September 24th

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September 24th 2003

We have a toilet!

Today the bus became a rolling portable potty. We managed to not only finish the framing for the bathroom, but the toilet is installed and actually works.

	We started out this morning by finishing the framing for the bathroom. The framing enclosed 3 sides of the shower and gave us the final location for the door to the bathroom. It turns out that we will have enough room to make our cabinet in the bathroom 18 inches deep if we choose. That's a lot of deep storage space that we did not have enough of...
	I test drilled for the minimum distance we needed to be from both the outside wall and the support structure in front of the toilet. We had room under the bus to move the toilet toward the center of the bus as far as we liked. After careful "testing" for the optimal position of the toilet between the wall and the shower (taking into consideration the 6 inch plumbing cabinet I will be building along the shell wall) we cut a hole in the floor for the toilet flange.
	My friend Alan thought that this was the big moment... The toilet flange installed on the black water tank and ready for the toilet installation. It was pretty cool to see one of the house systems finally connected to some degree... We still have to finish the vent along the wall, but the toilet flange is a pretty big move toward having more than just a bus...
	I filled the toilet with some water and invited Becky to be the first to flush... It sounds stupid, but I think everyone let out a small cheer when the water went down and didn't come shooting out of the black water tank or anything. We now have a flush toilet! We've moved ahead of ancient civilization! It doesn't matter that we have to prime the flush with the garden hose or a bucket of water.
	The finishing touch was the addition of the binford 2200 toilet paper dispenser. We actually have not flushed anything but water up to this point - I have to extend the pipe leading to the gate valve (and we wanted to make sure that there were not any leaks) before anyone can use the toilet for it's ultimate purpose... Our septic drain hose is not long enough to reach the RV hookup either, so we will have to purchase a longer length of hose to make dumping the black water tank a one person job. Putting the roll on a piece of scrap lath just made Becky and I laugh out loud - the finishing touch!

Tomorrow we're going to visit the trailer and see if we can scavenge the rest of the pluming for the fresh water supply. I don't think we can plumb the whole system yet since we are not definite on the location of the kitchen or bathroom sinks.

I'd like to finish sheeting the inner shell of the bus over the next few days. Once that is done, I can move on to working on closets and counters.

The fridge is leaking water all over the floor in the front of the bus, so I may need to temporarily set up something to catch the melting ice water that is getting the floor all wet.