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.

We haven't posted anything about building lately...because, well, we haven't been working outdoors much these sub-freezing days. (And there was that wedding in Mexico to blissfully distract us.) But we've still made progress, spending time reading and calculating and dreaming—and shopping. We've made a boatload of decisions: from lighting and heating to our wall paint and our composting toilet. 

Some of our picks:

The Kimberly Wood Stove. This sleek, stainless "gasifier" wood stove burns efficiently and cleanly, with less than half the emissions allowed by the EPA. It could heat a space six times the size of our tiny house, and one load of wood can burn up to 8 hours. So, as long as it works as advertised, we should be toasty all winter next year. Not to mention, we can do a little cooking atop it and, if we opt to buy a thermoelectric generator, we can produce a little power to boot.

Origo 6000 Oven/Stove. Electric stoves are energy hogs; using one would tax our solar/battery system (still in the planning stage). While some "tiny housers" opt for propane cooking, we're trying to steer clear of fossil fuels associated with fracking. The Origo runs on clean-burning, non-pressurized, denatured alcohol. We were lucky enough to see a couple in use at the Tiny House Conference we attended last April. Our two-burner stove and oven is designed for boats—but it's also a great choice for off-the-grid tiny houses. It may take us an extra minute to boil a pot of water, but we think it will be a well-spent minute.

BioLite Basecamp. No more propane grills for us. This wood-burning grill makes good use of the sticks that fall to the ground all around our tiny house. A built-in thermoelectric generator charges the internal fan that improves combustion and enables a cleaner burn. Plus, it generates enough extra energy to power its built-in light and charge a phone.

Ecovita Privy Kit. We're building our own composting toilet. Not the most glamorous of subjects—but quite essential. The short story is that keeping Number One separate from Number Two makes things easier and neater. This privy kit will work in combo with a plastic gas can, plastic bucket, coco fiber and a wood base we're working on. Enough said...