House Beautiful?

After my dry run with Sheilagh putting the tiny house through its paces and living in it I realized I needed to address seating. Not just seating for dining, but for lounging around and entertaining. In my planning stage I was thinking hanging chairs and hammocks for their versatility. But now that I had been showing the house to visitors who were curious about my tiny house I acquired a desire to make the house more conventional in the sense that strangers looking in the door could see that it was a home and not a fishing shack. Something that would read "house" in the sense of cultural icons that represented what people could identify as a home in a magazine spread. This was the first time in my life that I had had so conventional a thought process. 

My conception of interior space and decor had run through more bohemian territory with witty references to convention. I had at one time lived with a housemate who brought with him an iron bathtub set up on pieces of lumber that we filled with cushions and used as a place to lie in and read. It was the most comfortable piece of furniture any of us had experienced. When he moved into his own house taking his "couch" with him, I recreated the bathtub couch and being unable to find claw feet set it up on galvanized plumbing pipe connectors which I painted to look like elephant feet.

Our house in Thailand had a wide bench with Danish modern legs. Upholstered in turquoise Chiangmai cotton and furnished with throw pillows it had been my mother's idea of seating. When I took possession of it I just had to replace the worn out cushions. In the same house we also had one of those hanging rattan basket chairs popular in the '60s. My father designed built-in counter height cabinets that ran along one wall and served as a workspace while my mother had another cabinet that served as a sewing table. These were built by the carpentry shop on the corner and made up in teak. There was also a bar with two swiveling teak wood stools. Along with the marble coffee table on tapered legs that matched the couch this was our hip mid-century modern living room. The apple does not fall far from the tree in this arena of house decor I realized.

A couch would offer a place to lie down that would not entail climbing up to the loft or crawling into a hammock. And of course it would be good if whatever I built would serve more than one function. I had already decided that the cooler would sit against the wall opposite of the kitchen and serve as seating. This led me to design a bench to slide over the cooler paired with another one for storage for my sewing machine. I made cushions from the leftover memory foam I had cut off the topper of my minimalist mattress and bought good quality upholstery fabric to go with the blue green of the kitchen. Frugal style is knowing where to spend your money.

As for a dining room table, there were plenty of drop down tables built in tiny houses and that Ikea roll around table with two folding leaves and drawers in the center was also popular with tiny house people. The engineering of the drop down table was quite complex. I could do it given the wall space I had, but the legs were a problem with benches. After much drawing and research I realized that I already had a table I liked perfectly well. It had been a utility table for a computer printer that I had rescued from an office move. The polished blond wood and chrome legs were pleasing to the eye. The legs had wheels and a storage shelf at the bottom. I'd been using it for my sewing table. I could add fold down leaves to it and make it into a dining room table. And it would roll into the space under the stairs where I had originally planned to put the cooler. I could postpone adding the drop down leaves since it would not be a built in so I would not have to build it before moving the house.

With the bench and cushion covers in the works I turned my attention to shelving. I wanted as much footage as I could fit for my book collection. I was not a minimalist Kindle person. I had amassed a book collection in preparation for a collapse of the electrical grid. I had books to help me homestead an off grid life, build shelter and grow food. Books for home maintenance and fixing things for clients. Plus all my shamanic books and autobiographies of interesting lives that I hadn't read yet. I was after all a writer. I needed books. 

It was easy enough to make shelving from doors, but what to use for shelf supports? I could make wood farmer style supports, but that was too much work. Shelf supports were a decorative fashion thing I noted, but also a bonafide piece of hardware. I could indulge in buying shelf supports. I chose some plain iron ones that looked like a blacksmith might have hewn them. There were also some inexpensive hyper modern ones I'd never seen before that functioned like the hinge on a fold out desk holding the shelves at both ends. These were clever and minimalist with the added feature of serving as book ends. They came in white and the shelves were white which picked up the white of the window frames. When I installed all the shelves things finally began to look like a house. It was not just a couch then that makes it a house. Shelves and the ownership of things to put on them added significantly to the iconography that says here is a house.

On the kitchen side I had long planned to make shelves out of the strip of desktop I had cut off when I made my kitchen counter. I made two shelves of different lengths to accommodate my Berkey Filter that would serve as my water dispenser for drinking water. The rounded edges of the shelves matched the kitchen counter top in a very satisfying way. When adorned with my gold rimmed cocktail glasses I had saved from a client this definitely said house beautiful.

