Bee

40 feet is fine and a 'traditional' boat with the short back deck has more storage than a 'cruiser' stern with the long back deck (This is normally covered in broken bogs, bits of engine, firewood, bits of ruined bikes and a big heap of soggy leaves resting on rotten deckboards) Owning a boat is not cheap, check out the licence fees on CRT website, moorings are expensive too so it is not cheap but renting a flat is stupidly expensive and at least you stand a chance of selling the boat for approx what you paid for it. Have a walk along a canal and talk to other boat owners, take whatever they say with a pinch of salt, start collecting tools (you'll need lots) and find out all the pro's and many con's about boats. Good luck

Hmph. If I had been steering I would have asked for the fenders to be deployed. Amateurs.

Mold and the damp that causes it is a real swine. As I'm sure you know poor ventilation means that the damp cannot dry out, poor insulation will make cold surfaces and poor heating finishes the job. The rear hatch is probably just a piece of 3/4" ply with no insulation so that is hard to solve. If I was you I would swap the oil filled rads for fan heaters and move them around the boat whilst opening doors and windows all over the place and get the stove (is it solid fuel?) going. Hopefully this will drive warm, wet air out of the boat. You will be wasting a lot of heat but you really need to dry the thing out. Open all the mushroom vents wide and everything else permanently and leave as much open as you can.I would not leave fan heaters on whilst you are away from the boat but the oil filled rads will help if you you can place them under an open window or something so that convection draws the wet air out. This is a marathon and not a sprint. I guess the insulation is not great either so you might need to get to grips with that - I'd leave it to spring. Don't be tempted to put carpet on the walls in damp places - condensation will form on that too! Better cool and dry (ish) than warm and soggy. Good Luck

I could have written that! Its all good advice. I would add that when choosing a loo think carefully about pumps, wires, vacuums, separate tanks and fiddly stuff because you WILL be taking it apart and although a galvanised bucket might be a bit too basic these days there is much to be said for a cassette loo. In fact you will be taking lots of the sophisticated stuff apart from time to time so keep it simple, keep the access to stuff easy and spend time on the floor so you can lift nice big panels. Good luck.

Unless there is some other symptom then this sounds like fuel. So if it runs then stops how do you restart it? Does it just start then go again for a couple of minutes? If there is some sort of air leak I wonder it it starting as it should, then sucking air till it stops then the air bubble rises to the top of the pipework. You could then have enough solid diesel to restart it and pull a bit of diesel from the tank but a slug of air too and the thing stops again. Difficult to tell without seeing the pipe work. You have got fuel in the tank? These things can take some tracing.

Cor! This is a problem. Seriously, How good are you at DIY? Have you any sort of background in dirty, heavy work? I ask because narrowboats are remarkably simple shapes, everything is flat and there are seldom any compound curves (I am not talking about some of the older boats or top quality newer ones) The hull plating is a big, dirty, hard job but straightforward, a steel stockholder will almost certainly guillotine the majority to size and deliver them to hardstanding, You might be surprised at what you can do.

Steel narrowboats are massively over engineered, can't think of one that has sunk or had really bad structural damage unless it was already in poor condition