Bear with me on the title of this blog post.
Firstly, we are officially mad, according to those who have seen pictures of our outdoor bath on social networks. Check out the Instagram feed for more photos. We’ve had comments to ‘gee, you guys are motivated and clever’ to ‘what would the neighbours think’ to ‘it must be freezing’.
I’ve always wanted an outdoor bath. I love our bathroom, and there’s a huge window looking out onto the garden, but it steams up, so you can’t really see much anyway. Hence this experiment.
Basically, take one cast iron bath, pop on some wooden legs, fill with water and light a fire underneath like so:
Yes, it looks very rustic in this picture, but we do plan to pretty it up. When she’s fired up and the sun is going down, and the moon is coming up, it feels like being in paradise. The darker it gets the more beautiful it becomes. Note the chimney in the second shot, which takes away most of the smoke. We are still fine tuning it – eventually, all the smoke will go up the chimney.
It’s been lovely firing it up around 7 pm (daylight savings here in Victoria mean late evening light) and within an hour, it’s warm enough to jump in. You do need to put in a towel because it gets quite hot on the bottom. We are going to put a cedar slatted base there instead eventually, and landscape around it. The beauty of this bath is that it just gets warmer, not colder. The dying embers maintain the heat for hours, and we spend three hours in it last night with a bottle of wine. It was more entertaining than a movie, because the darker it got, the more stars twinkled into being. Firstly, it was Venus, my goddess of Love, rising with the moon, but before long there was the Southern Cross, and Orion, and many other constellations. You just couldn’t get bored – or more comfortable. How beautiful it was watching steam rise and swirl from the water, orange candlelight making the water glow, a warm breeze in the trees.
Hence, bathstronomy. It’s watching the stars, being astronomers, in a bath. Go do it. It’s so much fun.
Have you ever had a bath under the stars?
beans and honey 