Why would anyone give up a perfectly nice house on the side of a perfectly nice hill in the middle of perfectly horrid El Lay to live on a boat with less than 100 square foot of floor space? I think at some point on top of all of life’s other little aggravations one finally realizes that they are paying an increasing amount of money to build a museum of their lives. Garage, kitchen, dining, living room, three bedrooms, den, and laundry all devoted to housing all the knick-knacks you’ve collected in the last forty or so years. The price for storing all this goes up, daily. If you’re a good American, the size of your collection goes up, daily. So we sold as much as we could, dumped what we couldn’t and for a handful of things found storage among relatives. I wanted to keep my tools, she wanted the Stickley bedroom set and junior got a fully furnished apartment. The final straw was outsourcing. I knew my job was going away and I knew it would be soon. One year and one month after we moved aboard, I was out of work.
Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.
Arthur Ransome, Racundra’s First Cruise (Chapter 1), 1923
Slipping Away Blog 