Labor Day, laboring on the lav

After a lot of planning and procrastinating for various reasons (money being one of them, let's face it), we made more progress on the tiny house lav today.

This is the space we started with, to the left of the porch. Behind that wall where the siding is removed is the bed. (Our sun shower's been employed as a dog wash station lately.)

Keith Ledger

We hung some ledgers, got the corner posts set, and revised plans before we ran out of materials. But Friday is pay day and we should be able to get the rest of the flooring joists in this week and start on walls next weekend.

We decided our original plan of having a rain barrel under the toilet seat to catch solid waste was going to be a framing nightmare in such a small space (we'd need an outdoor access panel under the bathroom that was 4' tall to slide out a full barrel), so we chucked that plan and we're going with the simpler (though more hands on) sawdust toilet. We can get sawdust at the mill where my mom works and we'll be emptying it either in the RV dump near the fence on the edge of the property... or... somewhere else.

Urine can be handled easier (like this) and trees actually tolerate undiluted urine very well. We've been doing a low-tech version of that already, Keith peeing off the porch in any direction he chooses or me peeing a bucket and throwing it out in the morning. The perks of living in rural Idaho!

I'm about 100 pages into Hot, Flat, and Crowded and it's making me sad, depressed, and angry. Most of what I've read so far is about how the developing world (including China, India, etc.) is trying to live up to what they see as the American lifestyle and what the implications are for the rest of the world re: energy prices, food prices, and pollution. Makes me want to expand the garden and get some solar panels.

Labor Day is also Kamiah's annual celebration called Barbecue Days.  Everyone comes home for class reunions and to get their drink on (Keith and I have been there, done that and are now smarter). One of my friends brought her little girl over and my parents got to smell and hold a real live baby. Since it's looking like all of their grandkids will be of the canine variety, it was like a short-term baby timeshare. I think there could be a business in this...