News and Features
Life in a Floating Home
By Jennifer Van Evra published Sep 1, 2012
Yes, you can buy a detached home in a friendly neighbourhood in Metro Vancouver for $100,000. There’s no lawn—hell, no land—and you’d better hold on when the storms blow. It’s life in a floating home
All photos by Adam and Kev
Ricki Willing sets up a folding "Open House" sign outside, then efficiently breezes up the stairs of the three-storey, two-bedroom floating home, opening windows and neatly laying out feature sheets and business cards.
It's a sunny Sunday in Ladner, but while her neighbours mill along the concrete docks at a holiday pace, stopping to chat about the flowering planters, the resident swans' new goslings, or their weekend home renos, Willing is working-and hard.
One of a handful of Lower Mainland realtors to specialize in floating homes, Willing has four open houses today alone-and they promise to attract the usual mishmash of professional couples, empty nesters, retirees, and single women, all of them entertaining, if only fleetingly, the idea of living literally on the water.
Willing steps around a pair of sitting ducks as she heads for the next property, pointing out the pricier homes at the end of the dock that enjoy unobstructed views to the ocean, and the benches where residents can watch glowing sunsets, glass of wine in hand. Bobbing between two homes is a seemingly innocuous cedar log that likely came in on a Fraser River freshet, a rise in water levels caused by June's heavy rain.
"We have to watch out for stuff like this, because when the river is higher, it picks up debris on the sides," she says. "The other day we had a log that was so big, it got lodged underneath the ramp-if it goes under someone's house and then the tide drops, it can act like a great big lever."
Having a log put your house on a tilt is not a worry for most Lower Mainland homeowners-nor is your property breaking free from its moorings, a hazardous shift in the weight distribution of your appliances, riverbed silt accumulation, tsunami insurance, or otters, beavers, and raccoons nesting in your floatation system. Divers, it can safely be said, are likely not on your list of emergency phone numbers. Continue reading >>