Speaking of client gifts, I had a number of such gifts from clients who were eager to contribute to my tiny house. I now had a rather butch quilt made by a client's grandmother from mens shirts and pants in a plain pattern of simple squares. The client had gone to the trouble of washing it several times to rid it of its musty smell just so she could offer it for my use. I was touched by this. I'd also been given a folding travel iron, a mirror, silverware, bachelor casserole dishes and most interesting a velvet curtain that had gone over the door of a client's therapist's office to muffle sound.

After discussion with Sheilagh over matters of privacy in the tiny house we decided that the loo needed a privacy curtain, but the shower did not since such an act of bathing would not be shared with guests in the house unless a lover in which case the act of bathing would be willingly shared. And since I would not be spraying water over me I would not have to contain shower spray with a curtain. Pouring water was a much more controlled use of water. Thus the burgundy curtain became the privacy curtain for the loo adding a luxurious touch of class. Fishing shacks most definitely did not have velvet curtains.

Satisfied that I had firmly established that this was a house with all the functions of a house I was ready to move.

The Afterlife Of Poop: Behind the Scenes on Composting Toilets

Apart from my tribe of lesbian brothers (who are off-grid cabin enthusiasts) I was not surprised that few of my circle have experienced a composting toilet. When I show pictures of my homemade toilet only then have people wondered how they work. There is a high tech expectation that a composting toilet has some internal ability to disappear what is put in it. And while there are sophisticated ones that reduce the solids to a decomposed form through the use of a hand crank, fan and heater, the collection chamber must still be emptied. 

In a large house the chamber can be under the floor with an access door to the outside. There is no need to address the after life of poop for a year or so at which point it is no longer poop. But in a tiny house on wheels the process is much more intimate. In a homemade bucket toilet such as mine, my poop (and all my friends' should they gift me with a deposit) is with me for a week to a month lying quietly in a bed of sawdust and toilet paper. I admit that even I had some qualms about this fact. It felt like hoarding of the most extreme variety. And I must quickly avert my mind to the value of engaging in this cycle of nature that turns digested waste into soil and in turn to food again. And the comforting thought that humans carry all the essential minerals in bodily excreta to create soil to grow food that then provides us with essential minerals. This means we carry with us the ability to bring back fertility to a depleted planet. (This life saving factor aptly demonstrated in the movie The Martian.) How wondrous is that? What a complete package we humans are.

Thankfully the poop removal job has been made virtually odorless by the separation of solids from liquids. Modern composting toilets have caught on to this factor. So there are two containers to empty and process, one for liquids and one for solids. The urine being enclosed in a container with a screw top is easily carried out. Some toilets even divert the urine to a container outside for ease of emptying. 

Urine being rich in nitrogen and phosphorous and having the benefit of being sterile is immediately useful for fertilizing plants. It must first be diluted with water at least 3 to 1 or it will burn the plant. From my workshop at an eco farm I learned that if mixed with a cup of sugar or molasses, diluted urine is made more accessible to plants. Urine can also be added to the compost pile which would help to keep it moist while the nitrogen and phosphorous is preserved in the resulting compost. Seen here is a urine toilet I visited recently at an eco village that used sawdust to absorb the liquid which was then dumped into a compost heap.

Then there is the removal of solids. In a homemade toilet this consists of removing the bucket inside the toilet and taking it to a dedicated compost container in your backyard. (You can also line the bucket with a plastic bag and pitch it, bag and all, in your garbage can as people do everyday with dog poop.) Commercial composting toilets can be more difficult to empty if they have no removable bucket. The one seen on Tiny House Nation called Nature's Head ($960) requires that the whole toilet be unscrewed from the base and taken outside. Granted the hand crank prompts more decomposition and drying and shrinkage before it needs to be emptied so not quite as vivid an experience (but the toilet paper may still be visible). Such details of compost removal is never demonstrated or even mentioned on the show I've noticed. I suspect it would disturb the viewer and scare off advertisers.

