A man ditched his one-bed London flat to live mortgage-free on a boat - after watching a TV show. Calum Henderson, 31, was splashing out almost £1,400 a month for a flat in Elephant and Castle in London when he watched Sarah Beeny's 'How to live mortgage-free'.
Inspired by the programme, Calum found a brokerage selling the shell of a narrowboat for £44,000. He purchased the vessel in March 2019 and spent a year and £50,000 renovating it - spread over 12 months, using the £1,400 he saved monthly by not having to pay rent and an £8,000 loan.
Calum transformed the boat - installing lithium batteries, underfloor heating and additional insulation. After living on it for eight months he sold it for £125,000 and bought a bigger boat - a 62-foot wide beam shell - in 2021 for £64,000.
Calum spent eight months and £66,000 turning his new boat into a home - complete with a large kitchen and living room, a spare bedroom and an astroturf roof. The renovations inspired Calum to quit his job as a hairdresser and become a boat fitter.
Calum, who lives on the London canal system with his dog, Bilston, a seven-year-old cockapoo, said: "It is a passion I never knew I had. When you have a boat there is always something to do, something to fix - it is like having a part-time job.
"I love the building process, we enjoy building the boats on the water. You can be in the thick of a building site and step outside and you're on the water in the middle of nature.
"Whatever I am investing is in my own thing rather than spending rent away, it is giving me the freedom to design and build my place to how I want it to be. I don't have to worry about big mortgage payments, it has made me more self-sufficient, I am more aware of how much you're spending a month."
Calum said he "fell" into off-grid living after watching 'How to live mortgage-free with Sarah Beeny'.
He said: "I was renting a one-bed flat in London at the time. I have always been interested in property development and there was a boat on the show, which got us thinking. I was a trainee plumber at the time too and did some work on someone's narrowboat bathroom."
Calum and his ex-girlfriend started looking at ready-to-live-in narrowboats, but they decided there was not enough storage for them. They then found a shell of a boat up for sale for £44,000.
Calum said: "We found a brokerage that sells you just the shell of the boat. I had £25,000 saved and my partner at the time took out a £20,000 loan from her parents. We put a £1,000 deposit down and four months later it turned up on the back of a lorry."
Calum and his ex-partner moved into the boat two weeks after they bought it.
He said: "We moved in just with a mattress, flashlights and water. We lived on it like that for a year while I built it up. We would use the £1,400 a month we saved up on rent and spent £50,000 in total."
Calum did all the renovation himself and lived on the boat for a year with his ex-partner before selling it. This time Calum wanted a bigger project and bought a 62-foot wide-beam boat shell in 2021.
Calum spent around eight months renovating the boat, adding solar panels, underfloor heating, a large kitchen diner and a bathroom complete with a bath and shower. He paid for the new boat by using funds from his old narrowboat and using his monthly salary.
Calum said: "This boat is like my old boat, but on steroids. We upgraded all the old systems, we added more storage and probably did a better job learning from past mistakes. This project took around six to eight months, usually it would take me three months to build but I had some client projects on at the same time."
On the back of his two successful narrowboats Calum launched Boat Fit Co and he builds and renovates homes for people living off-grid on the water. Since launching five years ago, he has built 10 narrowboats, consulted on six and part-built a further 10.
He said: "With narrowboats it is slightly more unregulated than houses. You have more control - you get to design and build it your own way.
"You really need to consider the client lifestyle too - how much water are they going to need on board or how are they going to be using that space. You need to design a boat that they can live off-grid to suit their lifestyle."
