Arrived and moved in... Lets talk toilets...

Life happens so quickly sometimes that you don't really have time to stop and think, let alone blog! (although having the internet helps with that aswell)

For me at least, that has been the last 6 weeks of my life.

We have now been in Portugal for just over 1 month. Having moved into the farm house 16 days ago, it took a week or so to orientate ourselves to the lifestyle changes that were required for the place that we are living...

First things first... We had to sort out a toilet as soon as we moved into the property as there was no bath room...

This is a bit of an interesting one. After taking Mum to the Be-In Gathering at Boom land in June for the Summer Solstice, we both had the pleasure of using composting toilets, which got us talking about the possibility of using composting toilets here at the farm. Mum did quite a lot of re-search on the subject and also found a few books on it, one such book - The Humanuare Handbook has a lot of helpful hints and tips on the subject.

So with no hesitation, I found and ordered 5 buckets through Amazon and had them delivered to our UK address. Also bought a toilet seat as we knew we would be needing one!

Once we were here the race was on to design and build some sort of "toilet throne" to be used...

After around an hour, it dawned on me... Why not use one of the chairs that had been left in the house...

Used tissues, Toilet Chair Mod & Sawdust

So this is now our toilet... It works amazingly well, requires very little maintenance (other than emptying when full) and believe it or not, it does not smell!
The concept is essentially very simple, the bucket on the stole is full of sawdust (from the local mill if you can obtain it) ours is from Agriloja (an agricultural shop), the bucket/toilet throne is a chair with a bucket under and toilet seat. The bucket literally touches the bottom of the toilet seat so there are no gaps. You put around 2-3" of sawdust in the bottom to start with, then when you have done your business, cover with a few handfuls of sawdust until you can't see what you did anymore... The bucket to the left with the lid on is where you put your used toilet paper to be burned later...

It does make you face what you did in the toilet... I must admit, it took me a little longer to get used to it than Mum did!

So we had our toilet sorted... hurray... Now to get rid of the buckets that we have filled with crap, pee & sawdust... hmmmm...

After just over 1 week, we had 2 buckets, pretty much full of crap, pee & sawdust to deal with...
The book suggests that you build a compost heap.

Somehow it took me 2 days to complete, but finally I had created and finished the chicken/cat/dog proof compost heap for our toilet waste, garden waste and kitchen waste to be emptied into.

I used a couple of sheets of scrap metal that were laying around, a few boards, some chicken wire, 4 posts, a key, some screws & nails...

Dug out a small concave hole in the middle, applied some garden waste/shrubbery and then added the 2 buckets of 'humanure' to the mixture and covered with more 'shrubbery'.

Again, to both of our surprise, No Smell!

That was just over a week ago now, I have another bucket to empty tomorrow along with kitchen food waste. There is endless 'shrubbery' on the ground to be added so that will never be a problem to source.

Toilet = Check
Toilet waste disposal site = Check

Peace 1 <3

WMD