A dedicated compost pile or container for humanure composting is the rule. Rest assured that such a compost pile when done correctly will heat up to the high temperatures required to kill off pathogens. It is the size of the pile that determines if it heats up enough. About a cubic yard will do it. Leaving it for a year will also allow for the digestion of any pathogens by microbes, bacteria and earth worms. The weak link of this system is the rinsing out of the bucket. This must be done over the compost pile warns the Humanure Handbook whose author is amusingly verbose in the history and science of humanure composting. (A boiled down 12 page manual is available here.) Lining the bucket with a compostable bag which is then deposited in the compost pile could work too. I was also intrigued by this research paper by the Natural Resources Conservation Service on composting dog poop on a large scale that describes the process in a few pages of concise instruction.

If you cannot face this poop removal lifestyle there are other tiny house toilet systems to consider. For the complete overkill experience there is a toilet called the incinolet for $1849 that zaps the poop to ash with a jolt of high wattage electricity. Or if you like neat packages another toilet called the DryFlush Laveo for $590 plus disposable liners uses diaper pail technology to wrap each deposit in plastic after all the air is squeezed out. Needless to say both these options fall short for the eco minded and frugal.

Humanure composting has entranced me since I first learned about it in the '90s. It made using clean drinking water as a vehicle for transporting poop to a giant central processing plant seem absurd especially considering the difficulty of getting that clean drinking water drinkable in the first place. Plus all the chemicals added to the sewage sludge to render it "safe" before it is trucked out to farms to be laid on fields as fertilizer under the banner of organic matter. (The nerve.) This chemical interference which includes all manner of poisons thrown into sewers (informative blog devoted to the topic here) and rendering our soil ever more harmful and our food less nutritious. The nitrogen leaching out into our waterways has also caused algae blooms that have rendered beautiful lakes and ponds green and dead. A complete fiasco especially considering that depletion of phosphorous in soil is now a world crisis.

And when I learned from my construction technology class how our sewage is processed locally in huge open tanks which can overflow into the bay after a heavy rainfall, the yuck factor made a composting toilet seem much the simpler safer alternative. (Additional tanks can be built to take care of this overflow from processing plants, but I doubt if this has been a priority in our municipality.)

The flush toilet is so much a part of our society that to contemplate using anything but water to flush our poop off site far away seems heretical. When people balk at composting toilets I see how our modern technologies have so obfuscated natural processes that we no longer understand what is actually safe and what our elaborate centralized systems have done to throw nature out of balance. 

Composting was a way to take myself off this land intensive, water wasteful, chemical system and return to a basic, localized mellow process that would improve the very soil around me. In fact my fondness for compost is such that it may have been one of the reasons I have so eagerly embraced the tiny house lifestyle.

Tiny House Dry Run

My Canadian girlfriend Sheilagh came down from Vancouver to help me break in the tiny house. We would spend one night in it then head for a friend's cabin in Inverness which I figured would seem palatial by comparison. My aim was to serve a meal, wash up and sleep in the tiny house therefore testing the essential components. I had also offered a foot bath in the shower pan so on the way home from the airport we stopped at the hardware store to pick up an elbow so I could divert water from the drain into the rose bushes.

It was fun having Sheilagh there putting the house through its paces despite not being hooked up to water yet. So the first chore was to fill a 5 gallon bucket with water and bring it into the house where we put it in the shower pan. I was also dismayed to find that the sink drain leaked likely because I had not put enough silicone down when I installed it. So we had to make do with spitting into the shower pan drain while brushing teeth.

Dinner was relatively easy since I only had to boil water for peas and heat a pre-made casserole in the new toaster oven. I managed to find one big enough to fit a small casserole dish and found it on clearance at B,B & B for only $15. I marveled at my good luck. I was also delighted to discover that my little butane stove fit nicely into the drawer of the desk tower facing the shower pan which would allow it some air from the window above. This stove was already part of my earthquake arsenal. I have another as a back-up and a camping stove to use up those small propane canisters people are always having to throw out when they move.

Since I lack a dinette and have yet to make a fold down table, I brought a card table from home for us to eat off along with folding wooden chairs. I also brought out my camp chairs for us to sit in, but they were not quite right being too big a footprint for the space. Plus they gave the house the look of a hunting lodge or fishing shack. But they were perfect for pulling up to the shower pan for our foot bath. (For which I made sure to bring the Epsom salts.)

