Join us on our cultural house boat in the centre of Berlin, Germany

Informationen

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  Beschreibung

  Welcome aboard our 135‑year‑old cargo boat slowly becoming a vibrant community space through the hands of volunteers from around the world. The project brings together carpentry, creativity, learning, and shared living in a warm, communal environment right on the water in Berlin. Once a coal‑carrying barge moving through Europe, our boat is now being restored into a shared cultural and creative space, with rooms being rebuilt, structures reinforced, furniture crafted, and the whole boat filled with recycled materials and found treasures. Nothing here feels commercial or mass‑produced—every door, panel, lamp shade, and detail carries a story, donated or built by someone who lived here for a while.
  
  Behind the project are three friends who dreamed this whole thing into being. I’m Sky — the main host and site lead — with a background in carpentry and a love for building community as much as building spaces. Carsten is the big visionary dreamer, an engineer who once built an entire sailing boat from scratch and is incredibly good at bringing ideas to life and sourcing beautiful second-hand materials. Ali works quietly but powerfully behind the scenes; he’s just welcomed his first baby and keeps the project running smoothly from home, handling logistics, communication, and all the invisible magic that holds everything together.
  
  Volunteers join not as workers but as part of a cultural and creative exchange, learning from each other and contributing to a living, evolving space.
  
  Walking through the boat, you can see the layers of community in every space. Volunteers come with different skills, ideas, and artistic touches, and together they create a home that looks and feels unlike anything you’d find in a typical building project.
  
  Community Life
  
  A big part of this project is learning to live together, and the meals and accommodation are simply part of that shared life—not a payment, but a gesture of hospitality and community. Meals aren’t cooked for one person; the kitchen fills with shared smells and voices as we all take turns preparing food, cleaning up, and managing the space. We eat together every day, usually vegetarian and always communal—no volunteer is expected to spend their own money for shared meals.
  
  Language learning happens naturally as well. With people from all over the world, German becomes a shared goal, and we have an informal study group where volunteers help each other learn. The project has sparked music jams, small art collectives projects, and skill‑sharing workshops—everything from screen printing to carving spoons—using materials gathered through local community groups rather than buying new. We do not host any paying guests or hold paid events - this is a non-commercial, volunteer-based community project.
  
  We also have a morning circle, a calm moment where everyone can check in with how they’re feeling. We share three daily prompts: a fun or silly question, a personal one to get to know each other better, and one about the work or the environment on the boat. It’s a peaceful way to start the day and helps everyone feel heard. Hearing how everyone is doing is really important to have healthy and respectful communication. We never have heating conversations because we make time to relieve any building tension in a calm environment.
  
  When we aren’t building, afternoons often drift into music, cooking, card games, story‑swapping, and relaxing in the shared spaces. In summer, we go to the nearby park to play frisbee or organise trips to the lakes around Berlin. The wider community is queer‑friendly and open‑minded. Many strong friendships are made onboard and stay alive after their time here.
  
  Living on the Boat
  
   We currently have seven beds across four rooms, and volunteers can suggest where they’d prefer to sleep depending on comfort or social needs. Now in the winter months it is colder, not only the boat we build but also in the bedrooms, it is good to bring a sleeping bag and warm clothes and good shoes. Beds are prepared with clean sheets before new volunteers arrive so they feel welcomed after a long day of travel.
  
  With so many people around, the kitchen and boat can get a bit messy, but we all make an effort to keep tools organised, spaces safe, and common areas tidy. The community is lively, so finding quiet time can be important. We do our best to make sure volunteers have a comfortable bedroom, warm spaces, and access to whatever they need to rest and recharge. The toilets are composting so having a good attitude to that is important.
  
  Work and Safety
  
  A normal day on board follows a gentle, volunteer-paced rhythm—slow enough to enjoy the experience, but steady enough to feel meaningful, a gentle but steady rhythm. We usually start around 8:00 with a relaxed morning circle where everyone checks in and we set the tone for the day. After that, we plan the tasks together—anything from sanding, painting, insulation, restoring old wood, reorganising spaces, cutting firewood, or helping with communal jobs like filling the water tanks or stocking the kitchen. We work for about four to five hours total, usually with a big shared lunch in the middle. Afternoons can be flexible: sometimes we keep building if the energy is right, but often we wind down, and tidy up for a fresh start for tomorrow.
  
