Composting toilet 🚽

Looking forward to a proper 'eco' part of the project. I have bought a urine seperator and detailed instructions from Free Range Designs.
This will fit easily in the existing 'bathroom'. The toilet will deal with the 3 'p's. The urine in a bottle can be used on the garden. The poo will compost, I think I will use the sprinkle sawdust approach to speed it up and reduce odour.
I am using left over wood for this. The seat base will be 18mm marine plywood but chipboard at the edges because my wood is not quite wide enough. Used a jigsaw to cut the centre hole.

I follow the instructions to build the box, but as the toilet will be boxed in by the shape of the room, I don't need to face the back or sides. A small shelf is added to prop up the urine collector. I looked in lots of shops and online for a suitable bottle, but was not impressed. I decided to use an empty fabric softener bottle - this is ideal and nicely fits the spout from the seperator. Together these parts are shown below.

I need to secure the bottle in place, later.

I tried and failed to get an old second hand wooden toilet seat, and ended up paying £30 at Argos. The tricky part is making this airtight. The rubber spacers are easy to remove from the bottom of the seat and lid. I also remove the hinge, and saw the back to get a straight edge. This makes a mess of the varnish which I didn't like anyway so I sand this off.

The bit that sticks out at the back will act as a stop when the lid hinges.

Next idea is paint the seat and lid with the blue coach paint. I use the undercoat and 2 coats of coach paint (Tekaloid 318) as on the exterior.

The attaching into the van is straightforward, I add a handle to the lod because there is no gap to get a grip of it otherwise.

Bed completed✅

Been using the van for about a week now. Not had wifi good enough to update blog until now.

All of the below done on 6th August, spent 2 nights on the bed prior to this. I decided to drive the van with the mattress intact, mostly because I ran out of time. Not super comfortable the first night, because I forgot to bring a pillow, and 1 makeshift curtain fell repeatedly in the night... was fine the second night when I rectified these errors.
After the first drive (about 150 miles), the mattress slipped forward about 6 inches.

Above is how it looks as a bed before 'surgery'. I watched a few videos on YouTube cutting mattresses, and realised my bed base will be the perfect support to do these cuts, and I used a regular wood saw.

The mattress is foam with a latex topper(18cm height from BedzRUs), it arrived rolled and is very lightweight.

First cut was easy.

This didn't go quite so well, I think because I was leaning awquardly.

And the finished product in action.

The following day I added a piece of wood trim to stop the mattress slipping forward in transit, the ends aren't quite finished yet, and I haven't added  latches to the hinged doors yet either.