Paul's Story
In 1985, Paul bought this houseboat on Gate 6½ in Sausalito for $48,000. He was 24 years old and had only been in California for six months. The concrete pontoons were leaking and it was slowly sinking. He bought it anyway — putting in a combined $15,000 with his father and borrowing the rest.
Six months in, he was already rebuilding. Going to school for his Master's at night, working on the house during the day. The skylights leaked so badly he'd hung galvanized pails from cup hooks and planted flowers in them so the drips would water them. This is what it looked like while he was figuring it out.
The original pontoons were too far gone to save, so Paul designed and built a new concrete barge from scratch. He worked with a local shipyard and company called Aqua Maison to cast it — all the concrete poured in a single day. The plywood framing you see here are the pony walls, built to sit on top of the barge's stem wall and form the perimeter of the lower level once everything came together.
To get the house onto the new barge, they sank the barge in Richardson Bay and floated the original structure out over it at high tide. As the tide dropped, the house settled down onto the shear walls inside the barge. Then they pumped the water out, and when the next tide came in, the whole thing floated up as one. They pulled the old pontoons away and brought it back to the dock. It worked.
That first houseboat started everything — the portfolio, the partnerships, the decades of learning how this market actually works. But the story didn't end there.
Forty years later, Paul still lives on the same berth at Gate 6½. The houseboat you see there today is one he designed and built himself, a project that took him and his family 10 years.
Paul Bergeron has been buying, building, and selling housboats for over 40 years. He knows this market from the inside — not just the listings and the comps, but the permits, the problems, and the people.