10 / December 2020 PRIME
S
ome of you may remember a story I wrote several years ago about outhouses. In that little tale I explained how fascinated I have always been with these outdoor potty rooms. I have outhouse paraphernalia everywhere; coin banks, tree ornaments, calendars, towels, pictures, an outhouse quilt I made years ago, a night light, knickknacks, you name it. If it is an outhouse item, I have it or want it if I don’t happen to own that particular trinket. I am not sure why I have such an interest in these artifacts from the past, but I do. When I lived in eastern Montana, I had an old outhouse that I salvaged from the research center which I stationed beside my garden. It made a great tool shed, as well as a marvelous conversation piece, and I smiled to see it stand proudly by the garden’s edge.
The House of my Dreams By Lois Stephens
Moving to Virginia City placed me in outhouse heaven, so to speak. This old town has many decrepit old buildings throughout the town, many of which were former outhouse structures. Besides the normal one-hole facilities people generally see, there’s an old twoseater down by the train depot, and a double-decker outhouse located in an alley behind the Fairweather Inn. Double decker outhouses in particular have always caught my fancy. They seem special, somehow, and I love the reason for their existence. It seems that back when people routinely used their outdoor facility for
lack of indoor plumbing, and when winter invariably dumped several feet of snow on the ground, the door on the lower level of the structure became impossible to open. Therefore, the second story came in handy, people could scamper through the snowdrifts, sprint up the stairs to the second floor, and answer nature’s call without the necessity of trying to shovel a foot of snow from the downstairs door. I have always wanted a twostory outhouse, not necessarily a working one, but a two-story outhouse nonetheless, just because I like these structures, and if I am going to have one, it may as well be twelve feet tall and have two levels. Why have a hovel when you can have a castle? The opportunity finally arrived for me to realize my dream. For the past two winters, my husband worked part time at a saw mill. He brought home mismatched chunks of timber that couldn’t be sold as dimensional lumber. He figured these slabs would make excellent firewood. I pointed out to him that they would make an even better two-story outhouse. It took a little persuasion to sell him on the idea, but he decided that such a structure would be fun, and it would certainly fit into our landscape and our life style. Our original intent was to build our little outdoor facility back in our woods, but then the neighbors got wind of our plans. He decided that our woods were
