One of the first things we want on the property (after our symbolic veggie patch) is a toilet. Seems a no brainer to have a composting toilet, as we'll need to plant lots of trees in a few year's time. This is distinct from the smaller loveable-loo model we hope to have in our house - this structure has not been recognised by the council, though so far as I can tell it's in a legal grey area, and it's for the lead up to and during the build rather than while we're living there (though no doubt it will continue to come in handy into the future).
We've drawn great inspiration from Milkwood Permaculture's 'most loveable loo in the west' with bin specifics, amongst other various people who've done what looks to be about the same thing. We love Milkwood - whenever we decide we need to work out how to do something (build an outdoor composting toilet block, for instance), we set forth onto the Great Interwebs and seem to end up on their blog looking at exactly what we wanted. Essentially, two wheelie bins sitting under a corrugated iron shed of varying fanciness.
My initial (very rough) concept drawings give you a bit of an idea:
The patch of ground where we want to put the toilets is sloped down to the north, so we thought we'd take advantage of the slope to take some height off the building. The bins will be on the northern downhill side, so the chimney for the vents has lots of sun to heat it up and encourage air flow and the ground is naturally lower anyway. Entry will be from the south, up the hill a bit. There will be a retaining wall along the middle of the block, that the bins will butt up against when under the building. That way we don't have to create flooring that supports people's weight, we'll just use pavers from the tip to make a solid, level floor at two different levels (one for the bins to sit on, one for the people to walk on).
Since we have the space, and we're building a structure anyway, we figured we'd make each 'cubicle' big enough that someone could comfortably get changed in them, and have a bit of space for storage of things like extra toilet rolls.
We prepared the bins late one night, just before the shipping container was due to arrive as we knew we'd need them pretty soon.
We've got taps on the sides rather than at the back, as the taps protrude a long way and I was worried they'd get knocked on the ground as the bin is being wheeled around if they were on the back. Vents are on the opposite side as that works well with what the chimney for the vents will be doing. We did two bins this first time around, one left hand sides one right hand sides. The bins cost us about $130 each to make up, most of that being the bin itself at $95 from the local big-chain hardware store. We made some expensive choices on things like tap fittings as we want them to last, and we went out of our way to get black coloured bins, but the rest came from the tip.
Out at the property the next day we took the bins along and laid out where we wanted them to go. We'd measured them of course, and had a rough idea of the size of the building, but wanted to mark it out on the slope itself as we didn't have a measurement for that.
We put the bins in place, then sunk star pickets along where the wall above them will go and where the retaining wall will go. Then we cleared the grass from that spot. You can see my pitiful little section on the left being rapidly overrun by Kyle's on the right - he's a lot faster at this bit than I am. In my defence, though, it's not quite as pitiful as it looks in this picture as post of it's hidden by grass in the bottom left of the photograph.
Accuracy didn't matter too much at this stage, as it's just to have grass-free space to sink the retaining wall and the posts that will form the structure onto which everything else will cling. The posts are the point at which proper measurements and making sure things are really square starts to matter. The grass doesn't care if it's square or not, and the star pickets are just our guide for where we needed to clear.
Clearing grass is hard work, but satisfying. Took us about an hour and a half for this bit, with frequent brief stops to check the rain that was looking a bit threatening on the horizon and the nearby cows that were becoming accustomed to our presence and getting a bit curious.
A few days later we returned to lay the retaining wall. We reluctantly bought two new sleepers after failing to find anything suitable at the tip a few weeks in a row. We dug out the downhill section of our little bare square, and settled the sleepers in place.
Then, we dug three post holes. Kyle had already cut the notches for lap joints in the posts. After much discussion we decided to piece the beam together into the lap joints and fix them in place (square) with brackets before we set the concrete to hold the posts upright. This worked quite well, as there were only two of us and we didn't have enough hands to hold everything in place otherwise and make sure it was all square.
We lay drainage tubing on the earthen side of the retaining wall for good measure, then started sinking the downhill posts as well. These were a bit easier, and we ended up doing them one at a time but held in place by a few star pickets sunk into the grass and tied with rope. We hadn't wanted to do this for the middle ones, as it would have meant disturbing our nice firm ground with star pickets just after we'd dug holes for posts.
We ended up with these a bit off square anyway, though not an insurmountable problem. We learned from this and fixed our methods a bit on the other side. Of course, being interrupted by a hail storm doesn't help much - all of this took place over several days.
Once all the posts were concreted in, Kyle got a bit hammer-happy and put up bracing on all the walls. This will be what we screw the corrugated iron wall cladding to later.