As for the washing up I was happy with my assortment of dish pans for scraping, soaping and rinsing all the dishes. It was easy to sit on the wall of the shower pan to wash the dishes. I did remember to bring dishwashing soap (the biodegradable Dr. Bronner's) and my favorite washing up brush. Sheilagh dried the dishes as I rinsed them, but I'm thinking about installing a removable wire shelf for the drying of dishes.

This report would not be complete without a note about the tiny house facilities in use. There is a very popular off the shelf toilet that you see in all the Tiny House Nation episodes. It costs $1,000 to $1,500 and according to one friend these manufactured composting toilets are more difficult to clean out than a simple bucket toilet due to the fan drying the contents to a crust. The price was a barrier for me so in 2010 I set out to make one inspired by the book Liquid Gold by Carol Steinfeld which I reviewed on flickr (which led to my becoming friends with Carol). Also reviewed is the classic Humanure Handbook. Two important books in the world of off-grid living. At the time I used my DIY toilet for an urban camping expedition where I was camping in the yard of some rental property we owned.

Carol's book convinced me that separating the urine from the rest was the key to an odorless toilet and so it is.

The challenge is to figure out how to separate the two. I used a funnel in mine. And found an oil pan I liked to drain it into. The oil pan lies flat in the bankers box I had on hand. I combined that with the city provided compost bucket.

I focused most of my effort on the housing which I made from a wine box and two pieces of 1 x 12 for legs, hand rubbed with linseed oil. I needed a seat to make it complete and chose the light weight plastic one I found at Ikea. Much more comfortable than what you buy for emergency kits that fit over a 5 gallon bucket.

This effort has sufficed, but I have plans to make another toilet specifically for the tiny house using a chair. Because I can feel people flinch when they see a toilet out in the open in a living space. To afford some privacy for us I hung up a shower curtain for the duration.

For our trial run I repurposed a wooden recipe box to use as a sawdust container and added a garden trowel. I have been collecting sawdust from all the wood I've been cutting and storing it in a pet food container a client was throwing out.

Using a composting toilet seems to be the barrier to many people adopting the tiny house lifestyle. Sheilagh was such a good sport about it that it made me love her for that reason alone. She said the whole experience reminded her of her tree planting days in Northern Alberta. We also duly noted that my minimalist 3" memory foam mattress topper on top of the rubber gym mats was perfectly comfortable. And she was thrilled that I had it equipped with a red Canadian Hudson Bay wool blanket.

The Bitchen: Bathroom + Kitchen

Tim came over to help me install the shower pan and shower surround. When he saw the roofing panels he asked me if I didn't want to install a fiberglass shower surround.

"That would just be too suburban," I said.

"I knew I missed you," he said. It took him much longer to install my corrugated roofing panels, but it was worth it. He had to install a backer board to support the corner. And cut the panel to fit at the end. Then screw it all down with numerous screws. We will trim the edges with wood later.

I love the shimmering reflective surface. It is a humble building material that reminds me of Thailand. Yet it also has a modern industrial look to it.

Protecting the surface did worry me. I didn't want it to rust. Others who had used galvanized metal just sprayed on the Rustoleum clear aerosol, but aerosol products are against my religion. I chose the Rustoleum clear latex and brushed it on. It sagged a bit, but I just kept brushing it upward. At the end of the job I read the back of the can and it said not to use it on metal. Well heck. Then I read another tutorial on using galvanized roofing for a shower and they didn't protect it with any product and reported that it just dulled over time. So we'll see.

The drain for the shower pan proved a challenge to find at my local hardware store. Standard shower pans use a much bigger drain. This being an RV shower pan it had only a 2" drain. In the end I had to order a drain from an RV site. I chose one with a stopper so I could use the shower pan as a giant foot bath and a sink if needed. The RV pan has much higher sides than a conventional one so gave me this option. I hadn't decided whether to go with a conventional shower pan or an RV pan, but in the end I had to choose the RV pan because I was afraid the drain hole would land on top of one of the beams of the trailer below. Only RV pans offer a drain on the side like this. I also worried about how it would be installed because conventional shower pans need to be mudded in to drain properly. It turns out that the RV pan comes with a very thick styrofoam base that supports the pan so it drains properly. Tim had to cut some of the wood away from the wall to get it to line up flush to the wall. This was a better idea than trying to fill the void with wood as I had thought to do.

