Building an Off Grid Outhouse .........start to finish

[Music] how's it going everybody my name is dave whipple and you're watching bush radical today my brother ryan and i are going to build an outhouse it's going to be crappy but our work's not gonna stink my brother ryan and i are camping out it's the opening weekend of trout season 2021 this is my favorite time of year to camp we're up on the property that brooke and i bought this winter out the snow's gone i can really get an idea of what we actually have and the number one priority on any remote piece of property is to get an outhouse built so i spent last night looking for a good spot and i think i found one so this morning ryan and i are going to get busy we picked a nice spot in the woods just off a trail it's out of the way but not too far out of the way ryan's gonna start digging i'm gonna start building hopefully we'll have everything ready about the same time for this outhouse build we're going to use rough cut lumber i bought these two treated six by sixes at lowe's and it cost me a hundred dollars and i about lost my mind so i drove down to the amish and bought a whole truckload of rough sawn boards for about 75 that's what we'll use now when loading up this truck i put some of the delicate things right on the top like this polycarbonate roof panel so while i got it out i'm going to cut it to size that way it'll be ready to use when we need it i need two pieces of five foot and the scrap piece two foot we'll use that too [Music] this clear plastic paneling lasts a long time and it's easy to work with to cut it all you have to do is score it with a sharp knife and then you can just tear it right in half this will be our two roof panels and the p shield that goes in the outhouse seat [Music] brian and i tried to pick a spot where there shouldn't be too many tree roots but it looks like he's already found a couple we'll just chop those out hope that there isn't any more [Music] the wind's been picking up all morning and it's starting to be a pretty blustery day [Music] now the soil in this part of the upper peninsula is sand but it's a hard packed sand several layers of really compact dark brown sand is what you're likely to find in any dig around here it gets so hard at times you wish you had a spud to chip away at it but it drains well but the real good thing about that is that once you dig a hole it's not likely to slough in on you it's likely to hold its shape it's always good to work with my brother he's a substation technician by trade works for the electrical union over the years we've done a lot of concrete together quite a bit of roofing he's pretty good at digging holes too [Music] now if you've never built an outhouse before the most important part is the seat you can mess up a good outhouse by having a poorly built seat and by that i mean it could be way too high or the hole could be way too big or way too small so laying out the hole for the seat and getting the seat height correct that's pretty much the whole job in a nutshell we're going to use about a 17 inch high seat and for the hole it's going to be about 9 inches wide by about 12 and three quarters deep now what i'm doing is finding the center of my seatboard and i'm going to mark my lines out for nine wide i want to be about an inch and a half back from the very leading edge so you're not sitting too far back on the platform itself and then from there just kind of sketch in what looks to be like a good-sized toilet seat hole that looks beautiful [Music] now i've never been camping when i didn't forget something and today i forgot a drill bit to put a hole in that board to get the jigsaw started so we're just going to make a notch with this chainsaw real quick not to cut the seat out but just to get the jigsaw in that port [Music] this close to superior the weather changes pretty fast it was cold last night but it's warming up now supposed to get cold and rain later on though [Music] now we're going to build the outhouse off of these two treated beams but for right now they make a handy workbench [Music] my three dollar yard sale jigsaw seems to be doing just fine [Music] [Music] so now i'm going to put my foam over top of my board seat and kind of press down an impression so i can have a guide to follow cut that hole out with a pocket knife i'm just going to try to take my time and try not to tear the foam which is easy to do [Music] now in alaska a foam toilet seat is standard issue you can go out at 60 below and sit on a foam toilet seat and it's immediately warm it's a real luxury in cold weather climates and i would really like to spend some time up here in the winter snowmobiling and having a nice foam seat for an outhouse well let's just kind of thinking ahead i guess [Music] it looks like ryan's got the hole done we're about ready to move on now he's going to take some of that dirt from the hole and make some even pads on either side of the hole and that's where we're going to rest our 6x6 treated beams those beams are going to be the foundation that everything is built on now there's a lot of ways to build an outhouse but this is probably my favorite two big beams you built the whole thing off of those two beams now what i generally do is just