Monday, November 30, 2009

First Romantic project was building outhouse


In a land far away, in the distant past when The Commander and Kadizzle first met, they spent a summer in the wilderness of West Virginia. The Quinn family had a very rustic farm in the boonies of West Virginia. The farm was frequently refferred to as a brush farm. You could spend weeks there alone or with The Commander. The farm had no electricity, no running water, but it did have free natural gas right from the gas well. With no running water an outhouse was mandatory. The old shack was in sad disrepair so we set out to make a new one. The new outhouse was to be somewhat high tech. Our first great brainstorm was to make the base out of the outhouse from an old steel car top carrier. We cast the carrier into concrete. The beauty of this base was that now you had a mobile outhouse. If the hole filled up, you could attach the tractor to the outhouse and drag it to a new nesting place. The outhouse had two other unique features. The roof was made from plexi-glass, so this was one of the first solar powered outhouses known to man. The greatest innovation of all was Dutch doors. The fine new outhouse overlooked the county road. Although someone using the road was a very rare event, you could open the top half of the outhouse door and wave to the passerby as you read the Sears Roebuck. Almost forgot to mention that an old steel five gallon bucket was cast into the concrete to support the most modern of toilet seats. That whole construction process took place in about 1971. To the best of my knowledge that outhouse is still sitting there. If my ambition gland perks a bit I may google the location. I am sure this will be a historical site. If that outhouse still stands it is 38 years old.

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