stones and replaced them with much larger stones. Now it is much easier to stay on the stones.

To empty the septic holding tank, I pay $150 about every two months to have it emptied. I use a firm named Waste Knot, and it works out well.

A near disaster story below

It was a mid February morning and I had been out shopping. I had returned only a half hour and was sitting across from the kitchen double sinks when a gush of water came out from under the sinks. I opened the door and was blasted with hot water. I had no idea what was wrong but I knew what to do. I quickly ran out to the dock and turned the water to the houseboat off. I was lucky to catch it when I did, or the houseboat could have filled enough to sink.

I contacted Dan, my landlord and explained what little I knew of this hot water that was now soaking the carpet. I still couldn’t see what was wrong. The photo above shows where the connection failed.

His first attempt to solder in an extension failed, but his son who is a professional plumber explained what probably happened and what to do. It worked and now things are back to normal. Dan used a vacuum to suck up some of the water in the carpet. It took a few nice days of warm clear weather and my Vornado fan to dry the carpet.

I wasn’t sure I could trust it, so when I left for a doctor’s appointment, I turned the water off for the day.