use four sheets of plywood for an outhouse but with the price of lumber being so ridiculous right now we're just using rough saw on boards we're gonna build a back wall and two sidewalls instead of using one expensive piece of plywood for a wall we're just gonna build a sheet of plywood out of inexpensive rough cut lumber now that our back wall is pretty much done we need to take a little bit off that last board the reason is the whole outhouse needs to be about 44 inches wide so the roofing material hangs over on either side of the building now ryan is going to nail off this strip that's holding all the boards together we're using about a two and a half inch nail so once he's done hammering all the nails in that need to be hammered in we're gonna flip this thing over and he's going to clench those nails that's pretty old school but it's about as good as a rivet now that board he just nailed up is 17 inches from the bottom of this back wall and it's also gonna hold up the toilet seat itself now this other board we're nailing in is just a two by four and it's gonna be at the top of the wall that's why we flipped it over so we could sink the nails through the one by into the two by four oh that ain't a sheet of plywood holy cow [Music] no even though i stood it up upside down the back wall is ready to use time to build a sidewall [Music] just like that it's cloudy and cold again i'm going to trim up the bottom of this set of boards and this is going to be one of our side walls [Music] now as far as dimensions go the back wall is going to be six foot high and the front wall is going to be seven foot high but these side walls they're gonna taper from six foot to seven foot and they're gonna be five inches longer on the bottom so they can lap down over those beams they say a picture's worth a thousand words and as soon as you see it go up it'll all make sense right now we're just tacking it all together so that we can flip it over as a unit and then nail it from the back side but like every project once you start rolling along and everything is going good you're just probably going too fast we just tacked that together lightly so we could flip it over and work from the other side and you see we got we got to start over ryan reorganizes this wall i'll take just a second go get some screws the wind right now is just picked up to hurricane force and we just about lost the toilet seat it took off flying you can see the trees tell the story it is severely windy out right now we now have a back wall and a sidewall ready to go we'll build a third wall and then we can stand this thing up we'll take just a little bit more time on this one so we don't have another accident [Music] ryan's holding that board while i mark that roof angle i like to do one foot higher in the front than in the back it just makes an outhouse look like an outhouse now later on we're going to nail these boards off and clinch the nails but for right now we're just screwing them tight together so we can get this thing built hopefully the weather doesn't get any worse than it is at the moment [Music] now that both beams are down ryan's kind of dialing it in with a shovel taking off the high spots to let those foundation beams set as level and as flush to the ground as possible now the nails we have are basically whatever you got in a can so we're just going to sort through because what we need here is 16 penny nails the rest of these are like 28 penny barn spikes [Music] in this wind building this outhouse is about like building a giant wood kite you gotta hang on pretty good until everything is nailed together [Music] there's the sun again [Music] now that we've got that sidewall nailed off at the bottom we're gonna put the back wall on once two walls are nailed together it should be fairly solid and we should go pretty quick [Music] so now i'm filling the bottom of these walls just full of nails then when i'm done we're actually going to remove the boards on the inside the boards that we screwed on earlier in this video they were just there to hold these walls five inches below the top of those treated beams ryan's taking those boards out now because they're not needed we've nailed off the bottom so much those boards can just come right off we can use them for something else [Music] every minute of this building project we're getting closer to that moment the moment you don't want to be down in that hole anymore [Music] but it's safe for now deep hole yeah it is see that board in the back wall we put it just at that height so it's a ledger support for the toilet seat we need to mark where the toilet seat's going to come to and put some side supports in once again down in the hole it's still okay but time's running out i'm going to make my marks up from those beams so that these side supports are exactly the same height as that board in the [Music] back now lumber is so expensive right now when i went to the amish to buy this wood i bought 10 footers and 12 footers and just all kinds of stuff because they didn't just have what i wanted they had what they had and you had to make do with that so once i thought i had enough wood i threw another five or six pieces on the truck i'm pretty sure we're gonna be right down to the