Trousers

Nice one Goliath. You seem to have done a great job in selecting a boat at the end of the market I'm looking to enter in at. I'd be interested to know you selection criteria when choosing a boat and how you ranked the respective features of the boats in regard to importance. I'll certainly be going for a full survey haha

Thanks Alan, that's really useful. So, if you have two similarly aged boats at the same price and one has overplating that should do nothing to influence which seems like the better prospect? (pre-survey of course) Thanks for the response Murflynn. As Alan replied my thinking is to leave some money aside to remedy the terrible choice I make when buying a boat (as well as for insurance, licensing etc.). Do you think its better to basically put everything you have into making sure you get absolutely the best boat you could possibly afford? I can see the logic in that - but feel for a novice like me it doesn't leave much margin for error. Thanks Lady G, I shall bear that in mind when planning my routes. £4k a year sounds very doable for me, so that is good news. Thanks Leggers, I have been doing as much reading as possible - thanks for the recommendations. I will certainly try and get a boat with a deent history of work done so I at least know where I am with things. Really appreciate the feedback, I am actually not that strapping (more of a beanpole really haha) but have a decent ability to pick things up and work things out. That's really assuring and also pretty impressive. I'll e sure to check out the Thunderboat forum. Thanks to everyone else that has posted so far as well, I have read every word and its all been really useful (even the inevitable tangents haha). Cheers!

Hello everyone, I've been lurking a little while and believe I have read many/most of the recent newbie posts like this. My plan in short is that by January/February I will have around £10/11,000 saved. I plan to supplement this with a loan of around £20,000 which I appear to be eligible for based on my cursory searches. With this I plan to buy a boat for around £25-27000 to liveaboard as a constant cruiser (rest assured I genuinely intend to be a constant cruiser, in fact I intend to traverse the canal from South to North West - However perhaps that is whole other naive pipedream to be discussed at a different time ?) I will be living and working from the boat as I work remotely in publishing. With that said I have a few questions: feel free to answer all; one; some or none of these. 1. Is there a sweet spot in pricing at which point there is a significant jump in the amount of boat one can get for their money? I've seen a post by one of the most esteemed posters of this parish which suggested that below £25,000 the amount needed to be spent on work outweighs any prospective savings. 2. I know many of the basic things to look for when buying a narrowboat based on my research, but how should one weigh up different strengths and weaknesses. For example, with regards to a hull on an older boat, is a recent overplating a good or bad thing? Is there a definitive order for considering the value of a boat? Im assuming: Size > hull integrity > age > builder > electrics. But how many years of age is a good builder worth over a lesser one? 3. Is moving onto a boat a good idea for a young, single, strapping man with limited boating and DIY experience? (Just to head off the first question, the reason I want to move onto a boat is not as a cheaper form of living, rather it is to explore the waterways and see some (hopefully) attractive scenery). Any answers, questions, feedback, abuse, banter welcome! ?