The outhouse in our woods has to be more than twenty-five years old, and hasn’t served it’s original intended purpose for at least that long (we haven’t used it, not once, since we’ve been here, I can tell you that). It’s standard-issue: tall plywood walls, corrugated tin roof, one-seater, latch on the inside, and a thin horizontal rectangular-shaped window/air vent cut into the door about twelve inches from the top.

I don’t know exactly when our 1914 farmhouse celebrated the installation of indoor plumbing, but legend has it that on or near that indulgent and life-changing day, the free-standing privy was dragged ceremoniously (more or less) across the seventeen acres of cut cornfield and another ten or so yards into the woods to be used as a deer blind (the business end of the rifle would be poked through the window/air vent slit in the door—perfect, except that the user had to be standing if he wanted to get a decent shot at his quarry. Sitting down would have pointed the rifle upward into the trees, and who wants to sit in an abandoned outhouse aiming at crows? No one). Pinterest did not invent the art of re-purposing. Not by a mile.

Of course, on our inaugural land walk the week we moved in here, we spotted and explored every inch of that al fresco loo, swung the door back and forth on its rusty hinges, took turns looking through the narrow window slit while the other pretended to walk past the door in deer-like fashion to test the structure’s propensity for muffling sounds. If the leaves were dry and crunchy, and the hunter’s reflexes sharp and in working order, dinner was a single well-aimed shot away. We made up all sorts of stories about the history of this ingenious reassignment of place and purpose on the walk back to the house, most involving clever deer and those overhead crows besting the poor but hopeful rifle-wielder inside. Then we left it alone for years, with only the occasional check-in to monitor its condition. One spring afternoon, I yanked open the even more-rusty door and startled a ground-nesting vulture sitting on three eggs. We both reacted appropriately per our respective species (meaning, lots of feather-flapping, hollering and jumping about) and parted soon after. Who knew a simple functioning outhouse would have so many other lives? Re-purposing at its organic and creative finest.

We arrived here twenty-one years ago with the roots of a solid frugal lifestyle well-established, and were delighted at the opportunities this land set down at our feet to keep such a practice going. My parents understood the challenges of raising five children on a single income, and in our tender youth, we knew that the box of Carnation non-fat dry milk on the kitchen counter meant dad’s paycheck had been stretched to its limit that week. I muscled through the mushy dregs of my bran flakes anyway, grumbling a bit and trying as any seven-year-old can to understand, all the while dreaming of the triumphant return of milk in a plastic gallon jug the way the gods intended. But don’t let me paint a misleading picture—we were warm and clothed and loved and had three solid meals every day. Frugality was a helpful tool born of the marriage between circumstantial necessity and relentless creativity. Mom made it a game to invent something new by using what was ready-to-hand, and taught me everything I know about leftovers. On those days, saving money was an added bonus, not the goal in mind. I come by my adherence to thriftiness naturally.

In our first few months here, we came to understand that the land’s previous residents (who knows how far back?) employed their own frugal and creative powers to manage their daily routines, including burying their trash behind the shed out back (not environmentally responsible, but…frugal). Perhaps sanitation pickup fees were out of their reach, but they couldn’t keep every discarded leaving in a bag in the kitchen, so they did the next best thing. I suspect they tried to at least recycle their plastics, as evidenced by a mountain of milk jugs and soda bottles in the old hay bale side of one of the barns which greeted us when we arrived as prospective buyers with the realtor. But clearly, the pile outstripped their ability to keep up and just accumulated. Near the shed by the house, an industrious groundhog would regularly dig up all manner of items, from lidded plastic carryout containers (one with the chicken bones still in it) to toy action figures—some minus their heads—and shards of pottery. I cleaned a few of these up (the pottery shards, not the headless He-Man action figures) and glued them to clay plant pots in random mosaic patterns. I felt good about it.

During our initial tour of the house, we saw more evidence of kindred frugal spirits—canning jars, newspaper insulation stuffed into the cracks between door frames, and a barn filled with all manner of items dreaming of a second life just as useful as the first one. Rusty mattress springs, piano keys, mismatched Hartstone pottery and old ceramic field tiles all piled on top of each other, patiently waiting their turn at rebirth. I thought the tiles would make lovely landscape accents once I potted them with some nasturtium and ferns. Maybe that’s what the folks moving out had in mind too.

After all the closing paperwork was signed and notarized, we moved in and made mortgage payments on a home and acreage with a thrifty vibe, picking up where all the previous owners had left off. When the old dairy barn started to sag, we pulled the inside planks of gorgeous weathered oak and used them as wainscoting in our kitchen remodel (bonus: the cats can sharpen their claws on it and it doesn’t even show. It’s that old and that hard. So, money saved on a scratching post). Grapevines from pretty much everywhere we walk are cut down and twisted into wreaths that hang from the t-posts propping up and connecting sections of the garden’s border fencing. It looks rustic and decorative, especially when the goldfinches perch and pose. And while I know Patrick prefers to use virgin wood for just about any building project, he’s also quite up to the challenge of heading down to the barn mid-project to see if a scavenged piece of our friends’ former pool decking (treated and everything!) will do in a pinch. When we finally install the floating shelves in the living room, we’ll post close-ups of that final section of weathered oak, carefully ripped and cut, that the kitchen remodel didn’t need, with some objet d’art placed carefully and whimsically on top.

Giving things a new life, a different functional iteration, hones and validates the creative hum that pulses through each and every one of us. It’s our human tendency to keep the story going, to add new chapters by using that inherent creativity to turn something ordinary into something extraordinary (or at least something differently ordinary). I firmly don’t believe that some of us have this hum and some don’t, and I’ll lovingly challenge anyone who says “Oh, I’m not creative. I haven’t got a creative bone in my body” (see previous post entitled “Make Something” for more on this topic). Of course we’re all good at creating something. The question is what? And how? And when? And with what?

For some imaginative hunter-gatherer who lived at Naked Acres before we got here, the answers were:

Deer blind.

Drag it across a field.

After the new plumbing is installed inside.

Use the outhouse.