I've lived in a 1 bathroom house in the US and i said never again. It was one of the first things I looked at when buying a house overseas as well, and it served me well.
Problems with a single bathroom which includes the toilet:
If you have kids, everyone is fighting over a scarce resource in the morning. Showering/shaving/etc all takes time and you're all leaving in a narrow window.
If you don't have kids the people buying the house may, and they will care. It makes selling the house so much harder.
The bathroom _must_ be cleaned to be guest ready, and they get to accidentally snoop through everything. I love my ensuite for this reason. (and if you don't care about it being clean, your partner probably does)
If you have the room, why not have an extra bathroom? So much easier to build in new construction than add later.
When I lived in Australia the toilet was in a separate room, so the 4 bedroom house worked ok with only 2 bathrooms. The toilet wasn't blocked/held hostage by someone taking a shower. (washing your hands on the other hand...) But this also helped sell the place, since with 2 full bathrooms you can have kids/house mates/etc.
My current house has 3 baths with 4 bedrooms. One is in the in-law suite, which I airbnb, so we have 2 on the main floor. It makes 2 baths for 3 bedrooms. This feels like a nice "adult" house. We have a spare rooms for house guests, and they have a full bathroom they can use. This means we can host friends/family for days/weeks and we can be annoyed by their personality, instead of annoyed fighting over a bathroom. ;)
Of all the weird things in the US, a house having "too many" bathrooms really doesn't seem like a problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
> But the U.S. wasn’t always so profusely bathroomed. In the past half century, the number of bathrooms per person in America has doubled. “We went from two people per bathroom to one person per bathroom in the last 50 years,” says Jeff Tucker, an economist at Zillow. “That’s amazing, because postwar America was already rich and booming, and we just, you know, kept building more bathrooms.” Across the country, bathrooms are multiplying—including in apartments and condos—even as American families and households are getting smaller.
The article misses a major point here which explains much (though not all) of the trend: household sizes have decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, and the number of single-person households has increased dramatically. Single-person households can generally be expected to have at least one bathroom per person, and small households will generally have higher ratios than large households.
In 1960 single-person households were about 13% of all households; they have more than doubled, to about 28% in 2019 [1]. In 1960 the average household size was about 3.3; in 2019 it was 2.5 [2].
GDP just reflects economic output, not the distribution of the resulting wealth to real people. If you want to adjust for anything, adjust for the cost of healthcare, education, and amount of consumer debt.
exactly. The economy didn't need to support so many restaurants and food services when most people cooked at home. People also mostly entertained themselves or spent time with friends/family. Moving all that to a company or service will raise the GDP.
The Bay Area is definitely an extreme, but millennials nationwide are doing worse financially than their parents, even though they're working more. Here's one of my absolute favorite articles on the topic, which addresses everything from work/health/education/housing.
Not really. Millennials certainly face different problems than previous generations but it would be generally inaccurate to say that they are financially worse off. Going back to that article you linked, I have to take the opposite stance in terms of its quality. Articles which rely heavily on anecdotes to make their point are really not a good way to try to understand what constitutes "typical". In fact, they're mostly useless for that. If you want to understand what really is "typical" then you really need to dive into some dry and boring data releases. Let's use the BLS Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers Archived News Releases found here https://www.bls.gov/bls/news-release/wkyeng.htm
These reports provide reliable information about median weekly earnings for full-time workers, are available online going back to 1996, and include more specific data about different age groups. Let's compare the age range of 25-34 in Q1 1996 (non millennials) to the same range in Q4 2019 (millennials) while adjusting for increases in cost of living using CPI-U. Here are the major spending categories assessed in CPI calculations https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_1...
For ages 25-34:
Q1 1996 weekly earnings: $419
% change in CPI-U over duration: + ~66%
Q1 1996 weekly earnings in Q4 2019 dollars: $695.54
As the comment states, that calculation is the change in real weekly earnings. "Real" being calculated using CPI-U. To reiterate, the purchasing power of the median weekly earnings for the 25-34 group is 17% higher now than it was in Q1 1996.
“BLS data collectors visit (in person or on the web) or call thousands of retail stores, service establishments, rental units, and doctors' offices, all over the United States to obtain information on the prices of the thousands of items used to track and measure price changes in the CPI”
At least from that sentence and a cursory glance at categories collected, it doesn’t appear they’re specifically factoring in mortgages / home ownership aside from rents nor medical insurance aside from one-off clinic visits (which, given CPI is a snapshot of purchasing power at a given time and not a measure of lifetime household wealth, why would they?).
I don’t doubt purchasing power has gone up — private car ride hailing, specialty juices and cleanses, avocado toasts, food delivery, organic foods, wellness products, travel, hotels, all the once-expensive things people love to criticize millenials for buying are truly more accessible than ever.
That doesn’t definitely say anything about how much the cost of long-term financial obligations such as education, insurance, and home ownership costs, however.
Buildings and other structures are considered capital goods and investment items rather than consumption items as they provide a service and may appreciate over time. This is why mortgages aren't counted in CPI calculations. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...
As for medical costs, it's more complicated but as an overview:
The CE (consumer expenditures survey) tracks consumer out-of-pocket spending on medical care, which is used to weight the medical care indexes. CE defines out-of-pocket medical spending as:
patient payments made directly to retail establishments for medical goods and services;
health insurance premiums paid for by the consumer, including Medicare Part B; and
health insurance premiums deducted from employee paychecks.
But you're right, there are still plenty of problems. Like I said in my original comment, the problems faced by millennial are different than those faced by previous generations. Often these new problems can be considered more stress inducing due to a higher degree of initial commitments required to even enter many new fields (i.e. student debt) and uncertainty about the future. Whether these new problems are worse than the problems which they largely replaced depends on your definition of "worse".
But why CPI-U, why not CPI-W, or the more useful C-CPI-U. How do seasonal adjustments change the picture? What investments are those 25-34 year olds making in 401k, mortgage, stocks/bonds so that when they're in the 35+ bracket, and how might those compare? What does class mobility look like for the bottom 25%? How happy are the respective cohorts? How many hours/wk are those people working to get that purchasing power?
The huffpo anecdata-based story is "just so", but comparing a single quarter, for a single age-group, based on a single metric known to have short comings, and presenting it without context as "the reality", tickles my "just so" meter, from the other side of the spectrum.
If I'm trying to assess if a typical 25-34 year old is better off now than in 1996 why on Earth would I use a measure which only assesses a specific section of the population which constitutes less than 30% of the U.S. population? CPI-U covers about 90%. Barely anyone uses CPI-W.