While Tim worked on the shower I worked on my kitchen cupboard doors. I had assembled the door frames with the Kreg tool and was satisfied with how that worked. I cut thin ply to cover the back of the doors and painted the ply to match. Then using the left over corrugated metal I cut pieces to fit inside the door frames. Tin snips were too arduous for cutting and left a mangled edge so I ventured to try the grinder with a metal cutting wheel and that worked well. I made sure to use the factory edge on the side that would be seen most and it looks fine.

I did not really like any of the door pulls I found at the hardware store although I would have used a nickel bar type handle if I had not found some conduit pipe hangers in my dad's workshop drawers. They inspired me to try making my own handles because they only had tabs on one side so did not need to be mounted flush. And when I held them up to the doors I found that I could mount them inside the frame which would then hold the conduit pipe away from the surface. This looked terrific when I put in the pieces of conduit pipe.

Having derived such cool handles I now needed to choose the right hinges. I tried gate style hinges, but they covered too much of the frame. It became clear that a butt hinge would mirror the shape of the handles in a very stylish way even though it would require the use of a chisel to cut a mortise for every single hinge twice. Style won out and I got out my chisels.

The completed cupboard door. Even though it took two pieces of leftover corrugated panel to cover the door you cannot see the joint. Such is the power of illusion. Viewed from above the line is not noticeable.

I also created a rolling cutting board cart to fit between the cabinets. It wasn't part of my design, but when I realized that I had made the counter taller than normal because I had forgotten to take into account the thickness of the counter I decided to make a pull out cart of the right height that would also give me the opportunity to work in a compost bucket for greater efficiency of clean up. And the height of the cart in turn created a perfect space for a trash can and recycling bin. The cart itself is only 8" wide but could support a cutting board of any width.

It took me a while to build this cart because of all the components that had to be painted separately. I again used pieces of doors which gives the shelves that nice thickness. Thin ply make up the back and side. I had a lot of conduit pipe left over from the 18 tables I made for a play two years ago so wanted to use it in the design. The construction is not as solid as I would want it to be because the conduit pipe flexes a little in the joint, but it is good enough.

I also took the trouble to install shelves in the back of the cabinet I got from the desk because Tim pointed out that there was space behind the drawers and he suggested I make a secret compartment. I decided I would make extra shelves which will come in handy for canned goods and other supplies.

Once installed the entire kitchen came together in a very satisfying way. All the components looked great together. I put in a different trash can I had in my office and the porthole gave the whole thing a nautical look like a ships galley.

You can also see the installation of my horse feeder sink which is simply screwed to the wall with lag bolts in the valleys of the corrugated panel. I ordered a sink drain from an RV store which was chrome and gave it a touch of class. Tim installed the hose bib which goes right through the wall and connects to an inlet valve for connecting to an outdoor hose. The inlet valve is another RV specialty item.

The wood counter is finished with 4 coats of Waterlox which is the preferred product for kitchen counters because it fills the pores of the wood and locks out moisture. It was easy to apply, but must dry 24 hours before it can be coated again. I was very pleased with how nicely that old desk cleaned up.

When I showed this picture on Facebook one of my fellow tiny house builders called it a Bitchen. It certainly isn't a bathroom in the conventional sense. I can still fit in the shower pan with the sink there and use it for bathing, but mostly it's a utility area for washing up. There is no shower head. Only a cold water tap. My intention is to fill the sink with cold water and add hot water from my electric kettle. Then pour water over myself Thai style. I couldn't be happier with how it all turned out.

Salvaged Paint Covers Multitude of Sins

When you build with mismatched scrap wood, paint goes a long way to giving the completed unit a finished look. I'm not sure how I feel about this scratched up dragging technique. It looks like a bad paint job though in a stylish way so appears intentional. It certainly distracts from any imperfections in the wood and joinery.

Dragging a brush through wet paint was a popular technique for walls in Victorian times which favored rich textures in decor. A number of painting techniques were derived including ragging (rolling a rag through paint) and lots of faux furniture finishes. I loved the book "Paint Magic" by Jocasta Innes though I rarely had the patience to do more than sponging two colors.

As for mixing paint I read an article once about a painter of San Francisco Victorians. He had a large collection of paint in quart cans in his truck and when he was on a job if he didn't have the color he wanted he would just mix it.

