Capital Cost Summary
If you visit the cost summary through the red button, below, you will find a list of what we paid to outfit L'Escapade. We wanted a boat on which we could live comfortably all year round so we included things that would support this lifestyle - things like a washer and dryer, dishwasher, air conditioner and vacuum-flush toilet system. It would be a reasonable exercise to use this list as a checklist for the features you may want on board, and use these costs as quite representative. When all the big ticket items are accounted for you will be missing two significant and controllable elements: construction materials and construction/finishing services. Our numbers for construction materials are representative, given we fitted out a 25 metre boat. The services cost depends on two factors: The level of quality of finish you wish to achieve and your own ability to do the work to this level.
In our case we had the finishing touches done by professional carpenters. This was work done in addition to our working 7 days a week, 10 hours a day, for 8 months to get the piping, wiring, studding, and more rough finishing completed. As an example of how we worked with contractors, we laid all the pipes for the hot water heating system and brought them up through the floor next to each radiator. We installed the rads, but had a plumber hook the pipes to the radiators so that we had the best work done at the point of risk of failure. Not one leak so far.
We have tested our costing model on our friends that have built barges. In the Buying and Selling pages we have included a spreadsheet that we have had completed by a number of barge owners. In a cost target of 250,000 Euros this has proven to be an accurate assessment tool within 8% of the actual costs. Given the variety of age of equipment you may find on a barge, this margin of error of the estimate provides a good level of comfort to the budgeting process.