>Why not C-CPI-U
I would love to. Unfortunately C-CPI-U figures only go back to December 1999, bit of a problem if I'm trying to work from Q1 1996. Also, C-CPI-U tends to be a bit lower than normal CPI-U meaning that 17% increase would actually be slightly larger if assessed with C-CPI-U.
>How many hours/wk are those people working to get that purchasing power?
Since we're using median earnings I'd need median hours worked for the same age range at the same times in history which is not something I could find. That said, weekly hours worked by employed individuals have been decreasing for decades. That trend shows no signs of reversing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006023
A lot of the rest of the questions are harder to answer given available data but most are also of pretty questionable usefulness when trying to assess the financial well-being of a "typical" millennial relative to the previous generation. If your question is specifically "Does the typical working millennial have a worse material standard of living than their parents?" the answer is no.
If you want a more complete and accurate answer then use the data from primary sources to figure it out yourself. Every person that data has to be filtered through before it gets to you adds an extra layer of bullshit because when dealing with economic stuff you should assume that everyone has an agenda. That's true for Huffington Post articles and for random internet comments, like this one.
When I tell people here in Poland that I have friends living in LA, SF or NYC, making six figure salaries and living with roommates to be able to both live where they want AND pay off their student loan debt, they are dumbfounded.
Adjusted for inflation that's about a $35,000 median family income compared to an average of about $55,000 today. Still not great, but other items like homes were cheaper (and smaller), cars, etc. So not quite as bad as the GDP per person, but it does make me think about how that monumental rise of GDP isn't reflected more closely in how much money is being made by the average working person
> Income per family is a treacherous measure, since family sizes have shrunk considerably.
> If I marry you, our family income has doubled, but none of us is any richer.
I don't disagree with your core point, but I have to nitpick a bit the last part.
Expenses don't grow linearly with the number of people in a family, especially with the number of wage-earning adults. You will be richer in a couple, and I don't only mean emotionally :-) Rent won't double, all sorts of other living expenses can be shared, etc. Disposable income should definitely be higher than for 2 single people.
I feel that a decent chunk of the issues in modern societies is that many people are single for long periods of time. That makes things really hard financially, plus there's less support in case of issues...
I would expect that two could live a fair bit more cheaply (apples to apples) than double what they individually spent as singles. Rent, utilities, and (to a lesser extent) groceries all seemed to get quite a bit more efficient when we moved in together.
The "median family" is wildly different today than it was 60 years ago. A skyrocketing percent of households are single individuals with a single income and no child expenses.
That's a very valid point, but I assume the same trend would show up (though not as drastically) in the number of bathrooms per bedroom. (If not, then the article is bunk, but I assume it does.)
I'd also be interested to know the trend in the percentage of floor space given over to bathrooms, which would fuzz both the number of bathrooms and the increased bathroom size. It seems to me like a lot of space wasted, personally, although I admit it does feel nice to walk into a (rare) beautiful full-sized master bathroom.
Yes, I expect the trend would still be there, just not quite as dramatic.
We live in a 3-bedroom 2.5-bath home and I wouldn't want to give any of the bathrooms up. Not having two full bathrooms would be seriously annoying when either my or my wife's parents are in town, which is about 6 weeks a year, and not having the half bath on the ground floor would be mildly annoying all the time (and slightly more annoying when friends are over).
> “That’s amazing, because postwar America was already rich and booming, and we just, you know, kept building more bathrooms.” Across the country, bathrooms are multiplying—including in apartments and condos—even as American families and households are getting smaller.
You'd expect that wealth to show up in new construction more than in retrofitting every existing home, so bathrooms as a lagging indicator makes sense to me.
As for bathrooms in modern US inner city apartments, I believe it's mainly because many bathrooms allow the apartments to be shared by several flatmates. For the developer, it opens the market to more buyers.
American dwellings are larger than European Union ones for several reasons:
- Most US homes are new: All over Europe, people live in much older housing and apartment stock. Go back to 1940, and the US only had a 130 million population, which typically lived in large families in shared houses. In 1940, the European population (excluding Russia) was already 420 million. Thus, whereas the US population has more than doubled since then, the European population has only increased some 50 percent. This meant construction of far more dwellings in the US in the large 80 years.
- Eastern Europe: Eastern Europe has been much poorer than the US during the last 80 years with people largely living in apartments.
- Space: The US simply has more space per capita. We are 500 million in the European Union (for a few days more) in an area half the size of the US.
- Sprawl: The great US population expansion coincided with the automobile revolution allowing for people to live in suburbs far from city centers, which in turn allowed for larger houses.
- White flight: Europe never had an exodus from city centers comparable to the US.
- Materials: Europeans live in brick and mortar houses or concrete buildings. American houses are made of wood and are cheaper to construct allowing for larger homes.
- White flight: Europe never had an exodus from city centers comparable to the US.
Umm, not sure where you got your info but white flight is present in any major Western European city, they just have much better PR about it.
After the 2015 influx of migrants I noticed the segregation even more through some neighborhoods. Once the migrants were settled in one neighborhood, the natives with means quickly moved out to greener pastures making more room for the new guests and the cycle repeated itself.
Whenever I was renting in the expensive districts in Germany I mostly heard German/English spoken on the streets vs. when I was renting in the cheap districts I mostly heard Turkish/Arabic/various Eastern European languages on the streets/shops/doctor's offices and my German friends would ask why I chose to live in a "bad" neighborhood. Answer: because I don't care about the nationality of my neighbors, I live where it suits me the best.
But I get their way of thinking, we are social creatures and we are still driven by tribalism so most people don't want to live/socialize with strangers from vastly different cultures regardless of what lengths someone goes to convince them otherwise. This is universal for humans and not something country specific.
White flight in the US also wasn't about people leaving the city centers for the suburbs; it was about people leaving suburbs for other suburbs.
The postwar flight to more distant suburbs was due to WW2 veterans suddenly having way more wealth than they had pre-WW2 (i.e. during the Great Depression) and deciding they wanted an upgrade from living in a cramped, dirty, noisy city, with the meteoric rise of the automobile and marketing campaigns by developers helping out a lot as well. This flight was almost exclusively white, but it wasn't motivated by a desire to get away from black people, andd the only reason black people didn't join them was because of systematic racism gatekeeping them out of the new developments. Restrictive deed covenants imposed by developers, banks refusing to do businesses with people whose addresses are in black communities (most commonly known as redlining), and just plain old institutional poverty kept black people out of something that all Americans wanted to participate in.
