Having the unique opportunity to be interviewed by The Black Dog Chronicles made me think about telling you more about some of our own systems and processes in the van. Sort of a Slowcarfasthouse Expose’. So I will develop a few blog postings that reveal a few things about our daily life. If you have specific questions, please send them!
We meet a lot of people on the road. Some of them have heard of slowcarfasthouse and have questions to ask. One of the most common is regarding bathroom routines. Not just toileting, but the process of managing a typical bathroom on the road. So here is some info about how we take care of that aspect of our lives as full-timers in our VW van.
We keep our daily grooming products in this repurposed breadbox. This one was picked up in a thrift shop in Clarkdale, Arizona. (Thanks Mom) Mike drilled it from underneath and mounted it to the lip that runs around the former rooftop of the van. Then he added a steel beam to help support that and the spice cabinet next to it. The beam is bolted to the refrigerator cabinet.
This cabinet has a basic set of daily grooming products including hairbrush, comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, face cream, deodorant, q-tips and daily meds. You may notice in the photos that the handles of the hair and toothbrushes have been cut off to fit better in a small space.
We also have our bathroom bags or dopp kit (Mikes is a basic black bag, mine is a VW van)
There are a couple of racks on the pegboard that contain bathroom type items. One of them has Icelandic Salve (good on cuts and dry skin), bug spray (Coleman Botanicals is gentle and effective on skin) and the other one contains sunscreen, handi-wipes and strong bug spray (which we spray on the screen door rather than our skin). These are items that we typically need to keep handy, so they ride well in those pegboard baskets that my friend gave to me! (Thank you, Lidora)
Additional medicines are in one of the built-in cabinets. These cabinets were changed slightly when we added the oversized water tank.
And now for the part you have all been waiting for. How do we handle toileting? Well, generally we live by the practice of “Go when you can, not when you have to.” So we use public restrooms at our stops or RV parks. But when we are beach camping with no services we resort to the poop shovel!
Another product that we keep on hand is called Poo Powder. It comes in a huge tub (ordered online), so we repackaged it into a practical size.
I hope this little expose’ of van life in the Slowcarfasthouse lifestyle was informative and helpful to you. Please feel free to send me an email if you have more questions about anything I have covered here.