Do you have fresh water? From a well? I suppose you have such an old-fashioned toilet building?

I also used to live in a cottage. My grannies built it in Tromsø in 1952, I inheritated it and moved in there eventually. No water (my grannies used to carry canisters of water by car from their house - when I moved in, they had already built a school just across the street, so I would fill up a wheelbarrow with empty canisters and fill it at an ourdoor tap at the school - luckily, a winter-open tap with electric heating), no sewage (porta-potti for "big things", the small things we just did out in the forest), a simple outlet for "grey water" from the dishes and hand washing. No taps. We had electricity though.

We bought a coal-fired samovar in Russia, eventually I used that one when doing the dishes. I bought a big water canister, bought a water pump and installed a hot water tank, water taps, a shower and a washing machine ... plus a long water tube, so I could empty the canisters already at the parking place at the top of our property. Then eventually we drilled a well the next year. We had a neighbour that would come and top up water bottles from us, because he said the coffee tasted much better with our water than the chlorinated municipality water :-)

We bought and installed a Cindarella electric toilet - I was very happy with it in the beginning, but eventually it was too many problems with it. I read the "Humanure Handbook" - when we moved to Oslo we got a tenant in Tromsø, she requested that I would build her a "humanure" bucket toilet solution, so I did.

We built a separate sauna building, with a wood-fired Tylö-oven. We got a bath tub for free from someone that was renovating their bathroom, so we installed it outdoors outside the sauna!

Then things started going in the wrong direction - a property development company bought up all the land around us, they started cutting down the forest, they started building roads destroying our possibility to ski and sleight down to the sea, lots of ugly "box houses" started to pop up, they installed lots of street lights destroying the charm of watching the polar light, it got difficult to find places to pee without neighbours staring ... my wife complained every so often that she was tired of the dark season and even the midnight sun and wanted to move to Oslo ... so eventually we did.

It was quite cumbersome to have a tenant in Tromsø and live in Oslo. Despite living there almost for free, her mentality was that I had all the responsibility and she had none. She left for yule vacation home to Germany, turned off all the electricity and sent me a message - of course, when I arrived all the water systems were frozen. The house was invaded by mice ... eventually I sold it all to property developers, now they will tear down everything and build lots of ugly houses instead.

We never finalized our move to Oslo properly - so for some 7-8 years we had lots and lots and lots of properties left behind in Tromsø. My wife wants to keep so many things ... so now our house here in Oslo is filled up with boxes. I did a best-effort getting rid of items on the second-hand-market (finn.no), but really lots of effort and still quite many useful things just end up getting thrown.

Perhaps one really should strive not to own more things than what one can carry around ... I felt so happy and free when I moved to Oslo first time with nothing but a ruck sack ... next time I moved everything would fit into a car ... third time we moved we had to drive forth and back several times ... we moved back to Tromsø and had quite many belongings carried by a truck. Next time we moved to Oslo, buying a house there, again we carried with us almost nothing, for quite a while we had only the furniture left behind by the former owners of the house plus some stuff we found for free on finn.no ... I felt much more happy then than now, when our house is full of crap :-)