Living the Dream: Rough Home Building

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Left: In 1988, my first attempt at building on Round Island was a gazebo in memory of
Herb's late wife. Right: Just about the only way to get the cabin in summer is to ferry
yourself.

Servicing the Cabin

We mounted a gasoline-powered pump down at the lake to push water to three recycled plastic cider barrels in the loft. The barrels feed by gravity to the kitchen and bathroom sinks. The pump can fill our three barrels in five minutes and then we don't need to run it again unless we're planning an extended stay. We could have gotten by with less, and the gas motor has a tendency to be cranky. I would really like a bicycle-powered pumper like my friends over on Cranberry Lake have, but I'm glad to have the big one for fire prevention.

After considering a fire-breathing, propane-fueled incinerating toilet that I saw in a yard sale for $50, I was happy to discover a used composting toilet, which seems to me a better solution for the cabin—certainly better than flushing into tanks or lugging a tank of propane to the house every year.

Our composter (a Sun-Mar) uses a wind-driven roof turbine to draw off excess moisture and odors. The man who sold me the composting unit showed me his own installation: two toilets that shoot down cellar into a single digester bin the size of a chest freezer. In eight years the digester had not quite filled. He pulled it out part way and showed me. The soil was black and fluffy with less odor than inside a new car. He pulled aside the pearly grained soil to show me the red worms he had added to his system to do the final stages of composting.

I installed the toilet and a site-built gray water collector—evaporator, which is just a pit lined with polyethylene plastic, then filled with wood scrap. I needed it because you can't put your dishwater, shower, sink, or laundry water, with their bacteria-killing detergents, into a composting system. They are too much for a septic system to digest. In eight or ten years we will strip the pineduff lid off our grey water pit, dig out some of the rotted wood, add some more and a few red worms, then cover it up again. Lake Bonaparte has, in recent years, passed several health department tests for potable water, making it about the largest drink of water in the state. It should stay that way. But even so, we get our water from springs that don't have beavers and other bathers playing around in them.

Moving In

By 1992 the camp was ready for its people, who had been assembling archaic furniture and fixtures, junk store deer heads, and antique fish mounts. In July, Herb and family moved in. Propane stove, primitive icebox, kerosene lanterns, and all. That year my sister Valerie got married on Loon Island and she and Ray went to Round Island for their honeymoon.

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