My First Floating Home in Sausalito

I moved to California from Baltimore in August of 1984. Six months later I bought a houseboat.

I had been renting and I couldn't stand it. I wanted to own something, start building something. The problem was that everything in California was shockingly expensive compared to what I knew back east. This was the only thing I could afford. It was listed at $48,100 and it was slowly sinking when I bought it. The concrete pontoons leaked, the skylights leaked, water came in from every direction. I put in $7,500, my father Bill put in $7,500, and we borrowed the rest from a lender whose terms were best left unspoken. I was 24 years old.

The dock culture at Gate 6½ was unlike anything I'd experienced. Eclectic doesn't really cover it. I showed up in a tie sometimes and fit right in — because everyone there was a bit of a misfit in their own way. Single people, mostly older than me, finding their way on the water. I had no family in the area. Neither did most of them. It worked.

The house needed everything. The skylights leaked so badly I hung galvanized pails from cup hooks and planted flowers in them so the drips would water them automatically. That was my solution until I could replace them. I replaced them.

The bigger problem was the pontoons. The original concrete floats were too far gone to save. So I designed and built a new concrete barge from scratch — working with a local shipyard called Aqua Maison, run by a fellow named Ian Moody who had done it before and talked me through it. We worked with an engineer named Ed Beatty who lived on the docks and knew what he was doing. We cast the barge in a single day — all the steel in place, forms built up, concrete poured and left to cure.

Getting the house onto the new barge was an operation. We 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 temporary shear walls we had built up inside the barge. We pulled the old pontoons away, pumped the water out, and when the next tide came in the whole thing floated up as one. Then we brought it back to the berth.

I did all of this while finishing my Master's degree at night. During the day I was rebuilding the house — replacing the siding, building out the lower level, redoing everything. My girlfriend at the time had a brother visiting from South Africa, Roy Hutton, and he lived with me for a while and worked on it every day alongside me. We built it out together.

By late 1986 it was done. Two full stories, a loft, three bedrooms, completely rebuilt and sitting on a concrete barge I had designed myself. From a sinking single-level houseboat to something I was genuinely proud of, in about a year and a half.

Then I rented it out — for somewhere around $2,000 to $3,000 a month, which felt like an enormous sum at the time — and went to Europe for six months. When I came back I moved in next door to my neighbor Stan, who was in the middle of his own remodel and couldn't quite figure out his next move. I offered to help. He let me live there for free in exchange for the work. We became partners and eventually owned over 15 houseboats together on the Sausalito docks.

I finally moved my family back into the houseboat at Gate 6½ later on. Two of my sons were born there — Gian-Paul was a home birth, right there in the bedroom on the north end. We lived in it all the way through 2004, then I rented it out again and did another full renovation — new kitchen, new roof, new railings. Everything.

I sold it in 2012 for $765,000.

I bought it for $48,000.

That house taught me everything. How to take a risk when the numbers are scary. How to figure things out without a roadmap. How to see potential in something everyone else has written off. Those lessons have followed me through every deal I've done since.

And for what it's worth — I still live on the same berth.