Also keep in mind that suburbs weren't nonexistent pre-WW2 either; these old suburbs were transit-oriented and are now referred to as "streetcar suburbs". Pretty much every city in the US has a number of inner suburbs, just outside the central business district, that consist of single-family homes on an oblong grid of streets with alleyways and the occasional arterial (which originally contained a streetcar line) dividing the neighborhood (if anyone reading this has no idea what I'm talking about, let me know and I'll post Google Maps links). What was different about postwar suburbs is that they were much farther away from the city center and were car-centric in their design.
White flight was a later phenomenon that resulted from the civil rights movement dismantling a lot of racist institutions, causing white people to freak out and leave the suburbs they moved to following WW2 for other suburbs. Restrictive deed covenants and redlining were banned, black people finally being able to both move into any neighborhood and access mortgages, so of course they moved out to the suburbs. And then the white people fled. This is why much of the original postwar suburbs are now considered "the ghetto" (for example, Wynnewood was built as Dallas's version of Levittown, the whitest postwar suburb you could imagine, but is now majority black and Hispanic, and the name of the larger part of town it's located in, Oak Cliff, is almost used as a slur by racist white people). Black people moved in, racist white people moved out. Exploitative race-baiting real-estate agents even deliberately encouraged this phenomenon to buy low and sell high, a practice known as "block busting", which is now also banned. The agents would buy up a house in a white neighborhood and both sell it to a black person and send agents provocateur to talk to all the existing residents and stoke fears of black people moving in en masse. They would even hire black people to push baby carriages throughout the neighborhood! And so all the white people would sell their houses and move away ASAP, and because they decided they wanted to get out right now, they sold cheap. And the block busters bought up the houses and turned around and sold them at exorbitant prices to black people wanting to move to the suburbs for the first time. In Chicago, for example, block busting was so widespread that which suburbs were considered "white" and which suburbs were considered "black" would change every few months, as people would play racial musical chairs to a beat set by unethical salesmen.
Interestingly enough, many cities are now at a point where things have settled into a new mix: inner-ring suburbs are often very diverse, while the exurbs are extremely white. As PoC move farther out, white people build entirely new neighborhoods even farther out. My own experience in Dallas is that as the exurbs grow even farther and farther away from the city, more and more neighborhoods in the inner suburbs are becoming Chinatowns and Koreatowns (and as someone who lives in the inner suburbs and has diverse taste in food, I welcome this phenomenon).
This was a really great historical summary, thanks for posting it!
Only thing I'd add is "white flight" is still commonly used to describe both periods of large mostly white exoduses, and you'll often see it used in that manner.
Its just a large number of historians think the term is a bad misnomer because of how it implies the movements were directly motivated by racism even in cases like you documented where the causes were much more complicated.
I think car culture is probably the biggest one. In practice, there's plenty of space to build the sort of ultra-diffuse Mcmansion-y suburbs popular in the US in some European countries, but it's just less popular as a lifestyle compromise.
Well, this depends on _where_ the house is built. Building codes vary wildly across the US. You won't find a new house in South Florida built out of wood.
In Texas you will find a lot of new houses with internal wooden frames, but the outside walls are made of solid brick, I think this is called "brick veneer".
> You won't find a new house in South Florida built out of wood.
Interesting, what do they build them from?
> In Texas you will find a lot of new houses with internal wooden frames, but the outside walls are made of solid brick, I think this is called "brick veneer".
Brick veneer is just a decoration. It’s not structural in any way. There is usually an inch wide gap between the veneer and the actual wall for drying purposes.
What kind of concrete construction are they using? Straight up reinforced concrete? Or something like ICFs? Or maybe mortar joined cinder blocks? Do you maybe have some links I could read up about that?
As for brick veneer, I dunno really about its durability. It definitely is less susceptible to decay than traditional wood siding, but I don’t think it’s any better than cement fiber cladding, or other modern non-wood materials. Additionally, if anything goes wrong with it, I think it’s much harder to fix it in a seamless way, unlike other most types of siding, where you can just repaint them after repair. I have it on half of my house, and I can’t say I’m a huge fan.
> I believe it's mainly because many bathrooms allow the apartments to be shared by several flatmates.
In Europe (at least in the UK) it's common for houses/apartments to be shared by many flatmates regardless of the number of bathrooms. 4 seems to be roughly the upper limit on 1 bathroom. 5 bedroom places almost always have 2. And many houses with only 1 bathroom will have a second small toilet-only room.
Interestingly, new US apartment buildings are now predominantly wood frame as well. This is a recent change due to intricacies of fire codes and the politics behind them.
"Interestingly, new US apartment buildings are now predominantly wood frame as well. This is a recent change due to intricacies of fire codes and the politics behind them."
Wooden "stick-built" structures are also highly resilient in earthquakes and are, generally speaking, the best and most cost-effective way to build seismically safe buildings in earthquake zones.
I, personally, was always aesthetically offended by "American" 2x4 stick-built construction, as we generally understand it, but it is indeed the case that wooden studs properly sheathed with plywood "shear panels" (and tied to the foundation, etc.) are tremendously strong at a relatively very low cost.
I believe this scales up to at least 4 story mutli-unit structures ...
The downside is it's quite flammable. There are a comparatively high number of these going up in construction, before mitigation measures such as sprinklers are in place, in particular.
Well, the exterior need not be wood - and in places like California wine country, should not be.
A steel roof, concrete ("hardi") siding, and "WUI" vents with relatively fine pores, when employed properly, can make the building exterior quite fire resistant, regardless of the flammability of the interior framing.
That being said, I do have steel sprinkler lines running onto the roof ...
Just guessing here, but it could be that fire codes used to forbid wood, but then something changed (lobbying, whatever) making wood acceptable. Then construction changed to use wood (again) since it's cheaper than the fire-proof materials.
This is also good for climate change. Concrete is filthy, carbon-wise. Probably the ideal built-form, sustainability-wise, would be something like Paris or Milan, but made of wood.
Like a 5-8 storey streetwall of wooden multi-unit homes (whether apartments or stacked townhomes or whatever), dense-enough that it can be serviced with higher-order transit but no so dense that concrete construction is required for the buildings.
Is that so? Europe seems to have slightly more than 10 million square kilometers in area and the US slightly less than that. Europe is certainly more fragmented, but looking at thetruesize.com, one can use a better area preserving map projection and it seems that Europe has more space.
(I still agree with your points in general though.)
The EU (with 500 million people) is around half the size of the US. Europe including the land outside of the EU is much larger, as it includes vast areas in the former Soviet Union as well as Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Serbia and a few other small nations.
It depends on your definition of "Europe" - the EU is indeed quite a bit smaller than the United States, but the continent of Europe is, as you have noticed, slightly larger in area than the United States.
