THE BATHROOM

Some argue that what makes a country modern is government type, advancements in technology and manufacturing, and overall access to higher education, but I disagree. I think it’s electricity, running water, hot running water and flush toilets. When faced with the prospect of living outside of a modern home, the basic necessities come out to stare you in the face. What were the first things to disappear off of store shelves? Toilet paper, hand sanitizer, alcohol and anything with Lysol printed on it. The first place people’s minds went was to their rear end. In an effort to remain clean in this blog I’ll refrain from telling the million and one head-in-butt jokes I have in my repertoire.

I have a little over an acre surrounded mostly by a farm on two sides of a triangle, and then on the third side a house and the road in the hollow beneath me. I was going to have to build a bathroom of some sort, the question was where and what kind. My property is steep enough I had to consider ease of access to it day or night, rain or shine. There is a brush covered and concealed area down by the bamboo patch that would be downwind of my tent, but the trail to it was extremely steep and hazardous. I work mostly in orthopedic (ortho) surgeries involving the joints and extremities, and I’ve seen far too many fall injuries to want to join those ranks.

The only other viable option was up the hill to the northwest of my tent where the prevailing winds come from. This weighed on me because growing up we would visit my Grandma Boggs in West Virginia, and all she had was an outhouse out by the old dairy barn and slop jars under the beds for nighttime. Slop jars were those old white enamel covered pots with lids. Hers had red trim, but I’ve seen others with blue trim. The outhouse was extremely memorable because one summer, us kids found a can of pink paint and gave it a nice bright coating. Even more memorable was the horrendous smell emanating from the ominous black hole I couldn’t help imagining falling into. I was skin and bones, so it was a real possibility in my mind, and the last thing I wanted was to die stranded in a pool of who knows what underneath a pink outhouse!

As I’ll probably discuss in the future, give me a pick and shovel or a splitting maul or ax and I’m a happy camper. It’s mindless and works out all the stress of the modern world because it leaves you no energy to worry about anything else. Regardless, I was not about to dig a hole for an outhouse since first of all, it’s probably illegal, and second, I still had that pink nightmare in the back of my mind and the subsequent smell which would ultimately find its way to my very airy tent.

After a little research I opted for a composting bucket system. The premise is using old sawdust, dirt, mulch or some other degradable natural medium to layer over each deposit and it naturally composts into rich but benign soil. I have a toilet seat that snaps onto a five-gallon bucket and several old buckets waiting for a special purpose. I bought five big bags of mulch and was ready for the next step of creating the outhouse. I considered making a basic tarp tent at first, not knowing how far I would have to commit to the whole ordeal. That idea went out the window fast. I finally settled on a small corner of one of our garden plots that is shaded by neighboring hemlocks and has never had good enough quality dirt for gardening success. Building a small structure would be useful anyway because we always need more storage for gardening tools and supplies.

Once upon a time I had installed four posts along the edge of that garden for some long-forgotten reason, with the back corner post being heavy duty and deep to provide an anchor for one end of our clothesline. This was to be my cornerstone. I pulled up two of the other posts and used them to create a 3.5′ x 7.5′ rectangle.

Many years back my mother-in-law had the cedar siding on her house replaced with vinyl, along with the porch posts and railings. Seeing a potential gold mine, of course I got a lot of it to add to one of my ever precious piles under a large shed I had built at the back corner of my property. All I have to do when various projects present themselves is go dig around in the shed and my garage and eminently some dusty, mouse-nest-encrusted gems present themselves.

Early on the morning of March 28th (I remember because it was my birthday) I began digging out cedar siding and more posts. Another pile also provided some old treated 2 x 4’s from a deck I tore off the front of my house when we built the addition to it 20 years prior. I used an electric pressure washer to begin cleaning up the mess this stuff was in and pulled nails out of all of it, which I had neglected to do when I acquired it. I estimated what I had to work with according to the visualization forming in my head, placed an extra post and tied them together at the tops with 2 x 4’s, and proceeded to put siding up.

A lot was learned about cutting and handling that siding. It feathered down to a fine edge which would split and break along growth rings at the drop of a hat. I worked hard at maximizing the lengths to avoid as much waste as possible. There was enough I could do the roof, although the pitch was too shallow to be effective by itself. My post heights were my restriction, and I was going for reasonable headroom. I didn’t see backing into the toilet as a sustainable activity. After a revealing rain in following days, I bought a couple of pieces of metal roofing to remedy the leakage problem. Mind you, I had some roofing up in the shed, but it was buried so deep that my energy was better spent elsewhere at the time.

I had some old treated stair treads from the old deck that seemed to be made for the floor on the toilet side. I laid down and leveled some treated strips to keep the boards up off of the dirt. The entry area was to be my shower stall. The headroom was highest there, and I somewhat angled the ground away for some semblance of drainage. 2 x 2″ and 1 x 2″ strips were used to make a shower floor to drain water and keep me out of the mud. Two 6’x 2″ x 10″ boards were then laid down on strips to provide a mud free walkway to the door and allow water to drain underneath.

The roofing would be added the next weekend, and there would be future improvements to the outhouse, but as it was I had successfully given myself a bathroom for my birthday. I couldn’t simply press a lever and flush my worries away, but I had a private place that smelled like cedar and wasn’t pink!

One last thing that was needed was a way to take a shower. I have one of those camping solar shower bags that would be useless in this case, due in part to the low ceiling and the fact that it was the end of March and there were still a lot of cold cloudy days left. In my research of the composting bucket system, I came across a comment online from someone who used a weed sprayer adapted to a kitchen sink hand sprayer head. A lot of people make these adaptations for camping and situations that require off-grid solutions. It seemed like the most logical to me, so I went out and got a one-gallon weed sprayer, the kitchen hand piece kit, some brass connectors and a couple of hose clamps and rigged up the shower. I never in my life thought I’d brag that I could take a good clean shower with one gallon of water. There is a trick to it. I use one part liquid soap diluted in three parts water in a spray bottle so that it has a decent concentration and lathers very easily. You wet down, soap up, rinse off, then dry off. You can, of course, ask the dog to check you over to verify if you missed a spot.

When I finished it was Saturday evening, and I resolved to be moved out and ready to stay out after I came home from work on Monday. How long it would be before I went back in was anybody’s guess. I had my bases covered at that point and was ready for whatever came down the pike. Then and even now there are people who don’t give a crap, but I did, and now I had a place to put it.