last stick on this build and lucky that we have enough lumber if we do [Music] now that we think we've got all the long boards we need ryan is cutting up what we have left to make the floor [Music] while ryan's busy working on that floor i'm going to put together a front wall [Music] once we have that front wall built and the floor built we can build our door [Music] well ryan's about got that floor wrapped up and that thick rough cut full dimension white pine it's gonna make a good stiff floor [Music] 130 years ago this was the lumber capital of the world the northern midwest makes me wonder how many outhouses have been built right on this property when logging camps came through [Music] i bet those old-time loggers would take one look at this outhouse give us a thumbs up i bet it'd meet their approval it looked pretty much like what they would have done back then with the ridiculous lumber prices we're looking at today it might be money ahead to grab yourself an old antique whip saw and cut your own boards by hand or buy a team of mules and pull your logs down to the mill anything's better than walking into a home depot right now and paying eight bucks for a two by four that just doesn't make sense we're about ready to throw some hinges in this door frame and once we do we can build the door and hang it ryan's taking the measurements he's going to need right now he's going to build the door while i work on the roof [Music] [Music] building with rough cut lumber is a lot more time consuming and difficult than just throwing up four sheets of plywood in a box but i sure like the look of it [Music] now comes the most critical part cutting the moon in the middle of the door because i know if i don't do it i'm going to hear from people [Music] i guess an outhouse for a lot of folks just isn't an outhouse unless it has a half moon cut in the front door and you know what we can make that happen we have the technology [Music] ryan's ready to build the front door so i'm going to get out of his way and let him get to it one thing we don't have is a z for the middle of the door we have a top board and we have a bottom board usually there's one that runs at a diagonal across the front of the door to keep it rigid we just ran out of lumber we don't have it we've got just enough two by fours left to put three of them in the roof to put our roofing on we're just gonna have to make do for the time being with a top and a bottom board to hold that door as rigid as possible [Music] i cut this left [Music] of all the construction sites i've ever been on i think it's safe to say this one's my favorite beautiful piece of quiet property in the middle of nowhere and building something for yourself that you're going to use for decades well that's about as satisfying as building gets nothing makes you feel like you're making progress more than hanging a door [Music] little finishing touches like this really make it feel like you're making good progress too you got gotta have a latch on an outhouse you need one on the outside so when you shut the door you can keep it shut and of course you need one on the inside because what outhouse is complete without a latch for privacy [Music] so now's the time to throw the roof on [Music] i love using this clear polycarbonate panel for my outhouse roofs it just makes for a very bright outhouse [Music] oh that looks like an outhouse that is a thing of beauty time to throw in our foam seat now that our house is not only built but with a foam seat i'd say it's finished let's furnish this thing [Music] done now there is one critical thing that still needs to happen and that's the p shield you have the board that the seats made out of and then you have that board in the front that holds the seat up this p shield whether it's steel or whether it's plastic or whether it's polycarbonate roofing in this case that's going to keep that riser from getting soaked and you know just exactly what i mean just putting that scrap of roofing in that spot and attaching it to that riser solves that issue entirely the p shield is without a doubt the most overlooked or misunderstood part of any good outhouse once you have a p shield installed though you've got it made speaking of shutting the door from the outside with the outside latch i'm putting on just a block of wood as a stop so when the door is shut it'll butt up against that little stop and then just take a scrap of wood and a screw to make the outside latch to hold the door shut when you're not using the outhouse [Music] orion found this nice crooked tree branch and it just looks like a door handle we're gonna cut it off and screw it on right to the face of the door for an outside handle [Music] not only did ryan and i wrap the job up and build something that we'll be able to use for years and years to come i think we had as much fun as we possibly could doing it thank you guys so much for watching bush radical my name is dave whipple be radical eh see you soon

Channel: Bushradical

Views: 891,535

Keywords: Outhouse, building an Outhouse, off grid outhouse, building an off grid out house, homestead, remote land, remote outhouse, Out House, Out House plans

Id: _SgFemf7RZM

Length: 25min 58sec (1558 seconds)

Published: Sun May 09 2021