I can still remember pointing this out to someone on HN who stated that Europe would fit inside Texas.
Despite the points others made (which are all very valid), using the entire European continent is not a fair comparison when considering “useable” land area. Same consideration with Canada, which is also technically larger than the USA. The far northern climates are just not appealing to mass populations generally. Take Canada for example (second largest country behind Russia), the vast majority of the population lives within 150mi of the southern border with the US.
“This type of bath went out of style in Europe for almost a millennium after the fall of Rome, thanks in part to Dark Age scientists’ developing the very unscientific idea that bathing in water invites a host of awful diseases into the body’s pores. For most of the Middle Ages, “most [European] people didn't wash, or even get wet, if they could help it,” Bryson writes. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, declared that “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” in a 1778 sermon, he was talking about our garments, not our armpits.
This is a minor statement within the article but one which hints at shallow research in some sections. This makes me less confident in the rest of the conclusions.
Bathing was very common and encouraged during the “Dark Ages”. A few articles which do a better job than I can covering the hows and whys:
It seems like people so often underestimate dark age intelligence, as if everyone back then just spent their time groping around in mud pits. I'm curious how extreme you could go (in a Sokal affair kind of sense) and get away with it. Start a rumor that in the dark ages people bathed in giant tubs full of chicken blood because they believed it would ward off witches and prevent their souls from decaying. See how long it takes before columnists are solemnly citing this well-known dark-age fact.
I noticed that too. Triggered a Gehl-Mann amnesia warning for me. Interesting to think America may have a lot of extra bathrooms, but given the shallow research, I wouldn’t put too much stock in that article.
I've read Bryson's book, and while I don't have enough background to debate that specific point, he usually invests a significant portion of time into research. It looks like he chose to compile some excerpts from it into an article for Daily Mail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1281933/Deadly-be...
Relevant quotes are toward the end:
"Well, until the mid-19th century, bathrooms were a rarity. Indeed, for 600 years most people didn't wash, or even get wet, if they could help it.
'Wash your hands often, your feet seldom, and your head never' was a common English proverb. In 1653, John Evelyn, the diarist, noted a tentative decision to wash his hair annually.
Robert Hooke, the scientist, washed his feet often (because he found it soothing), but appears not to have spent much time damp above the ankles. So most people fought dirt and odour by either covering it with cosmetics and perfumes or by just ignoring it.
Where everyone stinks, no one stinks. But, then, in the 18th century, suddenly water became fashionable, though only in a medicinal sense. Spa towns cropped up all over the country, and people started adjusting to the idea that they might now safely get wet from time to time.
Washing for the sake merely of being clean was remarkably slow in coming, however. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, coined the phrase 'Cleanliness is next to Godliness' in 1778, he meant clean clothes. With respect to bodily cleanliness, he recommended only 'frequent shaving and foot washing'.
What really got the Victorians to turn to bathing, however, was the realisation that it could be gloriously punishing.
Many diaries record how people had to break the ice in their washbasins in order to ablute in the morning. Rev Francis Kilvert noted with pleasure how jagged ice clung to the side of his bath and pricked his skin as he merrily bathed on Christmas morning in 1870.
Showers, too, offered great scope for punishment, and were often designed to be as powerful as possible. One early type was so ferocious that users had to don protective headgear before stepping in lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.
Increasingly, bathrooms - albeit shared and down the corridor - became standard in hotels, and hoteliers who failed to heed this trend paid a hefty price. Nowhere was that more memorably demonstrated than at the vast Midland Hotel at St Pancras Station in London. Designed by the great George Gilbert Scott, the Midland cost the equivalent of £300 million when it opened in 1873, and was a wonder in almost every way.
Unfortunately, Scott provided just four bathrooms to be shared among 600 bedrooms. Almost from the day of its opening, the hotel was a failure.
In private homes the provision of bathrooms was hit and miss. The rich proved unexpectedly reluctant to bring them into their lives.
' Bathrooms are for servants,' sniffed one English aristocrat. In existing houses, bathrooms usually took the place of a bedroom, but sometimes were jemmied into alcoves or corners. Baths tended to be of exceedingly variable sizes.
A bath at Lanhydrock House in Cornwall was so big that a stepladder was needed to climb into it. Others, with showers built in, looked as if they were designed to wash a horse. Moreover, baths were still extremely expensive. A bath alone could easily cost more than £100 in 1910 - a price well beyond most households.
The British journalist, Katharine Whitehorn, recalled that, as recently as the late 1950s, she and her colleagues on the magazine Woman's Own were not allowed to do features on bathrooms. Why? Because not enough British homes had them - and such articles, it was felt, would only promote envy."
My wife and I recently moved into a 2 bed 2 bath apartment, mainly because we wanted the extra bedroom for an office as she works remotely. I was surprised to discover that it is so nice not having to share a bathroom—no stress about getting in each other’s way in the morning, less bathroom clutter—it’s really nice. I can see how people would get used to it. And then of course having an extra half bathroom for guests is the obvious next step.
Me and my partner just did the same and it was so much better than we thought. Not longer having to time things in the morning, no longer needing to rush the other person because you are going to be late, no need to fight over shelf space.
Downside though is I end up spending more time in the bathroom since no one else is waiting to use it and it’s a bit of a quiet space.
It's now a deal-breaker on a property for us - also does wonders for spending time together in the morning as we can get ready in parallel and spend time together on the sofa rather than bottlenecking and avoiding each other to use the free bathroom.
And as you say, when we have guests staying we do share and let them have free reign of one bathroom. Makes things much easier to handle. We'd easily sacrifice bedroom space for an en-suite.
I think the morning congestion is one of the biggest reasons for the doubling of bathrooms over the last 50 years. In the past, only one person was in a hurry to be washed and groomed each morning. Now there are at least two, and even kids are much busier than they were before.
Another reason might be the accessibility of traveling. More people are used to staying in a hotel compared to 50 years ago, so when you have a guest you would want to offer them a comparable experience. That includes a private bathroom as you said.
Both of these trends are common to most parts of the developed world, but people in other countries don't have as much space to actually go ahead and build more bathrooms.
We too have an extra bathroom now that we bought a house. Another thing to consider is a bathroom remodel will not retire an outhouse if you have an extra bathroom. Redundancy is really beneficial.
I just built my house with three bathrooms. ("Two and half," by American standards.) I almost did four, but I just didn't want to have to scrub another toilet.
Why three toilets:
The "half bathroom" is by the kitchen, living room, ect. It's just a sink and toilet. This is the one that, by courtesy, guests use. Because there's no bath, guests don't see our towels, toothbrushes, and other mess that accumulates. (No toothpaste stuck in the sink!) We also put prettier fixtures in there, because it's the one we go in most often.