I collected the paints my clients were discarding in garage clean-outs, then culled it down to gloss or semi-gloss or flats of strong colors. And if these colors weren't right for a project I'd mix a new color. Some of these paints were 20 years old in cans with rusty rims. But as long as the paint could be stirred into a smooth consistency with no solid bits they were fine. Sometimes adding water would help.

It was always an experiment not the sure thing that a paint chip would provide, but paint chips have notoriously turned out to be the wrong choice due to operator perception error. Or you end up trying out 14 different colors looking for just that certain shade you saw at someone's house. Better that you are making samples as you go and if you mix it yourself you are more likely to like it hooked, as it were, by the transformation of it all.

I started with a base coat of a grey green from the Ralph Lauren collection. I am not a designer label person but the color choices are nice. It tugged at me in a visceral way (which Mr. Lauren probably intended thus his success). I liked it better than the blue grey I had. Then I mixed some garish green and some deep blue paint to get the teal.

While browsing Pinterest for paint techniques I found a recipe for chalk paint and since I already had Plaster of Paris on hand I decided to try making chalk paint. And while I was looking in my paint stuff I found a wallpaper brush I bought once because I liked the old world look of it. I decided to use this brush for the dragging part.

The recipe I used was 1/4 cup water, 1/4 cup plaster of paris, 3/4 cups latex paint. It expanded the amount of paint and toned down the intensity of the color a tiny bit, but it dried chalky as promised. Then because I wanted a washable surface for my kitchen I put on a final coat of semi-gloss varnish from a job refinishing desks for an office. Now it was no longer a chalk paint except where I left it unvarnished inside cabinet doors. In the end I would have preferred a satin finish, but this project is all about reuse and a decorating preference did not justify buying new had it occurred to me beforehand.

Painting takes very little time to apply, but needs time to dry so it's nice to have a place to paint where I can leave it and work on it when I'm home with 15 minutes to fill here and there. I sure will miss my painting porch here at Ridge Ranch.

The Minimalist Mattress

Compared to the hard mattresses I grew up with, Western beds are way too soft. I realized this last time I came home from Thailand and my bed with mattress topper had me waking up feeling crumpled up. I did away with the topper and returned to my usual 4" foam mattress with egg crate topper and woke up feeling more aligned. So I was not surprised to read a medical research paper about instinctive human sleeping positions confirming that the body has a natural means of correcting most spinal and peripheral joint lesions while sleeping albeit on a much harder mattress than the deep mattresses we now buy. "When the head is down, the vertebrae are stretched between two anchors and every time the ribs move through breathing the tension is increased, the vertebrae realign themselves, and the movement keeps the joints lubricated." (It was also in this article that I learned how the "Asian squat" is an automatic manipulator for resetting of the sacroiliac joints.)

The blogger quoting this article said he slept on a 3" memory foam mattress topper. I decided this might be the way to go for the tiny house loft since every inch counts. There were lots of such toppers being sold on craigslist and they were snatched up quickly so before I could buy one for $20. I had also read that rubber gym mats improved the firmness of the thin mattresses found in RVs so I got six of those too from an online rubber mat store ($24). When I could finally get the two together it felt just right, said Goldilocks. I added an egg crate foam topper someone gave away on next door in case the memory foam felt too jelly like.

I cut the mattress to clear the loft ladder which made it 48" wide just big enough to accommodate a visiting lover and still allow a path to the closet. I had also thought about sleeping across the loft, but the sloping roofline coming down to my head felt odd in a bad feng shui sort of way. The topper was a queen size so what I cut off could make a narrow couch which inspired ideas about a couch that would separate into seating benches for dining.

Sheets were the next order of business, but a 48" wide mattress now only 3" thick is a very odd size. Fitted sheets for this size can be found on RV sites but are pricey. I could make my own I decided and found instructions to make fitted sheets. And while browsing ebay I found surplus army hospital sheets that were extra wide in a hospital scrubs blue green (for $19 including shipping). I'm a sucker for repurposing the unusual so ordered them (2 sheets and a pillow case), but they were so rough to the touch I wanted to start over. I gave them a wash in baking soda with a vinegar rinse to soften them and that took out enough of the stiffness to keep me interested. They should be ok after five washes or so.

