‘Cute’ Outhouse New Treasure for Collector

Susan Silgailis collects antiques, so it was kind of a thrill when her father gave her a Christmas present dating to the early 1900s. It was an outhouse.

The wooden commode was decorated with a string of lights and a red bow and placed in the driveway of her rented home in Brea on Christmas Day.

“It was quite a surprise,” said Silgailis, a physical therapist who works mainly with senior citizens at St. Jude Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Fullerton.

Her father, Jim Bailey, a retired agriculture teacher from Fullerton, had the outhouse shipped in an empty horse trailer from the family farm in Missouri, which he and four siblings own.

“My daughter saw the outhouse when she came to visit the old family farm, and she expressed a desire that it be saved,” Bailey said. The old house on the farm had been torn down and the outhouse was moved to a nearby hollow.

Silgailis put the outhouse in the back yard, and except for making some repairs to the flooring, plans to keep it in its original state, at least for the time being.

“I think if we ever buy the house and put in a swimming pool, the outhouse would make a cute changing room,” said Silgailis, who got a lot of advice on its use from her elderly patients.

“One woman told me to be sure and have a Sears Roebuck catalogue in there, and another told me to buy hollyhock seeds and plant them around the outhouse to make it look pretty and keep the aroma down,” she said.

The outhouse is part of her unusual collection of antiques.

For instance, Silgailis has a couch made from an old church pew that her parents bought from a church in Whittier. Also in the living room is a life-size model of an American Indian sitting in an antique wicker wheelchair.

For fun, she likes to bring out her collection of urinals and bedpans, and for the hardy she has a small grouping of old amputation saws.

“It’s hard to imagine in this day and age that they were ever used,” she said. “They look like hacksaws.”

Much of her antique collection has been handed down from family members, including her great grandparents.

“All the antiques look really good in here,” she said, noting that the old house she and her husband rent has hardwood floors and solid wood cabinets.

“I like this house and I like the simple way of life in older days when people used to go and bake and visit with one another,” said Silgailis, 30. She grew up in Fullerton and attended Fullerton High School and Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles.

Her husband, Steve Silgailis, 25, a student at Cal Poly Pomona, works part time for the city of Chino as a counselor in its alcohol abuse program for the disabled.

He is a paraplegic from a motorcycle accident.

“I kind of like the pioneer days,” she said. “I like to quilt and can food and feel good about the homey old-fashioned way of doing things.”

She is expecting her first baby in May.

They came with calculators and laptop computers to Tony Hermann’s first wine auction at his Bouzy Rouge Cafe in Newport Beach.

“I’m not really sure what they were doing with them,” said Hermann, who also acted as the auctioneer. “Maybe they were checking their bank balances?”

And for good reason. “There was some very spirited bidding,” he said, especially for a two-bottle lot of 1926 Mouton Rothschild, a first growth Bordeaux that sold for $265.

In all, 1,800 bottles of wine were sold. “We had to thin our inventory,” explained Hermann, a Newport Beach resident. “Maybe we’ll do it again some time.”