Then there's a normal bathroom (toilet, sink, and tub) that the kids and overnight guests can use.
Then we have our master bathroom, attached to the master bedroom, which has a toilet, shower, and two sinks. (Useful when my wife and I brush our teeth at the same time.) The point of keeping it attached to the master bedroom is basically so we don't have to walk around the house in "bedclothes" when we have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Another thing that this article misses: A lot of people like to loose track of time reading on the toilet. There's nothing wrong with that when you have extra toilets in your house.
> There's nothing wrong with that when you have extra toilets in your house.
I’ve heard that might not be so good for hemorrhoids or hernias or whatever else could be caused by excessive strain placed in that region. I kind of want a raised South or East Asian style squatting toilet since I feel like squatting is better for the body.
You should look at the SquattyPotty. It's a raised platform that you put next to the toilet. You squat on it and do your business as you would at a traditional squat toilet.
I've always found the habit of reading in the bathroom mildly horrifying. The bathroom is an unclean place. Get in, do your business, get out. Also baskets of magazines and nonsense in overspray range.
Grandparents on both sides are far enough away that they stay often. We also live in a popular vacation spot, so we're happy to host friends when they come through town.
That being said, the "guest room" is really because we're not done having kids.
For the actual numbers, go to this site [1] which the article cites. It has XLS files containing stats over time for all kinds of characteristics of American housing.
Eyeballing the "bathrooms" file, the "bedrooms" file, and the "bathrooms by bedrooms" file, it looks to me like most of the growth in bathrooms matches the growth in bedrooms, so maybe the question should be "why do American houses have so many bedrooms?".
One reason number of bathrooms per person may have gone up on average is because people have children later. Over the past 50 years average maternal age at first birth has risen from the low 20s to the high 20s.
So 50 years ago, a young couple would buy a house, and quickly start a family, lowering the bathrooms per person ratio. Now that couple might by a house, sized for the family they plan to start, but not start that family for almost 10 years. So for 10 years they are living with a higher bathroom per person ratio, helping bring up the average.
When buying rental properties, you always want at least 2 bathrooms because otherwise a problem with a toilet is an emergency and will get you out of bed at 2am
Do American toilets break that often? I've lived in the same flat for 10 years; one and the same toilet. Never had a problem that made it useless for unacceptable amount of time.
The only thing that took long to fix, was when it loaded the water slowly. But that only meant longer waiting between flushing; merely an inconvenience.
This is because they use a siphon mechanism, which also results in a narrow diameter pipe. Old style ones use an enormous 14L of water per flush and still jam.
Other countries use gravity flush which has lower water usage and less blockages, but forces you to periodically clean the toilet bowl. Personally I would rather clean than plunge.
A lot of the complexity you see in that image is the trap. It holds water in it to prevent sewer/septic gasses from entering the home. Sinks also have them.
Literally the most confusing thing about German toilets, from someone who grew up in the US... WHY would you want your poop to be entirely exposed to the air like this, on an elevated pedestal, as if it is some prize?
My wife has two daughters from a previous marriage. It's been my first foray into having girls in the household. I've learned to just accept that the shower will clog with hair occasionally, and we have to buy 4 times as much toilet paper now. I've become a part time plumber.
Interesting, I'll check that out. What's always surprising to me is that along with all the hair, there seems to be some grease/black stuff that builds up with the hair. Not sure if that's something other people find.
It is cheap, but if you have an electric outlet near by (or can invest in a minor renovation), the high end ones are worth every pennies. Auto cleaning, misting the edge of the bowl to avoid stuff sticking, warming the seat and water, adjustable jet, and even auo closing seat and auto flushing, or being able to flush with a button on the wall. It's glorious.
If the girls want to give it a try they will almost certainly appreciate it. Everyone who has tried a bidet that I personally know has preferred it to just TP. Plus, I believe (from experience) that a bidet is essential if you're a mensurating girl or woman who uses sanitary pads.
But the best thing about a bidet attachment is one or more toilet users can choose to not use it and it's not any different from a bidet-less toilet. It doesn't get in the way or anything, so it's there if you want it but not any inconvenience if you don't. My husband didn't use ours for the first year we owned it but after he eventually gave it a try he's now a regular user.
Plus it's so ridiculously cheap ($40) that it's worth trying out.
Many bidets have mechanical valves and do not require electricity. Ones like this can be had for $20-30 on Amazon. We used one like this for many years, although when we bought our house we upgraded to electric.
Modern bidets heat the water and the seat, and nobody I know with one (including myself) doesn’t have TP next to the toilet too, you just need very little of it.
As someone with a bidet, there's no way in hell I'm sharing a butt towel. The bidet wash isn't completely effective. It's not the same as sharing a hand towel.
If it does ever clog, you can be 90% sure it's an issue downstream, like tree roots getting into the pipes. It's also common to have a toilet separate to the bath/shower, and we have the dual flush options.
I never really appreciated how advanced we are at plumbing. Perhaps it's a product of having to take water management more seriously.
Agreed. The U.S.-style fixture, floor, pipe flange, and wax ring all have to work together. A terrible interface design. I haven't seen the Australian style, but when I saw a UK style I was very impressed by the pipe-to-pipe link in the rear.
> Never had a problem that made it useless for unacceptable amount of time.
The acceptable amount of time for a toilet in a 1 bath rental to be useless is zero, at least from the perspective of the tenant. It is true that toilets are pretty reliable, though. I've had one problem with a toilet, but that was somewhat of a freak accident.
It depends on your renters- I’ll bet there are plenty out tenants out there who are so mechanically averse they won’t plunger out their TP; I know I met a few kids like that in college.
I’ve also seen my kids managed to do amazing things to the innards of the flush mechanism- break the chain, tangle the chain, move the plug out of position, and in one notable instance get the toilet to start “auto-flushing." All fairly easy fixes, but you have to be willing to get in the (clean water!) reservoir and jiggle parts around.
Older houses, especially those on septic, have additional issues with the plumbing becoming overloaded (my dad TWICE backed up our entire house by trying to send an half a fridges worth of food down the garbage disposal) but that will often take out multiple bathrooms.
You never know what kind of idiocy you'll get into with renters. The kinds of things that people think they can put down drains is endlessly astonishing.
I had one guy who kept putting kitty litter down the toilet, even after I started charging him to get it snaked out.
Another one that I have seen too often is people dumping paint down the drains...
No, only if you use too much toilet paper. In my almost four decades on this Earth I've never clogged or otherwise broken a toilet, yet I know people who this is a regular occurrence for them. I never owned a plunger until I lived with an excessive toilet paper user. Made me buy a bidet attachment.
