As we peel back the layers we wind back the hands of time (forgive me for sounding twee).
Despite renovations in all directions, the toilet is staying put. End of story. With a loving make-over we celebrate our home’s first indoor loo.
Before it was converted to a toilet in the 1950s, the small room was previously a coal store built as part of the original 1926 bungalow design. The coal store (and in time, the toilet) was accessible only from the verandah via the back door for decades.
Where was the loo located before the coal store, you may ask? Grab a kerosene lamp, ignore the wetas and follow me;
A brief history of household loos in Auckland!
Outhouses or ‘dunnies’ as they were fondly referred to, existed at the bottom of the garden. They were common-place in early residential development years of Auckland. When one long drop was full, the outhouse was dragged to a new spot and a fresh hole dug, until backyards bulged at the seams with human waste. Not surprising, hygiene wasn’t all that flash and cesspits were eventually prohibited in the 1870s.
A new collection regime was introduced. Excrement was collected in a pail, covered with dirt and awaited the ‘night-soil man’ to remove it (at the householder’s expense). Council contractors working throughout the night emptied pails of excrement into their carts, with specially constructed wooden tanks. Known as Night Men, night-soil was still collected from some areas up until the 1960s. An interesting meaning to the term ‘soiled’ don’t you think?
Bob, the previous owner (born in the house in the 1930s) recalls the Night Men collecting at 9pm on a Sunday. “You could often smell the cart before you could see the four kerosene lamps hanging from each corner of the cart. A good excuse to go for an extended walk about the block until it had gone.”
Even with progress, modern 1960’s toilets were often attached to the outside of the house. An ‘outhouse’ of sorts but not so far to trek on a dark, winter’s night.
As electricity consumption rose and the coal store became redundant, our bungalow’s disused utility room was the perfect location for the inside ‘outhouse’. The toilet made it’s indoor debut in the 1950s and has stayed put every since.
We did remove a very suspicious dunny-looking shed that uncannily ran beside the underground sewage pipes, but we stand corrected as this was a just an innocent garden shed.
What we do now know however, is that the room adjoining the coal store (now toilet) once housed an old copper boiler. Now we are in full swing of renovations, the lowered ceilings have been pulled away and the floorboards exposed, we can see where the concrete slab was poured and the tin in the roof where the old chimney stood. Talk about fancy! No only did this house have a copper boiler, it had an AGA range cooker and a gas cooker right from the get-go.
Copper Boilers were large, oval tubs that sat over a fire-pit. After rinsing, soaking and scrubbing dirty clothes, they were dumped into a copper boiler that was coal-heated and boiled for an hour or so. Occasionally they were stirred with a dipping stick, then dipped out, rinsed, and wrung out to squeeze the bulk of the liquid before hanging out to dry. Copper boilers were used for many other things to: like heating bath water, preserving canned foods and even distilling.
When the toilet was installed, the room next door was renovated into a bathroom/laundry in the mid-1970s. The writing was on the wall, literally. “Angela, 1.1.74” was written behind the bathroom mirror! That wasn’t her birth date we’ve since discovered, but date of the renovations. The original paneling was covered with a combination of 5mm hardboard, and right on trend, themed pink to match the bathroom vanity.
That wasn’t the original bathroom though! The house was continually adapted and altered to suit a growing family or a change in technology (eg: bringing toilets inside once main sewage became available).
Talking of loos. Off we go to Mitre10 to select a new one. Renovations continue and the plumber has given us a list.
Post Script: Why do we bother to take interest in old dunnies, old wall linings, old anything? At the heart of Rediscover is asking how, why and when. Rediscover can at times be ‘discover’ and it’s a wonderful journey that results in gaining a whole bunch of knowledge (trivial at times, but none the less of value) about everything around us. Our bungalow gives us a perfect canvas to appreciate those things.
Thanks for following our journey.
