We have just completed my 2nd year of living on a boat fulltime. I have adjusted to life on the water and it all seems pretty normal. It wasn’t until my new neighbor moved in that I remembered the adjustments that I had to make when I first moved onboard for fulltime life on the boat and in the RV.
Cooking-
Boats don’t have full kitchens in a sense. They have the basics but you don’t have a whole lot of space to spread things out to make a huge meal for people. It seems that we cook simpler on the boats than we did on land, in a huge kitchen. But most adjust to that well. You can’t have the hot water tank on when cooking without throwing a breaker, so you have to know where the breakers are so you can shut off the hot water tank to cook. It used to bother me, but now it’s normal. We do have a small cook top, 3 burners, and a convection/microwave oven.
Since everything is electric you usually cannot run both at the same time when you have heat or air conditioner on without tripping the breaker. Summers are easier to cook; we grill outside a lot with the neighbors. It’s great to be outside throwing some hot dogs and burgers on the grill, and everyone just grabs it off the grill, no plates needed and we have a great time eating with everyone at a casual dinner. In warmer months we cook outside more than we do inside.
We do have a semi-full size refrigerator. We replaced the compact refrigerator which was dorm sized and had the freezer which held like 2 ice cube trays with a small refrigerator that has a separate freezer. We can keep everything we need in there, but must shop weekly to keep the freezer filled; you don’t have much room for more than 1 week of food.
When we go shopping, the first thing that we do is remove the boxes from the packages. There simply isn’t room in the freezer for boxes; you can fit the items in, but not th bulky packages.
Small Kitchen Appliances –
Can openers, coffee makers, blenders, mixers and The George Foreman Grill are some of the items that we have. As you can imagine we have no counter space, these are all stored in a cabinet under the sink and brought out only when needed. I find that I don’t use the electric can opener as much as I use the hand held one that is in the drawer with the silverware. It’s just easier to use the manual can opener then to dig under the sink for the item that you need. That to us is a major pain, but we do it. Plus we are so aware of electric usage that we try not to use much electric so we don’t have to shut off other things. It’s common for us to just have on what we absolutely need.
Doing Dishes:
To wash dishes, you have to plan ahead. Since our hot water tank doesn’t stay on all the time, you have to give the water time to heat up. We know that it takes about 30-45 minutes to have enough hot water to do dishes. So usually after we are finished cooking we turn on the hot water tank to heat up water to do dishes. Since we only have 12 gallons of hot water it doesn’t take long to do that. And we usually don’t have many dishes to wash after dinner anyhow. We have the 2 full size sinks that make doing dishes easier and quicker.
While we may not eat big gourmet meals anymore, we do eat better. We eat more fresh foods, and lighter meals. We usually don’t go out to dinner anymore as we are more comfortable eating at home in our “cozy” little kitchen. We have only the things that we need here, we don’t have a lot of cooking pans, pots, and extras that were never used anyhow in a bigger house and we don’t miss them at all.
After awhile you will get used to turning off hot water tanks to cook and it will become normal life to you too if you live on the boat or in a RV fulltime.Adu