At this stage we have 8 out of the 9 posts in (we would have had all of them, except for our hail storm interruption) and all of the structural cross beams are in. The next step is getting the roof beams on, then attaching the corrugated iron walls and roof ($50 at the tip for a big stack of it, what a find). After that it's things like seats, probably some shelves inside, and finding a source of sawdust.
We've drawn great inspiration from Milkwood Permaculture's 'most loveable loo in the west' with bin specifics, amongst other various people who've done what looks to be about the same thing. We love Milkwood - whenever we decide we need to work out how to do something (build an outdoor composting toilet block, for instance), we set forth onto the Great Interwebs and seem to end up on their blog looking at exactly what we wanted. Essentially, two wheelie bins sitting under a corrugated iron shed of varying fanciness.
My initial (very rough) concept drawings give you a bit of an idea:
The patch of ground where we want to put the toilets is sloped down to the north, so we thought we'd take advantage of the slope to take some height off the building. The bins will be on the northern downhill side, so the chimney for the vents has lots of sun to heat it up and encourage air flow and the ground is naturally lower anyway. Entry will be from the south, up the hill a bit. There will be a retaining wall along the middle of the block, that the bins will butt up against when under the building. That way we don't have to create flooring that supports people's weight, we'll just use pavers from the tip to make a solid, level floor at two different levels (one for the bins to sit on, one for the people to walk on).
Since we have the space, and we're building a structure anyway, we figured we'd make each 'cubicle' big enough that someone could comfortably get changed in them, and have a bit of space for storage of things like extra toilet rolls.
We prepared the bins late one night, just before the shipping container was due to arrive as we knew we'd need them pretty soon.
...
We've got taps on the sides rather than at the back, as the taps protrude a long way and I was worried they'd get knocked on the ground as the bin is being wheeled around if they were on the back. Vents are on the opposite side as that works well with what the chimney for the vents will be doing. We did two bins this first time around, one left hand sides one right hand sides. The bins cost us about $130 each to make up, most of that being the bin itself at $95 from the local big-chain hardware store. We made some expensive choices on things like tap fittings as we want them to last, and we went out of our way to get black coloured bins, but the rest came from the tip.
Out at the property the next day we took the bins along and laid out where we wanted them to go. We'd measured them of course, and had a rough idea of the size of the building, but wanted to mark it out on the slope itself as we didn't have a measurement for that.
We put the bins in place, then sunk star pickets along where the wall above them will go and where the retaining wall will go. Then we cleared the grass from that spot. You can see my pitiful little section on the left being rapidly overrun by Kyle's on the right - he's a lot faster at this bit than I am. In my defence, though, it's not quite as pitiful as it looks in this picture as post of it's hidden by grass in the bottom left of the photograph.
Accuracy didn't matter too much at this stage, as it's just to have grass-free space to sink the retaining wall and the posts that will form the structure onto which everything else will cling. The posts are the point at which proper measurements and making sure things are really square starts to matter. The grass doesn't care if it's square or not, and the star pickets are just our guide for where we needed to clear.
Clearing grass is hard work, but satisfying. Took us about an hour and a half for this bit, with frequent brief stops to check the rain that was looking a bit threatening on the horizon and the nearby cows that were becoming accustomed to our presence and getting a bit curious.
A few days later we returned to lay the retaining wall. We reluctantly bought two new sleepers after failing to find anything suitable at the tip a few weeks in a row. We dug out the downhill section of our little bare square, and settled the sleepers in place.
Then, we dug three post holes. Kyle had already cut the notches for lap joints in the posts. After much discussion we decided to piece the beam together into the lap joints and fix them in place (square) with brackets before we set the concrete to hold the posts upright. This worked quite well, as there were only two of us and we didn't have enough hands to hold everything in place otherwise and make sure it was all square.
We lay drainage tubing on the earthen side of the retaining wall for good measure, then started sinking the downhill posts as well. These were a bit easier, and we ended up doing them one at a time but held in place by a few star pickets sunk into the grass and tied with rope. We hadn't wanted to do this for the middle ones, as it would have meant disturbing our nice firm ground with star pickets just after we'd dug holes for posts.
We ended up with these a bit off square anyway, though not an insurmountable problem. We learned from this and fixed our methods a bit on the other side. Of course, being interrupted by a hail storm doesn't help much - all of this took place over several days.
Once all the posts were concreted in, Kyle got a bit hammer-happy and put up bracing on all the walls. This will be what we screw the corrugated iron wall cladding to later.
At this stage we have 8 out of the 9 posts in (we would have had all of them, except for our hail storm interruption) and all of the structural cross beams are in. The next step is getting the roof beams on, then attaching the corrugated iron walls and roof ($50 at the tip for a big stack of it, what a find). After that it's things like seats, probably some shelves inside, and finding a source of sawdust.
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