I was thinking back to the old outhouses we used to have around Apsey Brook and Snook’s Harbour when we were boys. There was always a certain smell to them—a mix of dry spruce, wood shavings, and lime, with the wind whistling up through the seat on a cold November morning. You didn’t linger in there any longer than you had to, especially when the catalog pages were the only thing on hand for toilet paper.

Building a classic outhouse on our new piece of land is still an option, of course. There’s a rustic simplicity to it. But since we’ll only be using the property for two to four weeks a year, the reality of setting up a camp demands a bit more modern pragmatism.

Hauling the Fresh Water

For the water, we are starting exactly how our grandfathers did before the wells were sunk—by hauling it. We’ll be carrying our fresh water in the back of the car in five-gallon buckets, keeping them tucked in the trailer to wash dishes and boil the kettle.

Carrying water gets heavy fast, though. The long-term dream, once we build a permanent cabin on the site, is to get a local drilling rig out here to punch a deep artesian well straight down into the Random Island granite. There’s nothing quite like cold, clean water pulled right from the bedrock.

The Sanitation Dilemma

But what goes in must come out, and solving waste in a trailer you only visit occasionally is a puzzle.

Traditional off-grid toilets don’t really fit our lifestyle:

• Chemical Toilets: They are cheap, but dealing with that blue sanitizing liquid is messy, and it always makes a small trailer smell like a highway rest stop.
• Composting Toilets: Many off-grid folks swear by them, but composting is a living process. It requires constant warmth and activity. If we’re only here a couple of weeks a year, the pile will just go cold, freeze solid in the winter, and leave us with a half-processed mess to deal with when we return.

For now, I think we’ll go with a Dry Flush (Bagging) Toilet—I believe the brand is Laveo. It uses a double-walled barrier film to hermetically seal the waste into individual cartridges after every “flush,” almost like a diaper genie for grown-ups. It’s completely dry, requires no water or chemicals, and we can just pack the cartridges out cleanly when we leave.

Ideally, a Propane Incinerating Toilet (like the Cinderella units) would be the ultimate setup. They burn everything into a tablespoon of clean, sterile ash using gas heat. They are perfect for our cold climate, but at several thousand dollars a unit, they are a bit too pricey for a starter rig.

Eventually, when the trailer is replaced by a permanent cabin, we’ll install a proper septic field. But for now, we’ll keep it simple.

Did you grow up with an outhouse, or have you tried one of these modern dry-flush systems in your own camps? I’d love to hear your experiences—leave a comment below!