Sometimes I think the concept of the “outdoor room” has gotten out of hand. Home and garden magazines advocate bringing the outside in and the inside out, but when did the inside-out principle begin to include outdoor upholstered furniture? A high-end cooktop built into an adobe kiva? A wet bar?

Anyone who spends hours working in a garden risks running out of time for sitting around in it, but still. One of the best things about the outdoors is supposed to be that you can clean it with a rake.

I’m not advocating a Spartan yard — that’s what wilderness camping is for — but the simple luxury of weatherproof chairs, light bulbs hanging in the trees and cold beer, none of which work as well in the living room. Secretly, however, I’ve always wanted one very fancy landscape item: an outdoor shower.

If you think about it, showering outside is the same thing as running through a lawn sprinkler, only upside down. Perhaps this explains why I fell under its spell as a child, in a time and place more seafaring than Central Texan.

My aunt’s Jersey Shore beachhouse was composed of seven one-room cottages, each with a galvanized pipe sticking out of the wall at shower height. On Long Island beaches you could rinse off with three complete strangers around a four-headed shower pole, trying to be discreet as you flushed a pound of sand out of your swimsuit. The shower at the local boatyard had cinder-block walls and no roof, which allowed the exotic possibility of showering in the rain.

As an adult, I met a woman who, armed with a big divorce settlement, designed her own house to incorporate a lavishly appointed outdoor shower with two heads — one for her, one for her dogs. And here in Austin, I lusted after artist Valerie Fowler’s outdoor shower while it was still in the construction phase.

After painting for hours in a second-story studio that sits above her husband’s recording studio, Fowler can walk onto the roof and into her oversized shower, which features blue mosaic tile, a skylight, a hot water tap and a view of a wooded ravine.

“I use it all year round,” she says, “and it’s my daughter’s favorite place, too. I can sit out here on the deck and listen to her singing in the shower.”

I began to think I deserved this amenity. I imagined tending my vegetables on a hot August afternoon, and washing away the dirt — and compost and sweat and that fuzzy stuff that sticks to pole beans — in a place surrounded by green things and unconditioned air.

Because this thought coincided with Mother’s Day, the father of my children agreed to help me spend a weekend building my fantasy, as long as we aimed for quick, cheap and unskilled. The bare-bones shower would run off a garden hose, just like the complete kits we saw for sale on the Internet. But again, cheaper. Surely we could learn to glue together PVC pipe. Plus, we wanted a second faucet at knee level, for foot- and dog-washing. From there, it would just be a matter of throwing up some kind of enclosure.

All such plans begin at Home Depot on a Saturday morning. Expecting to flounder cluelessly in the plumbing aisles, we were instead adopted by a man named Ede, or that’s what it said on his orange apron. He didn’t hold with PVC.

“You’ll use copper,” he said.

We didn’t know how to solder.”Don’t have to,” he snapped. “All that’s changed. Use Shark Bites.” Shark Bites are ingenious — and relatively expensive — copper fittings that lock lengths of copper pipe, joints and valves together. They’re idiot-proof, Ede said, but you can undo mistakes with a $2 “de-mount clip.”

Plumbing jargon and supplies came at us thick and fast. Our cart filled up with “hose bibs,” “pipe dope,” “female couplers,” a pipe saw and metal strapping, for attaching the shower pipe to the shower stall. Then it was time for Ede’s coffee break.

Armed with supplies we’d never used, we headed home to start constructing and arguing in our time-honored married method. “Don’t push me on this,” I planned to say. “I take my orders from Ede, not you.”

But the fights never came. We discovered that it’s easy to assemble the basic parts of a shower — especially when you don’t need to make them fit between the studs of a house wall. Ours was ready for a trial run in 15 minutes. We hooked up the hose and waited for the sound of exploding pipe or at least a drip, but the water only came out where it was supposed to. We felt like one of those capable couples on a home improvement show.

The rest of the project came together in a more familiar way. Any wall we build always ends up more parallelogram than square, and somehow we always apply 11/2 coats of paint instead of 2. But our habit of salvaging random materials paid off, providing five inches of decomposed granite for drainage beneath a section of old wooden fence that turned into a surprisingly workable wooden bathmat. By 5 p.m. Sunday, it seemed easier to hang a shower curtain than to learn how to build a cabana-style door. Though it could be said that parrot-print fabric makes a landscape look trashy, it could also be argued that nature itself is neither level nor color-coordinated, in the traditional sense. And our methods will save money, as the tax assessor will never claim that our shower adds value to the house. All that remains is to wait for the right sweltering day. I’ll haul mulch, turn compost and begrime myself. Then I’ll disappear behind the parrots, step out of my overalls and scrub away the evidence while cooling my core temperature. I also plan to sing.

Chotzinoff is an author who blogs at www.peoplewithdirtyhands.com and www.letterstomyagent.com.

What we did

1. For our shower enclosure, we needed three walls, relative privacy, proximity to a garden hose and good drainage. Using the exterior wall of the garage wall saved time and money. We drew a crude design of the shower we wanted.

2. We showed our sketch to a Home Depot employee, who directed us to buy copper pipe ($11), a pipe cutter ($9), two valves ($10), copper strapping ($3.47), a shower head ($4.48) and Shark Bite fittings ($46). If we knew how to solder, we could have saved $30 on fittings alone!

3. We cut the pipe and snapped it together with Shark Bites, using pipe dope ($6) to seal threaded fittings, and checking the whole thing for leaks before screwing it to the wall with strapping and screwing on the shower head.

4. We built a second wall from an old door, the third from a standard piece of aluminum roofing ($11.94) attached to a framework of salvaged 2×4s, and the fourth from two yards of indoor/outdoor fabric ($8) hung from a piece of old pipe. For a floor, we used 6 inches of decomposed granite topped with a section of old wooden fence with wide gaps between the pickets to allow drainage.

Total cost: $90; $60 if you skip the Shark Bites.