Rethinking The Shower

When I visited Ella, my instructor from the Tumbleweed workshop at her tiny house on wheels, she said something that stuck with me when it came to designing my bathroom. She no longer liked to use the shower because it just steamed up all the windows and makes her house damp. She worried about the impact of steam on her house. She did her bathing with a swim in the ocean.

Why have a shower at all? I asked myself. This was my chance to have a Thai bathroom with classic ceramic water jar and those ornately decorated silver bowls used to dip water to pour on ourselves. In Bangkok in the '60s the water pressure was often so low it didn't offer a good shower anyway. Plus we didn't have hot water in our house. (Few people bothered installing hot water systems in the tropics.) Every night my nanny would boil water on a brazier outdoors and haul the large kettle to our bathroom to mix the hot water into a tub with cold water from our water jar. This ritual of being so personally bathed was a fond memory. And now in this modern day we had electric kettles that would do for a hot water system. Why not just do with that? At least until I figured out a solar option. Why were showers so much the norm when half the world bathed from a bucket with a dipper? There was even a number of  YouTube tutorials on how to do so for the traveler. We in the West are so spoiled wanting our own indoor water fall plus there's all that water going down the drain while we wait for the heated water to come. All I needed was a water tight area that would house a drain or what is known as a wet bathroom. A shower pan would do the job.

Also plumbing a shower was a complexity I was happy to avoid. I looked around for a suitable container to use for a water jar. There were two lovely ceramic Chinese urns at the Home store already quite expensive at $60 each. I was sorely tempted, but the idea of a ceramic urn filled with water seemed like a liability when placed in a shower pan that might not bear the weight on a permanent basis. I thought of plastic water barrels, but I didn't like the idea of any heavy object sitting on a shower pan. I turned the problem around to a more utilitarian perspective. Why not just have a bucket hanging from the wall as I'd seen done in stables for watering horses? Those buckets were built to withstand being kicked across the stall.

While I was researching shower pans at Home Depot I fell in love with the shape known as a neo angle and knew this was the direction I would go in. After some in depth research about how to install a shower pan. I turned to the online RV supply houses. A tiny house could go either way with the installation of a shower pan. It could be mudded in with cement as they are in regular houses (I didn't fancy that job) or I could find out how it was done in RVs. But the prevailing problem I learned was that the drain could end up being blocked by one of the supporting beams of the trailer. And when I crawled under my tiny house to see, measuring the best I could where the dimensions of the pan would fall, I feared that the drain would land right on top of one of those beams. That clinched it. My best bet was to order an RV pan because the Better Bath brand offered one that could be had with a number of different drain placement options including one which would completely avoid the beam in question.

And when I studied the installation I could see that the mudding problem was solved with a thick styrofoam base already glued to the bottom of the pan. And while I was browsing the etrailer site I saw that they also offered a water inlet connector that could be installed through the wall so I could hook up a hose to a faucet inside the house. In my world this was a quantum leap from pushing a hose through the window. My tiny house builders had not made any concessions to plumbing and I did not want to take apart the wall to run plumbing through the house. I could however handle drilling a single hole through the wall along with the drain whole in the floor.

For the walls of my bathroom I loved the look of corrugated metal roofing. I bought one to see how it would look inside my house. The light danced off it in a pleasantly surprising way. I did long for something a little more built in than a bucket for the sink option.

I perused the horse supply site for a corner mounted water feeder; there was one, but it wouldn't work because the shower pan would require that I build out the corner at a 45° angle. I looked at other stable accessories and came across an urn like grain feeder in black. It had ribs coming down the round form that suggested a greek column. It was big enough to submerge my biggest pot and at the top it had a counter with a lip that would be perfect for a soap dish. The more I looked at this feeder the more intrigued I became. When I saw that it had a plug at the bottom I was confident that it would work for a sink.

Installation posed some interesting options. Such a feeder is usually just screwed to the wall, but would that hold the weight of water? I felt that I would have to reinforce the installation with lumber supports. Then one night I wondered what would happen if I made the sink removable in case I wanted to use the full space within the shower pan footprint. Whimsically it came to me that I could use a length of PVC pipe with a large diameter for a stand for my sink. The pipe would help support the weight and would also hide the drain pipe. Whether or not it was a removable sink I was now happy that my bathroom design had accomplished my goals and was going to be highly unique.