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I grew up with four people and one bathroom. There were times when waiting for the door to open got a bit dicey. We all did baths or showers in the evening before going to sleep. My mother did not want dirty bodies getting into bed.
When we built our current home we also had four people - and four toilets. No waiting, ever!
Mom grew up in an old 1700's farm house that had been in the family for generations... at one time 15 lived there and only one indoor bathroom which her father installed around 1930...
Prior to that... winter or summer it was chamber pot or making the trip to the outhouse...
This was a very large house... but baths were Saturday night off the kitchen as hot water needed the stove to heat...
All very successful offspring and to this day a very close family...
When Mom and Dad got married and bought a home it was 3 bedroom and two bath... quite a luxury for them... the Master Bath was VERY small but it had a toilet, wall sink and shower... living large!
To answer the question... it is hard to miss something you never had... but once you do it is near impossible to go back... just like all those years cars had no A/C....
One bathroom with multiple people is a terrifying thought to me. I shared one bathroom with my parents until we moved into a house with multiple bathrooms when I was 17. I would never want to go back to having one bathroom again. My house has four bathrooms and I live alone!
I grew up in a family of five with one bathroom. I don't remember there ever really being issues. I think we three kids had assigned shower times... other than that, I don't recall too many potty emergencies. Maybe my brothers went outside if they really had to go.
We also had one bathroom when the kids were little; one of those years, we hosted a foreign exchange student. In addition, she and her parents came to visit for two weeks a year later, so it was four adults, a teenager, a 6-year-old, and a 4-year-old all sharing one bathroom for that period of time. We managed.
Since selling that house, we've always had two bathrooms. I would really miss not having a master bath; it's so convenient to have it right off of the bedroom and never having to cross the house in the middle of the night to go potty!
Lol at the first world problems in this thread. I watched a documentary once that said there are still thousands of Deliverance-like subcultures in the deep South where even today the bathroom is still an outhouse with a hole dug in the ground underneath.
Threads like this remind me of the old saying "I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet."
There are millions of people in this country that not only live with one bathroom but also have large families in one bedroom where they share beds and take turns sleeping and dressing.
If you can't imagine yourself living in that kind of deprivation just count your blessings that you don't have to.
I wouldn’t use The Brady Bunch as an example. They had a live-in maid and no toilet in their bathroom!
They had 8 people living in that 1970s California house. You would think since "Mike" was an architect, that if they needed another bathroom, he would build one. I think there was an episode with the girls and the boys fought over bathroom time. So 6 kids shared one bathroom. I presume that the parents had their own and Alice peed in the kitchen sink when no one was looking.
This reminds me. When I traveled to Israel, I found out that their bathrooms aren't combined sink/toilet/tub rooms. Even in homes with one bathroom, the toilet and the tub/shower are in separate rooms; the sink is in one or the other. (I read that the same is often true in the UK, where Israel borrowed its building codes from, during the British Mandate.) Even public restrooms were odd by American standards: only the toilets were separate for men and women, with the shared sinks located in-between. Come to think of it, not a bad way to save on plumbing.
In public bathrooms in Europe, men and women enter through the same doors, split up to use different toilets and then use the same sink area.
Did you visit the Bedouins on your tour? I don't think they have a toilet in their tent in the desert.
When I was young, my great-grandparent's house on the farm only had an outhouse. When plumbing was installed in the house, my great-grandfather refused to use the indoor bathroom and would only use the outhouse until he became too infirm to go out there. He always said that it was just "unsanitary" to have the privy inside the house.
I remember seeing an apartment in New York City that had the bathtub in the middle of the kitchen. There was a hinged wooden cover on it, which was bigger than the bathtub and was covered with a tablecloth and used as the kitchen table. Double duty! Open concept, even.....
I remember those. We also saw some houses on Long Island when we were looking (Levittown) where the big metal tub was still in the kitchen.
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