Good Lord...Has it come to this

Pappy said:
That helps explain, blurred vision, coughing an rapid breathing, the symptoms I use to have when all we had was an old out house. It use to get pretty rank in there in the summer time.
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I really can't think of anything much worse than an outhouse on a hot July day! It is enough to "gag a maggot" as my grandma used to say.
 
Jillaroo said:
Never forget i went to see Ians work partners parents and they had a Dunny, i needed to go and nearly died when i saw how full it was, if i had sat down normally all the poop would have touched me, it made me feel so sick and it stunk, no excuse for that they should have emptied it.
Casper the nightmen did carry it on their shoulders, omg if it spilled over yuk
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I was only ever up early enough to see one dunnyman in action. He carried it on his shoulder then slid it across the floor of the truck while reaching for a lid lined up along the side and an empty pan. He'd run with them to the next house, drag the full pan out and slap and clip the lid on it to prevent spillovers, slide the new one in with the spare hand and swing the full one up onto his shoulder and he was off, back to the truck. He was poetry in motion to watch but then doing that job you wouldn't want to be clumsy.

It wasn't quite as messy as some imagine.
 
Here is a pic of our outhouse in 1946. Shortly after, we put in an inside toilet. Ours sat over a big hole in the ground. That's me with my two little cousins while the uncles are cutting out the weeds.
 

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Never forget the one i used at a lookout years ago , there was no pan it was a bottomless hole, it was quite eerie.
Has anyone here used one of those glass public toilets, you can't see in but you can see out, it would be bloody awful sitting there with everyone walking around you
 
The family farm up the coast here still had an outhouse well into the 70s but it wasn't over a hole, it was set up with the pan system and would get dragged out, put on the little tractor cart and taken as far from the house as terrain would allow to be emptied into a sludge pit they had around the hill where it couldn't leach back into the creek.

It was always an adventure going out there at night. It was a very cutely rustic one set in the shade among huge old date palms that were usually full of fruit bats squabbling and screeching over the fruit. I think the whomp whomping of their wings was worse than the screeches and salvos of dung they fired off. That gauntlet run you'd then have to have remembered to bring a torch before you stepped through the door, to check the floor for snakes and the seat for spiders.

Most screams that ever eminated from it though was when someone sat on a big green tree frog that had been hiding under the lid and they hadn't noticed.

There was family wide celebration when they finally got the septic system in. My Uncle was so chuffed with it he nearly emptied the tank just pushing the lever and watching it flush.
 
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an alternative to Depends, with a fertilizing exhaust system, this outhouse get about 50 miles per crap.
 
Remember when my car broke down on the way to work in a country town. It was early morning and the traffic was very light in that area. The only thing that came up the mountain road was the "sanitary cart". The men tried to start my car, but it wouldn't, so they offered me a lift. I sat between the driver and his assistant. They'd been on the job for a while, so the smell wasn't really delightful, but I did get to work - albeit a bit of residual smell attached to me. Also remember the time that the "sanny man" came a day early. The dog hadn't been chained up. Heard a voice in the early hours calling for help. The dog had let him in, but no way she was going to let him back out again. I much preferred the pit to the pan.
 
I've never heard of the carts and the only outside ones I've used are at public functions, which, thank God, include alcohol of some sort. Makes 'em so much less offensive.:miserable:
 
Some pretty fancy outhouses in this post! I still have an outhouse at the cottage. It has a window in it so you can sit and look at the ocean while doing your business. My son and I re-shingled the roof and put in a new floor about 5 years ago. He calls it "our bonding experience". lol No pan though, just a hole. The goods don't pile up because everyone once in a while you put a bit of lime down the hole. Ours is a double holer. lol

The cottage was my Grandmother's and I spent every summer of my life there. The outhouse served double duty as a change room so that you could take off your bathing suit and change before you came into the house. Somehow I just can't imagine the cottage being the same without the outhouse!
 
TICA said:
Some pretty fancy outhouses in this post! I still have an outhouse at the cottage. It has a window in it so you can sit and look at the ocean while doing your business. My son and I re-shingled the roof and put in a new floor about 5 years ago. He calls it "our bonding experience". lol No pan though, just a hole. The goods don't pile up because everyone once in a while you put a bit of lime down the hole. Ours is a double holer. lol

The cottage was my Grandmother's and I spent every summer of my life there. The outhouse served double duty as a change room so that you could take off your bathing suit and change before you came into the house. Somehow I just can't imagine the cottage being the same without the outhouse!
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How wonderful to have a place that has been in the family so long and where lifetimes of beautiful memories have been made..and through your son/other children the memories will continue on for generations. Gives me goose bumps! (Have to laugh at re-shingling and new flooring. That may be a first or certainly something you don't hear of often! :))

May I ask, since you mentioned changing...were you enjoying a lake or pool? Just being curious and very envious whatever it may be.
 
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