And condoms. I've had more than one former partner tell me to go flush the condom. So I'd just wad it up in toilet paper and toss it in the trash. From what I've read around the internet this seems to be pretty standard in the sex trade too (and probably with hotel/motel guests in general).
This is a nice joke, but the reality is that standard American sewage pipes are smaller in diameter than in Europe, and European toilets tend to flush with more pressure.
Most toilets in the US are created to be "green" when it comes to water usage, but the reality is it takes at least 2+ flushes most of the time instead of 1 because of it - but as long as the amount of water per flush is low it passes regulation.
In my experience, the US toilets from ~2000 to ~2005 were crap (heh), but since then they've figured out how to make a low flow toilet that works, and it's fine.
A good, modern low flow works better than the old high flow toilets. A few years ago I lived in a new house with a Toto low flow. It was the best toilet I've ever used.
You can't cheat physics. If you dump X gal of water from Y height it will have Z kinetic energy minus efficiency losses. We've greatly improved the efficiency of the water dumping mechanism over the years but a high end low flow toilet of today is still nothing compared to a high end toilet of decades past. That said, there's a lot of crappy old toilets out there that don't flush any better than a modern low flow toilet and take 5+gal to do it.
Source: Moved into a house that was once owned by wealthy people. The upstairs toilet was clearly top of the line circa 1940s and is awesome. The downstairs toilet was clearly subject to some serious compromises for packaging reasons and is nothing special.
You most certainly can improve upon bad implementations. Kohler's most recent line (within the last 10 years) are considerably better than all toilets I've had before. They consume much less, flush once and don't make an excessive amount of noise.
Could you talk more about this? Anecdotally I've found american diets to not be fiber rich and full of fried foods, resulting in less solid BMs, but maybe you have more information?
I don't know why you are being downvoted by I can chime in with my own experience. I switched to a largely whole food plant based diet last year, instead of getting 1/4-1/2 of the recommend fiber intake I now get 2x+ the recommend fiber intake. My stool has gone from clay logs that often took considerable effort to pass and would stick to the porcelain to effortlessly (amost freakishly so) pass and tend to have a considerably smaller diameter that breaks up more once it is in the bowl.
My pre-whole food plant based diet bowel movements would also leave considerable residue, often requiring 4-5 different wads of toilet paper AND 2-3 wet wipes to wipe clear. Now 1-2 wads of toilet paper leave me rarely even needing a wet wipe.
Honestly it's the biggest difference I've noticed since switching to whole food plant based. Frequency of bowel movements and just how easy/clean they are, I used to regularly have to clean part of the toilet bowl where clay-poo would stick and I've not had to do it once since switching my diet. Then mu grocery bill as the bulk of my kcals come from oats/bananas/potatoes now.
What I would like to know is why the America average wash cycle requires around 40 gallons (151L) of water [1], when my machine in Europe uses around 13 gallons (50L) and a 10 year old one uses 22 gallons (84L).
> Top loaders [...] generally fill all the way up.
I have a top loader (a Whirlpool from 2011) and it most definitely doesn't fill "all the way up". It uses as little water as a modern front loader and also adjusts the water level based on fill level.
I think there is difference in the way top loaders are build in US and EU. US top loader is basically front loader put on it's back, that's why it have to fill all the way up. EU top loader have the drum sideways so it works in the same axis as front loader and you put your clothes trough the doors in wall of the drum.
Wow. I’ve never seen a top loader with a horizontal spin axis. Until now I never even contemplated it could be different. I wonder what other stuff is like that.
The top loaders I have seen here in Sweden have just been front loaders except the instead of having a window you load the drum through a hatch in the rim. That design should use exactly as much water as front loaders.
I just went to the website of a local tech shop that sells washing machines, and grapped two midrange Whirlpool models, a top loader and a front loader. Since I'm in Europe, regulations require that shops display a trove of efficiency data that is calculated for standardized model washing cycles. The front loader has 7kg loading capacity and uses 8850 liters per year. The top loader has 6kg loading capacity and uses 8500 liters per year. Because of the difference in loading capacity, the top loader is 10% more efficient in its water usage. So okay, slightly more efficient, but top loaders are certainly not hopelessly inefficient as the discussion seemed to imply.
I looked up two entry level machines on a Canadian website:
* Top loader - 4.4 cubic feet, IWF 6-1/100
* Front loader - 5.0 cubic feet, IWF 3-1/5
Not knowing what those meant, I looked it up. The "water factor" represents how much water a machine uses, in gallons per cubic foot of capacity. In other words, the front loader uses about half the water that the top loader uses.
As another commenter said, top loaders are different in the EU - in North America, the whole drum is turned on its side and water must fill as far up as the clothes go - there's no tumbling action to shift clothes in and out of the water at the bottom of the sideways drum in a front loader (and a European style top loader)
I'd like to see how that's measured, and how it compares to real life usage. Our house came with a high efficiency top loader, but it constantly goes unbalanced if not really carefully loaded (and sometimes even then). Its solution is to try and rebalance itself by filling the drum up with water and agitating, up to three times before quitting with a warning.
He probably just looked at a European-style top loader. My family here in Sweden had one of those over 30 years ago, and it is just a window-less front loader which you load through a hatch in the rim of the drum. It is a bit more of a hassle to unload them but they use virtually the same amount of water as front loaders.
Top loaders are common in Japan and they use a tiny amount of water. They also have a feature to drain the bathwater to use instead of the tap. Of course a "bath" there isn't for cleaning but more like a jacuzzi.
I should have used past tense. I have heard the newer high efficiency ones don’t fill up all the way, but the older and cheaper models I had absolutely did.
To supplement your anecdata: having used many an old top loader, they do have different fill levels - varying from "small" filling halfway up the drum to "large" as high as it can go. As an individual, even using the "small" setting uses a huge amount of water - no way to wash a few pairs of socks or whatever other small loads you might have.
I've never had an issue with modern front loaders not getting my clothes wet. They are much better at spinning them dry at the end, though.
Right, and all of those low-efficiency units had to cover the clothes in water because they only agitated horizontally. Whereas my front loader agitates vertically and lifts the clothes in and out of a smaller amount of water.
For some reason, about 15 years ago in the US it was almost impossible to get a top loader washer (out of 30 models on the floor, only a couple "value" models would be top loaders), because of efficiency requirements. Then they started to come out with higher efficiency top loaders, and now you see more top loaders again than front loaders.
I think the big thing that is different in the current top loaders, vs the old ones, are some don't have an agitator -- instead they use a low profile impeller at the bottom to force water vertically. And the ones with an agitator have the impeller shape at the bottom, so there is still vertical water movement.
