Where's the bathroom?

Everything the light touches is yours.

Jan 09, 2025

When we first purchased our property our bathroom was the woods. Which was… fine. Though certainly not ideal long term, especially with friends camping and generously donating labor. Molly and I figured the least we could do was offer a decent privy.

Like, really decent. Photo by Ben Rasmussen, shooting for Dwell.

We considered our options for what would become Outhouse #1: Septic was too expensive. There were incinerator toilets, but those were pricey and required power, which we didn’t have. (Propane incineration was also apparently an option, but I can’t recall if we knew that.) Composting toilets were an obvious solution1, though this would require some amount of emptying and upkeep. Ultimately our friend Sebastien pushed us toward a simple pit latrine. He’d set up sewage systems in Latin America and the Caribbean, was running his own wastewater treatment laboratory, and happens to have an actual PhD in poop (I’m certain that’s not technically correct, but it’s close), so we trusted his judgment.2

His pitch was that we weren’t endangering any groundwater. That the build would be simple. And if and when the pit ever filled up, we could just cap it and move the structure. (Or, if we really wanted to, possibly pump it out.) He assured us that if done right a pit latrine could be a surprisingly pleasant user experience.

Doing it right meant a ventilation pipe (and keeping the toilet seat down, so the vent pipe would work) and making sure we got a good seal between the pit and toilet to keep out critters. It also meant not putting windows on the outhouse— the theory being that with no other natural light, any flies in the pit would aim for the screened ventilation pipe exit rather than buzz out the toilet and into the outhouse.

We had an excavator at the property for some road work and took the opportunity to have the operator dig us a pit. We’d read that a five-foot-deep 3x3 pit would last a full-time family of five for five years. He dug down 11 feet. With our meager weekend use, 11 feet seemed very adequate.3

To make the interface between pit and outhouse we used an old scrap of air duct which neatly mated to the plywood subfloor and attached to the framing. Dirt was filled in around it. Concrete, a plastic barrel, some culvert, a wooden box, etc, all would have been fine—anything to make a good seal. Construction involved a handful of friends and took place over a couple months.

The completed outhouse was extremely polished. Our goal had been to make it confusingly nice. Like, you forget you’re pooping in the woods nice. The kind of niceties that keep you coming back to help us build a cabin, let’s say.

Exterior was knotty cedar coated in Swedish pine tar and linseed oil. The recessed wood surrounding the functional sink was a Craigslist score of clear cedar. The painted plywood and bead-board interior had a couple solar-powered shed lights, wired to a timer light switch to prevent battery drainage. The toilet was a Romtec waterless riser—same model you’re likely to find in a state park pit latrine. Our ventilation pipe was undersized and indoors—they’re generally several times that diameter and on the exterior. But our design didn’t really allow for that, so we rolled the dice.

True to Sebastien’s word, the user experience was pleasant. Far removed from our experience of the pit latrines in state parks and the like—if only that our toilet saw far less traffic and for the ash and sawdust we occasionally sprinkled down there. Smells were minimal, if present at all. (Water is the culprit with smells, so when they did rarely crop up, it was when a lot of people were using the bathroom over a weekend—and peeing in it—or if recent rains had seeped into the pit.) Bugs were also largely a non-issue.

Unfortunately, three years after we built that bathroom, a wildfire came through.4

You may wonder why is there is so much foliage. Where the fire didn’t ascend into the canopy, its heat killed the leaves high above and ultimately the trees themselves. All those in the photo are dead and sagging. They’d eventually either fall, or we’d fell them, and then they’d get burned or chipped.

Fortunately the pit was still useable (though I had to fish the melted toilet out of the hole—not glamorous work), and while our post-fire property plans weren’t entirely clear, not shitting in the woods felt like a good start.

Outhouse #2 would be simpler. Quicker. Cheaper. An ethos forged in flame.

Let-in diagonal bracing was used since we skipped plywood sheathing.

The same section of metal duct was used to make the ground-to-toilet connection. The interior was smaller, though still spacious enough to not feel cramped. We left an overhang just in case there were ever any sink aspirations. Same Romtec riser, similar interior ventilation pipe, a slightly different solar shed light on a timer switch, and a single layer of Canadian hemlock tongue and groove siding was used for the walls.

We tried a stain for a black-ish look. In part because I was not yet comfortable with the idea of building a door and the cheap pre-hung metal door we’d purchased demanded some paint—so we figured we’d just color the whole structure.

Looking at it now, I’d say the exterior looks… fine, but I wouldn’t personally make that same stain and paint choice again. I love the unpretentiousness of the raw wood interior though. Better than the first outhouse, actually. The upside of this fiery try-it-again-mandala has been the refinement of rustic simplicity. Well, that and further opportunity to build stuff with friends.

Fittingly, Sebastien is in the mix here.

If a tree falls on this one, or another fire comes through, I think Outhouse #3 would likely be an even simpler build—only the enclosed structure, with no overhang, and a raw wood exterior paired with a wooden door which I’d build. I’d be curious to see how that outhouse would feel.

But Outhouse #4? I think that might be when we go back to the woods.

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Throne recently sent us a composting toilet for the latest cabin build. Haven’t set it up or used it yet, but it’s the same folks as Tiny Wood Stove and that product has been a winner for us.

He also shared some resources on latrines, including his self-penned Encyclopoodia which you can access here.

It’s now been nearly 8 years and I just took a peek in the pit yesterday. The… fill… honestly seems like it hasn’t changed much. We’ve still got a looong way to go and it’s hard to imagine it will ever get full. I suspect that our infrequent and sporadic use is barely outpacing the rate of decomposition.

Followers of our projects and builds might be aware that a wildfire came through in 2020 and deleted everything. We’ve built a few things since and the property has evolved. A telling of that whole event is a post for another time.