Last January, I told the tale of our water woes. The ground froze before we finished under grounding the water pipes leading from our friends' "big house" to our tiny house. We drained the pipes and carried in water for drinking and cooking the rest of the winter. We showered at rec centers and other peoples' houses. We often hauled our dishes over to our friend's house for washing.

A year later, with freezing temperatures day after day, I'm happy to report that we have running water in the house! We wash our dishes here! We shower here! When the temperature first dropped to the single digits, we did have an issue—which has since been resolved. All of this wasn't just a simple matter of digging trenches for the pipes....

• Step one: Finishing the water line to our house. We excavated rocks so that we could finish trenching to the tiny house. Then we used foam insulation around our hose and encased that in PVC pipe for protection before burying it underground.
• Step two: Setting up holding tanks. We were still worried that pipes might freeze because we couldn't get them below the freeze line (down 20 to 30 inches), given our rocky mountain terrain. We decided to create a holding tank up the hill from our house where we could keep water from freezing. Bill constructed an insulated box large enough to hold three, 78-gallon barrels (rated for drinking water). He connected the barrels and put a thermostat-controlled panel heater inside the box. We fill the barrels from spring fed water coming down the mountain, as needed. Our tiny house can now draw water from the climate-controlled tanks.
• Step three: Protecting the faucet. The first place to freeze last year was the short section of pipe above ground that leads to our outside faucet. Bill wrapped that section of hose in aluminum foil and then attached heat tape. He insulated the faucet where it connects with the house, and that connection hasn't (knock on wood) frozen since.
• Step four: Better insulating the pipe running under the house. We have a section of PEX piping that runs under the house, between two floor joists, from our bathroom to our kitchen sink. While that space is sealed and insulated, it was obviously too cold on frigid nights. Water ran from the outside tanks to our bathroom without a hitch, but we couldn't use the kitchen sink after the pipe under the house froze. So, Bill insulated the PEX pipe leading to the kitchen better and installed an incandescent light bulb in that space to provide a little heat to the area with the pipe. Only once has the pipe frozen since then, when we had a number of days of single-digit weather—but at least the pipe didn't burst! Our new plan is to replace that PEX pipe with a heated, potable water hose. 

With the temperature still below freezing outside, we're quite happy to have hot, running water. It's something I've taken for granted in the past—but no longer! 

You can read more about our plumbing, water pump and water heaters in old blog posts. Please click on the images below for more details about our winter water solution.

Bathrooms require privacy; naturally, we built a wall to separate the bathroom from the rest of our living space. 

But there's no room to waste in a tiny house, so there's more to this wall than meets the eye. In the living room, we have a wall-mounted TV, pictures and shelves. In the kitchen, the wall becomes a pantry. In the bathroom, a recessed medicine cabinet, lighting, outlets and the sink and shower line the wall. 

We wanted to be able to get at the "guts" inside the wall should something come up, so the TV pulls out to reveal two doors and the bottom shutters come off completely, giving us access to all our plumbing. It's a hard-working wall.

Please click on the pictures below for more details.

We have hot showers! We have a bathroom door! We have a recessed medicine cabinet! Who knew a year ago that having a fully functioning bathroom would be this exciting? Not me.

So, it's time for a restroom summary:

The bathroom is a little under 6' x 6'. Like the bedroom partition, the bathroom walls don't reach all the way to the ceiling. Though we needed privacy, we wanted the house to feel open and light.

Our shower has an off-the-shelf 27" x 54" pan. We covered the moisture-resistant green board in the shower area with galvanized, corrugated sheet metal attached by roofing screws with waterproof washers. We overlapped the sheets to prevent water from getting behind them and sealed the corners with silicone caulk. Our nice, big shower window lets in a lot of light, but we didn't realize it would get splashed this much when we shower. So we added extra-wide, painted trim around the window, and we wipe the wet sill after we shower. (So far, so good.) Our Delta shower head is a low-flow model, but still produces a good, solid spray. Rather than heating water all day, we flick on our 12-gallon water heater 30 minutes before shower time, and get a good six minutes of hot water. Not a long shower, but long enough! You'll find more on plumbing here.

Our tiny, wall-hung sink is deep enough to make hand washing and tooth brushing convenient without taking up much space in our compact bathroom. After a lengthy search, we found our pint-sized Barclay sink online at Home Depot. We went with a Delta faucet on the sink. 

Our composting toilet may not be as convenient as a traditional flushing model, but we've adapted quickly with no real complaints. Nuts and bolts: The toilet seat is an Ecovita Privy 501 with a urine diverter, which means Number Two stays drier and therefore less smelly while Number One flows down a pipe through the floor to a gas can under the house. The diluted urine can be poured out anywhere and used as an effective fertilizer; we chose to pour it a distance from the house. Two 5-gallon buckets sit inside our DIY cabinet. One we line with BioBags, fully compostable liners that we will eventually be tossing into a yet-to-be-built "humanure" composter. (For now, the poop gets "wasted" by being tossed in the landfill. We need to get on this project!) Each time we make a deposit in the bucket, we scoop up some coco coir from second bucket to cover the poop. (We use coco coir, because it's considered more effective than sawdust and it's more sustainable than peat moss, the other "cover" options.) For more info on composting toilets, you can't do better than the Humanure Handbook. We also found the Gone with the Wynns website handy when figuring out our system.

Our door is a hanging barn-style DIY model scavenged from local demo sites. More here.

Our 9-inch-deep medicine cabinet is set into the utility closet behind the bathroom. A hinged mirror covers it. More here.

Our floor is the same tongue-and-grove pine we installed throughout the house. We used a waterproof stain and have a rug to sop up any shower drips. 

The light is an outdoor fixture by Design House that seemed to fit our bathroom style better than traditional bathroom lighting options. (It was also cheaper!) Like the rest of our lighting, we're using an LED bulb. It should last around 20 years and uses very little power. 

Our towel hooks, towels, soap dispenser, shower curtain, rod, rug and shower shelf are all from IKEA. They don't pay me to say this: IKEA showrooms are a great place to cruise for tiny house ideas and their products fit tiny budgets like ours.

What's not in our bathroom yet: a vent fan. We bought one, and it was so big and so ugly, we returned it. We'd like to figure out an affordable, compact way of bringing fresh air into the house and venting out any bathroom moisture and smells. Still in the works.... 

Please click on the pictures below for more details.