The front loaders started to go out of style, partly because people complain about an oder build up in them. Not sure what that is about. And worries about the seal in the door leaking (if the float gets stuck and it puts too much water in it -- my brother has that issue periodically).
I would think that a good top-loader design would be something that has a pump at the bottom (under the basket), and circulates water to the top and sprays it down on the clothes. But I haven't seen any like that though.
> What I would like to know is why the America average wash cycle requires around 40 gallons (151L) of water [1]
Your source does not call this the average, but the upper limit. Washing machines have a range of sizes you can set them at ranging from small to "super-max". Also a range of durations depending on how many cycles and how much washing is needed.
You'd need to relate it to how much laundry gets washed per gallon.
Also, some parts of the US are semi-tropical and even swamp. Not every state is as worried about conserving water.
I was confused by this and the sibling comment, but apparently "top-loader" in the US sense means a type where the drum's spin axis is vertical – which I didn't even know existed before this thread. "Top-loader" around here (Northern Europe at least) means a design where the spin axis is horizontal but you load and unload the machine from the top, via a hatch on the side of the drum. Because the drum is oriented the same way as in a front-loader, water usage should be equal.
I've never actually had this happen in 35 years (I live in a front loader country, and have never used a top loader). I'm not sure if there's something different about American front-loaders, or if it's just some difference in usage practices.
Or it could be use of liquid detergents, which seem to be more common in the US. My washing machine's manual specifically warns not to use liquid or pod detergents, and they lead to internal buildup.
Ours has a cleaning cycle we run about once a month that sanitizes the machine. I've been adding a recommended cleaner with it, but I think even that is unneeded.
Top loaders are still common in Australia and New Zealand. They’re terrible, but they are cheaper than front loaders and are what many people are used to.
I can pause my front loader and add laundry, I'm not sure how the machine does it, perhaps I cannot add just whenever I want -- depending on the wash cycle, but I've never had the problem of not being able to pause the washing and add new laundry that I forgot.
Front loaders are extremely water efficient, there’s not much water in there and when you use the pause feature it can drain away enough water should that be necessary to make it safe to open, but mainly it just gives the clothes and liquid a chance to tumble to the bottom as they’d all spill right out otherwise and (then release the lock to make actually opening the door possible). By contrast, top loaders don’t even have a lock and don’t need a pause feature. There is usually a trigger switch to detect when the lid is open to stop the agitation for safety reasons, but there is no mechanical lockout and no delay: you can just open the lid.
Unfortunately a cheap front-loader only lasts about 3-5 years under normal usage, whereas the equivalent top-loader tends to last twice as long. I have no idea why that should be the case, but I've seen that too many times to discount it.
Washing machines are in a weird place where they are expensive to replace, but parts and labor to fix them when they break is almost, if not more expensive.
I moved to Belgium where apparently it's also normal to put toilets in the bathroom, and I still don't understand why one would put the dirtiest place in a house in the same room as the cleanest place.
I don't want to shower and brush my teeth just a meter away from the toilets.
In the US, a "bathroom" is usually a 3-piece (bath/shower, sink, toilet). A toilet/sink (no bath) is usually called a "half bath" in real estate listings (2.5 baths is common in suburban homes - one master suite, one serving the other bedrooms, and the "half" near the kitchen or living area).
My wife and I tend to only rent places that have at least a powder room on top of a primary bathroom for this exact reason. It isn't often we need that dual toilets, but after contracting food poisoning with only a single toilet... we decided never again.
Dual toilets have rescued us twice now from inevitable accidents.
More than one person can use a bathroom at the same time.
Toilets are a bit trickier, but if you're spending enough time on the toilet for it to be a bottleneck in your hosuehold, you may want to consider adding more fibre to your diet.
Agree! But what I don't understand is the 8 bedroom, 14 bathroom type of houses (rich people). I mean what's the point. I agree that you need at least two bathrooms in a home and max one bathroom for each bedroom...but after that, what's the point?
Need in the sense that, it improves the quality of life, and it's a worthy expense.
Those houses are designed for entertaining and large parties. Any event hall that you go to will have at minimum 1 bathroom for each gender with multiple stalls, 2-6. This is still a home, so they choose not to have stalls in bathroom setting, hence 6-10 "extra" bathrooms.
Additionally in the very large houses the bed/bath ration doesn't capture the setting of the bathrooms. There is a house not to far from me that has a connected indoor pool and that has 3 bathrooms for changing/shower.
Proximity matters. If I have a basketball court in my house, I'm going to want to have a little locker-room/bathroom off of it so that I (and my guests) don't have to trek to the bathroom in the main hall. If I have a 10-car climate-controlled garage with lounge where I hang out and show off my Ferrari collection, same thing. If I have an amazing pool that all of my kids' friends want to use, I'm going to want them to use the bathroom with the outdoor entrance so they aren't tracking water in the house.
I have a very wealthy relative who lives in the USA, and I visited when my younger brother was just 6 years old. It took him several complete tries of running round the house to count all the bathrooms (and not lose count).
There was one per bedroom, then one on the ground floor, one by the garage and one which was easy to get to from the beach.
The neighbour's house's guest room's bathroom was also the general bathroom; it had two doors with appropriate locks. This seemed like an efficient design.
Bathrooms with two doors are annoying. Typically, the door to the bedroom gets locked and not unlocked, so you have to go around to the hall door anyway. Also, unless the bathroom is large, the doors typically clash.
With a house like that, you're probably doing a fair bit of entertaining. You're going to be glad you have those extra bathrooms when you have 60 party guests.
The toilet and shower being in the same room is the biggest issue. If someone is in the shower and someone needs to go to the toilet that's a problem. The worst is in the morning with homes where more than two people are living.
From what I understand many in the UK, European countries have separate rooms for toilet and bath.
Due to a water leak and repairs my family of 4 has temporarily gone from 2.5 bathrooms to 1. It's miserable when everyone needs to go at once. Plus guests now have to come upstairs to use a toilet.
Most people with a family of four or a 3 bedroom place would have 2 baths (or often 1 proper bath and one toilet without shower/bath) in Europe too. What I find a bit strange is the "4 bedroom / 4 bathroom" thing. Bathroom 3/4 seems a bit over the top.
I imagine it's because 1-2 of those would be ensuite to one or more of the bigger bedrooms and/or that one or more aren't full baths.
