Took a quick blogging break due to Thanksgiving and I’m currently dealing with a back injury… which is a real bummer. I’ve started experimenting with some holistic treatments for sciatica, which will be a topic for an upcoming post 🙂 But for now…

During that same week that we got the woodstove up and running and installed our composting toilet inside, we also got ourselves a sink and the beginnings of a kitchen. A friend/neighbor of ours gave us a nice stainless steel sink he wasn’t using, so we built a counter and stand for it to sit in. Up until that point we were doing things like brushing our teeth, doing our dishes, and washing our hands, outside. Once winter came, that got real inconvenient. And obnoxious.

Since we don’t have plumbing or running water or anything like that, we basically attached a piece of PVC to the bottom of the sink, which leads directly into a bucket with a hole in the top. This gray water capture tank needs to be emptied every other day or so, depending on how much we’re using it. We make a point to only use biodegradable soaps so we can just dump the gray water out into the woods.

I personally find the gray water way more gross than our urine tank in our composting toilet. That tank needs to be emptied about the same amount, every other day or so. And for whatever reason, I’d much rather empty the urine tank than the gray water, while R would rather do the opposite (to be clear, we both do both, it’s not like I purposefully neglect the gray water, that would just be rude). I don’t know, I just find things like food residue and spit way grosser than pee.

Regardless, we now have a way to accomplish normal household activities inside, which is awesome. And it challenges us to be much more conscious about how much water we’re using for things like dishes. You’d be surprised how many dishes you can clean with a minimal amount of water and soap. I challenge you to do some dishes, like the normal amount you accumulate after dinner, with half a gallon of water.