Today is the day! We are upgrading to a flush toilet. For the past 2 years, our family of 4 has used a composting outhouse, and it’s finally time for an upgrade! I know you’re excited about this upgrade for our family, but I bet you may be thinking “What the heck is a composting outhouse?” So you can read more about that here . . . . We used a bucket system for our composting outhouse. We used 5 five-gallon buckets and those buckets would last our family of 4 for about 1 month. When you go to the bathroom, you go in the bucket and then cover it (and the toilet paper) with compostable material. Our compostable material was a blend of peat moss and fine bark chips. Once all 5 buckets were filled, we would then dump those buckets into a 40-gallon trash can that had holes drilled all around it for airflow. We had 2 40 gallon trash cans that we used, and this meant that the material could sit in the trash can for about 2 months before we dumped it into our compost pile. Using a composting outhouse is a serious business if you want to make sure it’s composting correctly. We learned a lot as we used this system, and it worked great for our family. Please do your research if you’re considering this method. The Humanure Handbook is a must-ready!!
And now a little back story on us, in case you just found us on YouTube. We’re Sara and Ryan. We are your average suburban family, but 9 years ago, we purchased a raw piece of land in the Hood Canal in Washington. We’ve been developing this piece of property slowly, and this year we knew it was time to go all in. So we purchased a log cabin kit home and decided that 2020 would be the year we built a house on our property. We plan to build this cabin (as much as we can) on our own. Unfortunately, COVID-19 put a delay on our cabin kit being produced and delivered in the time frame we had originally planned. While we could have just waited it out and pushed back starting on the build of our home, we decided to shift gears and change our course for the time being. We purchased a 30 foot yurt, and will be setting it up as additional living space when we begin to build our cabin. In the summer of 2021, we FINALLY moved to the Hood Canal so we could start the build of our future home. While we are building our home, we are living in a camper trailer and the yurt that we built in the summer of 2020. We hope to have our cabin kit home built by the summer of 2022. Just my husband and I are building the house. We get help here and there from friends along the way and we do plan to get help on the roof but other than that we are doing it all on our own.
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