Little Loo, Storage Stairs and a Fishy Door

It's funny how things can seem so sluggish even when a lot is getting accomplished in a short span of time. The last few months have been a whirlwhind as moving to the interior finishings means having several small projects on the go at one time. But this also divides our attention; feels less focused. These last several weeks proved no exception with the bathroom and toilet, storage stairs and the front door slowly but finally coming together.

The Loo!

Using our new bathroom will require probably the largest adjustment to our daily lives when we move into the tiny house. The energy and water wasted in the conventional sewage conveyance and treatment process is enormous (in fact, it stinks!), so finding an alternative way to deal with our waste is important to us. That said, dealing with the waste ourselves means a lot more leg work and vigilance. Such as making sure our seperate urine container doesn't overflow. The closer we get to completing this house the more real this becomes and the methods by which we will be handling our waste will be properly put to the test. The human waste issue appears to generate the greatest amount of interest amongst the tiny house blogs so clearly we're not the only ones with our minds in the gutter.

Our composting toilet will be of the 'Lovable Loo' style, the design for which we got straight out of the Humanure Handbook. We're composters in our non‐tiny house life already, so the idea of composting our own crap was pretty appealing to us while learning how to do it safely has been inspiring! This also means that we build our own toilet, something that Rory has been looking forward to since day one of this build, so when the day finally came he was right in there sorting out the configuration.

It's basically a plywood box with a hinged lid (see pic below of box sans seat), allowing us to lift the lid when either the pee container or turd bucket needs to be emptied. Of course it needs to be at a comfortable height and has a toilet seat attached that is also aligned with the five gallon bucket inside. The bucket will hold the solid waste, which is combined with sawdust or some sort of

carbonous material that balances the nitrogen content and neutralizes any odours. We decided to further mitigate odours, and reduce the frequency with which the bucket needs to be emptied, by rigging up a urine seperator that we bought from Free Range Designs in the UK. Separating the waste streams vastly reduces the nitrogen content in the bucket.

By the end of the day, the bathroom looked like this:

We also got to work on fitting the pocket door. Creating the cavity wasn't too tricky as

we'd bought a hardware package that included adjustable split studs (see earlier post). What we still needed was the door itself, so we went to Jack's New and Used and picked up a $25 fir special.

This door had an old dark stain and lacquer on both sides, but we liked the idea of maintaining a kind of distressed look. We stripped down the outside with the belt sander and then used a random orbital sander with a higher grit for the inside, leaving the stained grain showing. We coated it in varathane and in the end we were pretty happy with the result. Of course getting it to hang properly took a little more effort but we got it in the end.

Storage Stairs

During our short design phase we much preferred the functionality of a staircase that doubled as storage over a ladder. Now that the floor is finished we have been able to start building on top of it and the storage stairs are taking shape.

We're using plywood for the vertical supports and fir planks (that are being reinforced with more plywood) for the treads, which will be edged with mahogany. A little extra configuring was required when we discovered the plank of fir we bought for the treads was more narrow than it was supposed to be, but eventually we figured it out.

The idea is that by the end, with the help of some complex graphics, it will look something like this:

Front Door

We have a door! And it's only taken 7 months to sort out.

We knew we would need a custom door because the rough opening, being under the loft, is 75" tall, which is shorter than the standard door height. We'd always had a vision of a beautifully crafted door, something lovingly made and ideally with some stained glass. In fact, Rory's grandfather had made a stained glass fish that we were super keen to incorporate in our door. But as we searched and inquired, the quotes were always too high and our imaginary door became more and more plain.

Then about a month ago, Bob our woodworking guru offered to build our door with whatever features we wanted in the wood of our choice for a very good price! We could not turn it down so we got to work getting all the pieces lined up.

Feast your eyes on the Grandpa Fish:

This is the stained glass piece made by Rory's grandfather, but it was as a hobby and copper foil, so it needed some reinforcing. We took it to Kits Glass in Richmond, where they sandwiched it between two panes and sealed it all up, ready to put in the door.

Next we needed the wood. Rory's dream was to have a yellow cedar door and was able to get some nice stuff from Sunbury cedar. While there, he found enough off cuts from large beams of clear yellow cedar to do nearly all the window trim for $5. Score. Bob then got to work on the joinery, adding in some lovely walnut and mahogany accents, and delivering a very hearty door that captured all the character we'd imagined. Isn't it inviting?

This closes the door on this blog post. Next up: Going Green!