Our Hillbilly Home - The Outhouse

This is a story about how we got started with our farm several years ago...I was chatting with a friend one day and talking about how we got our house, and she wanted to see some photos so I decided to write the story for my blog and share photos instead of trying to e-mail a bunch to her. If you missed the first part of this story, you can find the links to all the parts on my links page.
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The rest of 2001, after getting the farm was spent trying to decide on where to build, so we could start planning our homestead and maybe get a shed or two up when we had time to. We thought about 2 or 3 different spots, but kept coming back to the one I originally wanted, east of the first creek.

We had been out walking around our property not to long after buying the farm, when I got tired so headed back without DH. We were over the "big" hill from the truck, so I took my time, and meandered along, since it was kinda warm out and I overheat quickly. I finally made it to the top of that big hill and started down the other side, thankful I was within sight of the truck...even if it was still several hundred feet away. LOL

About halfway down the hill it hit me and I stopped as an awareness came over me. This was it...the beautiful view spread out before me, with the creek close by for the frog's songs, a ways from the road, so we weren't so close to the dust maker, and facing so I can watch the summer sun set beyond the distant hills. I was home...

....as long as DH was ok with it anyway. LOL Being the more knowledgeable of the two of us, when it comes to most things, he had the final say about where we would build. DH was considering over by the road, as we wouldn't have to have as long of a drive...and I could see how that could be good...but my heart was still over across the creek, on the side of the big hill.

Thankfully God gave us our answer, in the form of new zoning laws that were coming...we wouldn't have all that much room over by the road, as the land starts sloping down to the creek, so when we found out we wouldn't be able to have a building to close to the road...we dropped that idea and my site because the chosen site.

The next order of business...much to DH's brothers sorrow was to provide a place to go for relief...and I'm not talking the resting kind. *giggle* I'm not one to want to "go out behind a tree" to "relieve" myself, so over the winter we planned on planting the first building on the side of that hill come spring...an outhouse!

It's the only civilized thing we could do, since we didn't have running water, because I just don't consider "going out behind a tree" to be civilized.


March 2002 blew in, and DH was busy when we were home, building a shed, that he could take down in sections to haul to the farm and put back up with battery operated power tools (remember, we didn't have electricity either LOL)...it was little, and everyone that drove by while he was building it on our driveway, in our small town, wanted to know what he was up to, and got a chuckle when he told them. Finally he had it finished enough that we could make a trip down to the farm, dig a hole, and set the building up over it. I of course had to document that first "ground breaking" with a few photos.

The nice thing about the outhouse was, it was just large enough, that we could store some tools in it, when we were gone. It had pink house wrap on it for the longest time, which made it stand out on that bare hill, and DH still laughs to this day about the fact that his brother wanted him to put a tv antenna on the roof, so neighbors driving by would think it was something other than an outhouse. *giggle* I grew up using an outhouse, so having one wasn't really a new thing to me.

On a side note, my parents somehow ended up with a book of verse about an outhouse when I was little so naturally the place for it, was in their outhouse and every now and then I'd flip through it and read the short poems about outhouses. There was some cute ones, but the only one that I can remember was the following...Sorry, I can't remember the title or author.

Rain or shine,
Hail or fog,
Grandma took
her catalog.

Don't ask me why that stuck in my memory *giggle* but for some reason it did.

I have to admit once we were married I quickly become spoiled with that new fangled idea called indoor plumbing, *snicker* but even now, after all these years, I could make do with an outhouse if I had to...

...hopefully I won't have to on a permanent basis. LOL

Stay tuned to see what our next project was...

...next time on "Our Hillbilly Home".
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More will come once I get the photos gathered, and words written...please forgive the fact that I'm clearly NOT a "writer" AND the time it could take for the next part to show up...a day, a week, a month or... God forbid... a year.
Next installment is here.