  We usually have a small group of volunteers, often between six and eight people at a time, usually staying for four weeks. The work schedule is balanced, with meaningful tasks that match people’s abilities. We don’t expect volunteers to use tools or machinery that require professional experience. If someone wants to learn basic tools like a drill or sander, we take the time to show them safely. Even for simple tools, we make sure people feel confident and comfortable before starting. We often have people that love to build join the project so we like to have a buddy system with one more experiened person working with and teaching someone that is new to the world of creative construction.
  
  The goal is to learn from each other—through building, cooking, creating, and living side by side. Volunteers bring knowledge from their own backgrounds, and those exchanges often become one of the most valuable parts of staying with us.
  
  If you’re interested in hands‑on work, shared living, creativity, and community, this might be the perfect place for your Berlin chapter. People who thrive here tend to enjoy hands‑on tasks, shared living, and the naturally messy, creative energy of a community project. They’re flexible, open‑minded, and happy to jump into both building and everyday communal life. What matters most is a good attitude and a willingness to learn and contribute — not specific skills or strength.
  
  We welcome all genders, backgrounds, and identities. We’re international, queer-friendly, body-positive, and non-hierarchical. Respect and communication go a really long way here. Are you someone who can handle the chaos, mess, and energetic community — and still show up with a good attitude?
  
  If that sounds like your kind of challenge, and you want to be part of this wild boat-life build project, send us a message and tell us:
  -Where you're from
  -Your age
  -Why you want to join
  -What date you’d like to arrive, and how long you’d like to stay (3–4 weeks is ideal to start)
  -Any relevant experience (skills to teach others) or things you would like to learn
  -Any food needs or other things we should know
  
  We get a lot of messages, so it really helps if you include all this info when you write — it makes it much quicker and easier for us to reply.I do try to get back to everyone, but I usually only check this account about once every two weeks. So please don’t worry if it takes a little while to hear from us — you’re not being ignored. ****
  
  We usually see how the first weeks go together before planning a longer stay—what matters most is that everyone feels comfortable, happy, and part of the group. Short visits aren’t super energy-efficient — we’re looking to build a crew that grows together.No German is required — we speak English and are used to working with people from all over the world.And oh, by the way, I'm Sky! (you’re writing to me, not Carsten
  — I know it’s confusing with his name on the account). I’m originally from New Zealand (yes, a Kiwi). I help host our amazing volunteers to support and coordinate the daily flow of tasks. Looking forward to hearing from you.Let’s build something cool.— Sky, Carsten & AliP.S.
  !!!! This Workaway profile has been active for a long time and has hosted lots of cool build projects over the years. We’ve kept that old content online to show the history of the page — but you don’t need to read everything below to understand what we’re doing now!!! Please read everything above.
  
  
  
  Our old text and the whole information:
  
  Hello-world :-)
  
  As there is obviously no text limitation I will just keep the old descriptions from the last work - away projects below. The first one was from 2012 about building a catamaran in the region of Braunschweig and the second one was from 2016 about renovating a ruin in Berlin to a house-project. Things have gone forward. The Catamaran is actually floating since summer 2014 and was built with the help of about 120 helpers via workaway/helpx. We went after two trips to the Baltic Sea in 2018 on the real trip: from Berlin to Budapest, in 2019 from Budapest until Sulina at the mouth of the Danube at the Black Sea. In 2020 we finally could put up the mast and set sails from there to Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and finally Greece where it is now. The run down building at Ostkreuz in Berlin we renovated with about 70 helpers workaway/helpx between 2016 and 2018 including roof/ windows/ heating/ electricity/ pipework/ doors with a lot of building material recycling from trade fares and buildings that got tared down. We got it that far that we are now living with 18 people from 6 different countries together as an open house project. We have to fight against the building administration of Berlin for not being send out of our house as it stands on the area of a future highway construction plan. But that's another story that we can tell when you are around :-)
  
  Since April 2021 (and still ongoing in 2025) the third project goes online on workaway:
  
  As a group of eight people we bought a 55 x 6m boat that was built in 1907 to transport building materials into Berlin. In these early years boats of this size were built without engine. They were moved on the slow waterways of Berlin and Brandenburg by a hand full of people with sticks and on lakes where the water was too deep with a huge sail. We got it from one of the old boatsmen of Berlin who is like a living history book.
  
  He is the last son of a family of boatmen from the region of Berlin. His family had bought the boat already in 1969 when it was on its way to the scrap-yard the first time. After using it as storage space and as a terrace in front of a restaurant the boat was passed on to us while Rainer is still helping us a lot in the project. He had to find help with the boat as it is built with a wooden floor that after 114 years urgently needs to be replaced.
  
