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I grew up in a 1 bathroom house until I was 14 or so. 1 bathroom for a family of 4 was rough. If anything ever broke (which it did because the house was old), and it's a full on emergency. Having to drive 15 minutes to use bathroom and take a shower at a family members was a common occurrence.

My current house has 3 full bathrooms which is really too many for just my wife and I. But, the extra bathroom has come in handy as we have remodeled over time.

I lived in a 1 bathroom house until I was 18 with up to 4 other people and I honestly don't remember there being many problems - apart from occasionally having to chip ice out of the bath before getting washed :-)

Same here, though it helped a lot that we were in the middle of nowhere and going outside was very much an option when someone was on the toilet.

Heck, I shared a house with 8 people in college that only had one bathroom... That was more of a challenge, but it was rare that we were all there at the same time, so it mostly worked.

>Same here, though it helped a lot that we were in the middle of nowhere and going outside was very much an option when someone was on the toilet.

"I have to pee outside" is going to count as a problem in most people's book.

> chip ice out of the bath

I am not familiar with what this phrase means nor does a quick Google help. Is it to be read literally - "it got so cold during the winter that ice formed in the bathtub and had to be chipped away before use"? Or is it an idiom for an unspecified location.

I think the implication is that everyone else used up all the warm water.

No - I literally had to chip ice out of the bath some winters.

My parent's house was old and not heated terribly well - which I didn't notice until I went to university and stayed in a centrally heated halls of residence and returned.

I was in a 2 bedroom house with 1 bathroom and three people, including me, until I was 18.

I don't remember it being too bad, probably because only two people in the house had to leave in the mornings, and we left at different times. Also because I didn't know anybody who had more than one bathroom. Our extended neighborhood was all 1940s construction.

Friendly, unnecessary, pedantry: "for just my wife and me".

"I" is used when it is in subject position. Occasionally, the rule is a little bit obscure ("He does it better than I", where the subject position is implicit ("better than I do it")).

This grammar error is becoming very common even among well-educated writers and speakers, in the US at least. It must be stopped!

Probably because of the far more atrocious "me and my wife" grammar error.

Edit: Wait, "for my wife and I" was a grammatical error?! The fuck? Fuck the rules! That's a stupid rule.

Would you say "for me" or "for I"?

I'm usually not one to pick up on grammar, but I like to pick people up on this one because it's usually an example of people being pretentious, yet getting it wrong.

I always say "me and my wife", because in the town where I grew up, to say "my wife and I" would be pretentious. But when people say "for my wife and I" it goes through me. It's double reverse grammar pretention.

wow. I consider myself pretty good at grammar and could easily make this error. Is there a proper name for it?

> This grammar error is becoming very common even among well-educated writers and speakers, in the US at least. It must be stopped!

Thank you for the feedback. Rest assured, I am not a well educated writer, but always trying to improve. This is one I normally catch using the trick to remove the other person and think about what sounds right.

I lived in a 1 bathroom apartment in 4 even in my 20s. I don't remember many issues, to be honest, but I think it really depends on how long your morning routine is.

Agree with all the above, but let me put this in computer science context:

- bathrooms are a scarce resource

- usage is not evenly distributed, greatest usage is 1. in the morning and 2. when you are running late :-)

- queues form at critical moments and hold up the entire pipeline (e.g., getting ready for work, school, etc.)

The best way for you, or your potential buyer to resolve this bottleneck is to have more of the bottle-necked resource.

I find you reply funny but I think you got downvoted because these analogies usually go the other way round: CS thing is described in layman's terms to make it understandable.

Going the other way round seems a bit strange, IMHO.

When cooking I often find myself pondering that food prep has a very similar space-time tradeoff [1] to CS algorithms. Protip: Sprawling over to non-kitchen areas for mixing bowls and whatnot can provide a significant speedup vs moving things around in a limited kitchen workspace.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E2%80%93time_tradeoff

You can also partition your major resource into smaller sub-units to decrease contention, increase parallelism and improve throughput. E.g. separate your bathroom from your toilet.

Agreed - that's better than my initial conclusion: pee in the sink.

Agreed completely. I have a 4-bedroom, 3 bath house, and we use them all. We have one attached to our master bedroom, one main bathroom on the main floor, and one in the basement. We spend a lot of time as a family in the basement, we spend a lot of time with guests on the main floor, and my wife likes to use our private bathroom as a little getaway.

I think a decent rule of thumb is one bathroom per floor, plus one. It really sucks having to wait for a bathroom when you need it, and they take up so little space (especially if it doesn't have a bath/shower) that it makes no sense to skimp. We've used all the bathrooms simultaneously, so it's hard for me to consider having fewer.

> I have a 4-bedroom, 3 bath house, and we use them all.

