Goodbye things, hello life
Last summer, I scaled down from a roomy three-bedroom cottage in Sussex, with a garden and shed, to a 46-foot by six-foot canal boat in a London dock.
My son had just finished his GCSEs and had been offered a place at a sixth form in the city that specialised in his passion, film. From our Sussex home, it would have meant an exhausting four-hour daily commute for him. I am a single parent, my son is the most important person in my life and I wanted to support him. I also realised that I only had a couple of years left before he moves out, and I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible before he flies the nest.
The only way I could afford to move back to London, where the rents are sky-high, was to rent out my cottage and move onto a boat in King’s Cross. I had to rent out my house unfurnished, which was the opportunity to have an epic declutter to avoid paying a fortune for storage space. I’ve always been fascinated by documentaries about the tiny house movement – people living in shipping containers and cabins – and had flirted with minimalism for years, but I always felt too messy
