Such nice and useful topics from the rest of you, and here I am talking about the bathroom.
But it's new! Brand new this month! I'm dying to tell you about it.
To begin, for six years I have asked my guests to carry their food, water, and sleeping bags a kilometre down a footpath through the woods. Once at the treehouse, they got no wifi, no electricity, no plumbing. Kitchen access? No. If they wanted to cook, they had to make a fire. Same if they wanted warmth. If they wanted a bathroom? Ha! They had to make that themselves, too.
And they call me a superhost.
The secret to getting five stars for severe deprivation is to tap into the hiker crowd. You good hosts, understandably and wisely, discourage them, with their dirty boots and backpacks and toques. I love them. I'm one of them.
But then our listing got noticed by non-hikers, who started to book in droves.
They are nice, too, and I can see why you want them, smelling of shampoo as they do.
But leave-no-trace camping turns out not to be their thing, and suddenly our eco-friendly cat-hole system that had been given the green light by the rivershed conservation authority was unsustainable without extra hours of work by me. Like you, I don't have extra hours. I couldn't keep up.
With this influx of instant-booking new-to-the-outdoors guests, I would either have to delist or think up a system they might embrace. The solution was to build an outhouse 400 metres up the path away from the river. Less than 400 metres, and it would have been within the floodplain. Do not picture an outhouse in a floodplain. Oh, you have already? Sorry.
It's lovely though, this one, all piney and clean and following our township sanitation rules. Works like a charm. Harry, the designer, is brilliant.
Immediately a deer mouse applied to be co-host with the duty of shredding the toilet paper, but Harry is keeping her out now with a metal door sweep. I had to add a screen to the moon-and-star cutout to thwart the sparrows. The raccoons are hibernating, so they won't be trying to book it for a party until spring.
I am upping my nightly price, given this great luxury, but no plans to apply for Plus or Beyond yet. 😉