This tends to be more or less valid for any resource in the house (extra room, closet, etc.). And as it stands bathrooms are on the important side. If you had one bathroom per resident they'd still all be used simply because the people would thoroughly enjoy not having their stuff moved around or bothered by anyone else, or ever risk having to wait for someone to get out first. So you'd just have "assigned" bathrooms.

You could even have an extra one that can come in handy when you are remodeling or simply experiencing technical issues in one of the others.

One per floor, plus one, makes a lot of sense to me.

I don’t think having multiple “full bathrooms” is so important, but “half bath” ie. a toilet and sink takes up very little space, and it’s the kind of thing that, when you need it, you NEED it. So it’s worth it.

In my country we don't call that a bathroom. You can't take a bath in a "half bath". It's just a toilet.

A typical Dutch house has a toilet + sink downstairs for guests or for convenience of the owners. Upstairs there is a bathroom with a toilet, shower, sink and shower for the owners of the home to use.

It's called a washroom or a "powder room" in Ontario, Canada. Powder room specifically refers to a small room in a house with only a sink and toilet and is not a term I personally use. A washroom is any room with toilets and sinks, whether or not it has a bath/shower, especially in commercial settings, but "washroom" seems to not be used in the US much or at all, in my experience.

Seems like in (mainland?) Europe people dare to use the actual word a bit better rather than hide the meaning: if the main purpose of the room is the toilet bowl inside of it, it's called a toilet or a wc

"Water closet" or WC is hiding the meaning just as much as "washroom", in my opinion. Both imply a room with washing facilities.

Calling the room a toilet just sounds odd to me, because the toilet is in the room, but I understand why it's used like that.

I've also heard "I'm going to use the [toilet] facilities".

> In my country we don't call that a bathroom. You can't take a bath in a "half bath". It's just a toilet.

What do you call a room with a toilet, sink, and stand-up shower? That's what one of the full bathrooms in my house is.

Because the US traditionally consolidated WC/baths, there was only one room, and people found it more polite to call it the bathroom. Needing to 'use the bathroom' then became a catch all for any function that might happen in there.

But when we started building some without bathing accommodations, the customary terminology didn't go away. Everyone already understood that 'going to the bathroom' really meant using the toilet. So, the term 'bathroom' stuck.

I grew up (UK) in a house that had an outside toilet and no bath (Had a tin bath would haul into kitchen and fill up once I outgrew the sink). Was around the age of 11 when we finally got a indoor toilet and real bath. But that was a georgian era house and common in many area's and you see many that have had add-on buildings to add toilets etc.

But as a friend from Canada put it - they had gaps between houses in his country compared to over here, they would build a small housing estate in those gaps.

But then, it's fascinating to compare buildings and code over the years, country by country. Things like legacy infrastructure, climate and history all come into play and darn interesting.

[EDIT ADD] Note was house of 4 (2x adults 2x children] and outside toilet sure does cut out any morning queues - based upon my experience. Though 2 bedroom - was late teens when I left home that I got a room to myself.

You might find out how common from this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21698533

> I grew up (UK) in a house that had an outside toilet and no bath

Were you born in 1800?

Joking aside, what decade was this? And is this common?

I grew up in rural VA in the 70s-80s. One bathroom in a house that was built in 1890. I was lucky, as the kid down the (dirt) road did not have a bathroom, rather an out-house. That house had a single cold water faucet in the kitchen. Seems to now have plumbing, evident by the vent pipe in the roof.

https://goo.gl/maps/dSFy1wx8G5C4UpZ5A

I suppose this is all hip now with off-grid living and van dwelling. Back then it was called poverty.

Born 1967, so talking 70's and back then, probably. Was an era of which people saved over credit (which was very hard to get), we had glass bottles that had deposits for recycling before plastic moved en masse and a car was a luxury item. Didn't have a phone as couldn't afford it and when we could, thanks to TV messages of hackers of doom taking over the planet and me owning a computer - my mum wasn't going to enable that. Oh and we walked to school and was rare for kids to be driven to school, indeed they had the piss taken out of them for being lazy by the other kids.

How times have changed - not all for the better.

[edit add] Oh and we had no central heating until my teens, and frozen ice inside the single window pains during winter(double glazing - luxury item then).

I live in a 3/1 in the US, and having a 2nd bathroom was on our list, but when it comes down to it, we all end up sacrificing something.

As you mention, an en suite master bathroom would be incredibly nice, and if we remodel, it's _the_ #1 non-negotiable item on the list. Private bathroom for us, 'clean'/separate bathroom for guests/visitors.

My sister lived in a 4/1 with an odd feature: a toilet on a wooden pedestal in the (full-size) basement. No wall around it, not even a curtain. Just sitting there in a corner.