  Nowadays this happens with steel as no shipyard is still able to work the with old way of wood-boat-building. Now it is upon us to save the old wooden floor of the boat and to make it the new inside floor when the steelworks in the shipyard are finished. This is already a big part of the project for this summer as its about 280m² of 9 cm thick and about 40 cm wide boards. The boat currently only consists of the hull with 1.9m inside height and a steel-structure for a terrace on top with a layer of some old tropical "Bongossi" wood.
  
  We want to develop it as a cultural space with individual cabins and a deck for guests and some urban gardening. The next work-step is to take of the current deck layer together with the steel structure, build an additional side wall with space for windows and put the deck layer back on the side walls with one meter more inside height. This work is also still planned in the coming two months while the boat is still in the shipyard. Afterwards we need to put about 240m² of roof, install about 60 windows, two toilets, a wastewater treatment system, a kitchen, a communal space and about 8 cabins. So we wont run out of jobs for the next two years ;-)
  
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  Old/ finished! workaway offers:
  
  Offer from 2016: 120 years old house renovation and Catamaran building in Berlin, Germany
  
  Now I am writing this update as we are looking for more helpers from spring 2017 on. Together with some friends we bought a ruin/house in Berlin close to the station Ostkreuz in Friedrichshain / Lichtenberg. The house was built in 1893. Luckily it survived the war and became property of the German Democatric Republic as its former owner moved to West Germany. After the wall came down the house was returned to the son of the former owner who left it mostly unused for years until we found the house. Fascinated by the history and the fact that since the early nineties some squatting skinheads sprayed their graffiti nobody has changed anything we started working together. We already finished a kitchen and a bathroom with hot shower and a solar light network in the house as new living comfort for us and the helpers that start moving in the house. As there are six rooms in the house that were still in good shape, we cleaned them, repaired the broken windows and brought a lot of beds and couches from friends to start living there. The maximum till now was 6 helpers at once which was a funny time with a lot of live in the house and on the boat that floats in a walking distance on anchor.
  
  For the next months it is planned to continue with a lot of tasks on the house and some projects on the boat. It has its place now in Moabit. We are still looking for motivated Pirates that like getting something done during the day as well as living on the water or in our ruin with continuously increasing comfort. So if you are interested to travel to Berlin or just to escape from the normal Berlin city-life please write with some buffer time until you would like to come. Sometimes it takes a week or two until I check the account but you will usually always get an answer.
  
  What else ...
  Now I am 32 and currently working on these contract stuff that comes up when you want buy things. I am still having this job that makes me work in Egypt from October till March. I am writing from Egypt now where I will continue my research work about capacity increase of overloaded water purification plants in developing countries. Loving the water topic I plan to start my own small business in the house for water treatment units for urban agriculture in facade greening.
  When I write “we”, it includes Dorothea, Carlotta and Christoph that are also living on the catamaran for the warmer 7 months of the year. And we means Ina, Christoph, Ruwen, Micha and Ralf that bought the house together with me.
  
  
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  Offer from 2012; Building an 12.5 x 6.2 m wooden catamaran
  
  We're building a boat in a barn in north Germany and are looking for help. We means about 30 helpers since may 2011 from the USA, Canada, France, Argentina, Israel, Iran, Korea, England, Spain, Brazil, Venezuela, Hungary, Austria, some friends from the neighborhood who come around to help for a couple of hours and me.
  
  In Schoeppenstedt between Braunschweig and Berlin in the Niedersachsen-Region lies the former farm of my grandparents. Today the farmhouse is rent to a family and most of the other buildings are unused. During the last years I started to use them for various projects like building a raft/houseboat, a handcar, a two person diving bell and a small sailing Trimaran.
  
  The biggest project so far is to build a wooden 12,5 m Catamaran. Since 2008 this plan has constantly evolved and is now about 80% through the process of realization. While I was terminating my studies as an engineer I had the possibility to work on the construction as an university-task. Thereby I received all the relevant engineer standards and learned a lot about the recommended practices to build a safe boat.
  
  The project has evolved during the last year. Now there are the two Hulls with the right side up in the barn and would float if the deluge would come. During this summer we glued all the plywood-parts to the Hull that we prepared last year before the winter-break. To work with Epoxy (the glue) it needs to be at least 15°C and there is no heating in the workshop. That is why the next winter-break is getting closer.
  