As she put it "you only need it every once in awhile, but when you need that second toilet, you're REALLY GLAD you have it!

I don't find the proliferation of bathrooms/toilets in large houses surprising at all. If I lived in a 4000-5000sqft mansion, I might not mind a 2-3 minute walk to get to my bedroom at night, but I sure as hell don't want to have to do so every time I have to use the facilities. It simply makes sense to have a toilet and sink, at least, near the rooms you use regularly.

Any chance your sister was in/near Pittsburgh or the surrounding coal-country?

The "Pittsburgh toilet"[1] is a relatively common basement feature in older homes of steel and coal industry Appalachia. Often there would be a showerhead nearby as well, and the room was intended for the worker to come home through the basement, clean off the day's grime and 'do their business' rather than dirtying the proper upstairs house. The showers are removed pretty easily but the toilets are not.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_toilet

Not Pittsburgh (upstate NY), but I got a chance to learn something new today! thank you.

Was your sister in Pittsburgh? It's a thing there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_toilet

> Of all the weird things in the US, a house having "too many" bathrooms really doesn't seem like a problem.

"Problem" is a bit dramatic, but it is annoying to me when a house I'm looking at has, say, "3 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms." Who the heck needs that many bathrooms, and ultimately you're paying for all those toilets, and they're taking up square feet from living areas.

Also, hot take: en suites suck. I don't need to be _that_ close to where I take a crap. Feels like a prison-cell layout.

Guess everyone's experience is different.

We always had one bathroom for a family of five (5) growing up and, honestly, there was never an issue with it. Since it was always that way we learned from birth (practically) that you can't hog the bathroom, so everyone learned not to, so nobody ever did. I always toweled off, dressed, and did my hair in my bedroom. There was certainly no reading on the toilet or other activities going on in the bathroom. Plus, it was normal, I can't think of a single person I knew growing up that had multiple bathrooms (grew up poor, everyone lived in older construction, mostly smaller apartments). My dad actually grew up in a family of ten (10) with only 1.5 bathrooms.

Even now friends comment on how little time I spend in the bathroom.

Nowadays I have 1.5 baths, which is usual for this area (old construction). The half bath it totally unnecessary (just myself and my spouse here) but it's sometimes nice not having to go upstairs to pee. And of course the half bath isn't original to the house.

I live in a 1 bathroom apartment with my wife. Even with no kids, it's still tough. The marginal benefit of adding 1 more bathroom is enormous, kind of like a dual core vs single core processor.

I actually dislike ensuite bathrooms for myself. Like that there is separation for sleeping and showering/bathrooms. The moisture from the bathroom comes to the bedroom. On guest rooms it's can be nice that the guests don't have go around the house when they want to use the bahtroom.

Optimally, I'd say a house should have one toilet on each floor, and at least two toilets and bathrooms.

The huge benefit of the ensuite is not waking up the rest of the house if you have to get up in the middle of the night to use the restroom (which I often do). Also, don't get your comment about moisture from the bathroom. We have a fan and door on the bathroom which prevents any moisture from coming into the bedroom.

While I agree with this, I think there is a somewhat middle ground between a single bathroom in the house and what I see now in many houses where EVERY bedroom has its own en-suite bath.

The main thing for me is that I feel like all the "kids" bedrooms having to share 1 bath is a good thing - learning to share is a valuable thing IMO.

Where have you seen this? Maybe I haven't been in any rich peoples' houses, but I've never seen a house with any kid's bedroom having its own private bathroom.

I've seen quite a few where 2 'kids' bedrooms have a "jack-and-jill" bathroom (eg, a bathroom between the two rooms, that connects them both).

Satisfies the "kids bathroom" and "sharing" all at once!

While the bathroom may not be "private", I've seen loads of houses where there is a 1-1 ratio between bedrooms and bathrooms. Often times a bathroom for the kids room is accessible both from the bedroom and a hallway.

I've seen it, although it depends on the surrounding demographics. The suburbs I currently live in, it's uncommon. But much of the newer urban housing I looked at before deciding on a place had that particular set up. As well as some older housing, which happened to be in the vicinity of a local college.

Barring the specifics of rich people's house, you'll generally see this set up in places where the "kid's rooms" are not, in fact, intended for kids. Where I've seen it in urban homes, it was designed so there was definitively a master suite, but then every other bedroom came paired with it's own en-suite. From my understanding talking to builders, it's done this way since a large chunk of owners in that area are young professionals that rely on renting out other rooms in the house (whether to other young professionals or AirBNB-style short term rentals) to afford the home. In college areas, you get similar rational, but because every room tends to be rented out to a student, there's usually not a definite "master suite" and all of them tend to be similarly sized and equipped with amenities.