  What else ...
  Oh ok, and who I am: My name is Carsten , 28, currently working on the six doors for the cabins / toilets. I studied bioengineering and environmental technology in Germany, France, Czech Republic and Marocco were I finished my Diploma about a project in Casablanca for wastewater purification and agricultural reuse in May 2011. In 2012 I found a job at the Technische Universität Berlin’ branch Campus-El Gouna in Egypt. During the winter semester I am giving lessons in water-engineering. Luckily my course runs in Berlin during the summer semester, so there is still time to work on the boat.

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  Arten von Hilfe und Lernmöglichkeiten

  Heimwerker- und Bauarbeiten

  Zubereiten / Kochen von Mahlzeiten für die Familie

  Hausarbeiten

  Handwerkliche Arbeiten
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  Interessengebiete

  

  Segeln / Boote

  

  Wassersport

  

  Outdoor-Aktivitäten
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  Kultureller Austausch und Lernmöglichkeiten

  Travelers will meet a group of other workawayers and friends that have been motivated to start the described projects in the German capital. We like to actually do things and see how from our hand’s work a place gets better and better. What you could learn is partly described in the section about the ongoing projects. Beside the work there are boat-parties together with all the other self-made boats and rafts on the Spree river, open-air parties in the parks and festivals around the city that becomes more and more a world capital for the spirit of life with little money but good ideas how to live. As the German songwriter Dota Kehr wrote about the world mainstream: “They are buying things that they don’t need, from money that they don’t have, to impress people that they don’t like”. I feel like Berlin is a city were luckily a lot of people realized that this is nonsense and that it is much more important how much you like the things that you are doing rather than which things you buy or own.

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  Arbeit

  What we need are people that come for an actual hand-helping experience. There will mostly be people of us doing the same tasks that we ask helpers to do. Moving material, using a cutting or drilling machine for steel profiles, cutting wood, cleaning the old wood of the former bottom of the boat, painting steel structures, making food for the group. We intend to be always a hand full of people helping together.

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  Sprachen

  Gesprochene Sprachen
  Deutsch: Fließend
  Englisch: Fließend
  Französisch: Fließend
  Arabisch: Grundkenntnisse
  Spanisch: Grundkenntnisse

  Dieser Gastgeber bietet Sprachaustausch an
  We already live in the house-project that we set up between 2016 and 2019 as my second workaway project. We are people form Argentina, Poland, Italy, USA, Netherlands, England and Germany. So mostly we speak English and German. But of course I happily try to stay speaking German when someone learns it and tries to not always fall back into English. I would be also happy when someone likes to exchange Egyptian Arabic with German.
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  Unterkunft

  The accommodation will be either in the house-project where we finished all the infrastructure between beginning of 2016 and end of 2018. Now we have two kitchens, two toilets, a bathroom with hot shower and an attic with a lot of space for people to sleep. Alternatively there is an Ateliers of Dorothea on Eiswerder that is close to the shipyard in Spandau. Depending on the progress also on one of the other boats we will arrange places to sleep during the warm months. After the time in the shipyard in Spandau will end around mid of June the boat construction side will move to Mitte where one of our boats usually spends the summers.
  
  As you will be either in the house project between the two stations of the Berlin city ring Ostkreuz and Frankfurter Allee or next to the station Jannowitzbrücke it will be easy to find things to do during the free time. Usually there are also some bikes that can be used to explore the city without having to pay a public transportation ticket. As a comment from people living in Berlin: besides these lovely distractions offered by the German capital it also gets increasingly interesting to hang out with the people around and the friends visiting the house for a wine on the roof or a barbecue in the garden.

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  Was noch ...

  We are a group of 8 people:
  Yoshi from Gent, Belgium who actually came as a carpenter via workaway for the catamaran project,
  Linus from Kiel as media pedagogue
  Dorothea from Braunschweig as theater manager
  Cathrin from Neumünster as film producer
  Christoph from Rostock as building supply engineer
  Meinhard as Landscaping engineer and carpenter
  Julia as sail maker and film editor
  and me, Carsten, as environmental engineer for water purification

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  Etwas mehr Information

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    Internet Zugang

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    Eingeschränkter Internet Zugang

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    Wir besitzen Tiere

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    Wir sind Raucher

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    Familien möglich

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  Platz zum Abstellen von Camper Vans

  In the street in front of our house we have often people living in campervans. In the house we have all the rest of the facilities.

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  Kapazität - wie viele Workawayer maximal

  mehr als zwei

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  Meine Tiere/Haustiere

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