I used to own a three bedroom suburban townhouse that had 3½ baths. Each bedroom had a walk-in closet and en-suite bathroom. It definitely made the properties (this was a 10 unit condominium) attractive for people who wanted roommates
I have a normal European detatched house with 2 bathrooms. I find that stressful and expensive considering the cost of renovation. Say you do it every 15 years or so. (Yes I realize it would last longer of course, probably want to do it after 15 years or less, especially if you plan on selling). The going rate for bathroom renovation here is $12-15k for small or cheap standard rebuilds, up to $40-50k for large or higher standard jobs. Normal standard and normal size is probably $25-30k. For most people this is a years' pay after taxes. If I had 4 bathrooms I would have just doubled my cost.
> Say you do it every 15 years or so. (Yes I realize it would last longer of course, probably want to do it after 15 years or less, especially if you plan on selling).
Our last home, in the southern US, was build in 1980 and two of the 3 bathrooms (all full which is odd) were original and about 35 years old. While the appearance was dated, structurally and mechanically they were sound with no mold, water damage, or other issues. A steam clean of the tile and porcelain, along with a re-caulk and re-grout would have been sufficient to keep them going for quite some time. Our house before that was from 1965 with both bathrooms being original. The metal plumbing had started to fail and there was some rot to the sub-flooring around a toilet but otherwise fully functional and clean. In both cases the bathrooms were like most homes in the US with ceramic tile floors, steel tubs, and tiled shower stalls.
When I think about all the bathrooms I've used while in Europe, most were much newer and all felt like they needed to be redone. The finishes were unlike what's typically done in American bathrooms, some where plastic or vinyl covered while others used wood. They were all small and poorly ventilated, and they all had issues with mold and rot. I'm thinking poor ventilation and choosing materials for style over longevity might be why you feel the need to redo your bathrooms so frequently.
A lot of what's in the market for UK bathroom remodelling is actually very poor and unsuitable materials (e.g. cabinets with a veneer on top of particle board that will just love the humidity and blow up nicely once the surface or a corner gets a knock). It originally started with kitchen companies seeking new markets, and only needed to resize units and change installation habits a little to add new, (badly) fitted bathrooms. As a result a lot need redoing as half the stuff was never really suitable for being in a bathroom in the first place. Going on the quality of most kitchen installations, why would anyone ever...? :)
So you move into a new house with a grotty, worn out (and possibly only 4 or 8 year old) bathroom, with mould and maybe a tile or two falling off. Now you need to remodel, and most of what's out there is shoddy "replace every 5-10 years" quality, so the cycle repeats. New build homes are happy to install the cheapest shite available so long as it looks OK. Every time someone moves it's just about certain the mouldy, grotty bathroom and kitchen will need a makeover (or a divorce). If they got suckered in to a fitted bedroom you'll need to budget to rip that out too (also built from kitchen units with ideas above their station). :)
The parts of Europe I visit seem caught in a similar game.
Up until the seventies most houses were built with lifetime bathrooms -- one 50s house we lived in still had the tiling and fittings from when the house was built, still looked clean, nothing broken. All we ever needed to do was change taps as they had started to wear, and fit a better shower. A couple of tiles were lifted doing that -- that was revealing. No tile adhesive, all the tiles were mortared directly onto the brick, no wonder none had been lost since new. Not only that, tiles were better and the edges and corners were in the tiles -- none of the awful, easily broken, plastic corner things that appear to encourage mould.
The nicest house bathroom I ever saw was a house that had managed to keep its turn of the century bathroom, with high gloss tiling, original bath, radiator and polished pipes, with the modern additions carefully picked to appear like they were there from new.
Never quite understood how so many got so completely suckered in to such wasteful and expensive short-termism.
The fit and finish items in new construction in the US is also what I would deem substandard but with the option to upgrade. That's typically how developers can offer homes starting at very low price points, because quality finishes can increase the home selling price by 25-50%.
There are plenty of renovators that will be happy to install floating floor systems and other garbage but the traditional materials and installers still exist and don't charge that much of a premium. Many times the newer methods require subfloor modifications or other added costs that usually bring them in parity with the traditional products but the end result is much lower quality.
Here, the bespoke cabinet makers doing things the traditional way are often on par or even less than the installation companies. I think people simply assume they are right at the premium end so don't even ask for a quote -- as a result may not get all the work they deserve. Box installers meanwhile have bumped prices up to "insane", right where I might expect a carpenter making genuinely fitted cabinetry.
Can't agree more with this. Spending ~25k every 15 years on a bathroom remodel needs a budget of over $1000 per year. Do you really get that much value out of it?
The design life is probably 20-25 so it's not much different.
Or turn the argument around: would one rather have 2 bathrooms with an average age of 7.5 (15 years interval for renovation) or 4 bathrooms with an average age of 15 (30 years lifespan)?
The house with the 4 bathrooms in worse condition would be a worth a lot less money on the market than one with two bathrooms in better condition.
The cheapest option is of course having 2 bathrooms but staying with long intervals for remodeling. That's where I am now, but as both are pushing 13 yers now it's kind of stressing as they'll both "come up for renewal" at the same time soon.
But yes, living without 80's tiles is something I very much imagine paying a lot of money for.
> Or turn the argument around: would one rather have 2 bathrooms with an average age of 7.5 (15 years interval for renovation) or 4 bathrooms with an average age of 15 (30 years lifespan)?
A home with 4 bathrooms is going to see half the traffic of a home with 2 bathrooms so they might last 2x. Or is as the case a lot of times, the bathroom in the common areas of the home gets renovated as does the master.
> living without 80's tiles is something I very much imagine paying a lot of money for.
A lot of European bathrooms I've experienced were very trendy for their time and while that occurs in America I would say it's the exception and not the norm. In general our bathrooms are relatively bland and the materials are "timeless" in the sense that they're not very stylish ever, even new, but also never look that dated either. The last 3 bathroom renovations I did all involved using subway tiles, which while currently trendy, have been used consistently over the last 100 years. The houses I grew up in all used a similarly bland while tile that was 3x3" while squares.
The fixtures and finishes I've seen in European bathrooms also don't tend to stand up either. Pedestal sinks with exposed metal pipes and those detachable shower wands on sliding poles. Apart from the master bathrooms, most American bathrooms are boring with simple sturdy faucets and fixed shower heads. The sinks use vanities which hide/protect the plumbing which is usually plastic and much less vulnerable to corrosion.
Timeless!? They are insane. The toilet uncomfortably low to the ground. The sink that splashes, and you have to spend 40 seconds every time to get the water temperature right. The cabinet that's 2 inches deep and things fall out each time its opened. The mirror that fogs up. The slippery tub. The moldy curtain. Noisy flush. Soap gunk by the sink. Plumbing that leaks and clogs under normal use.
Spider Robinson wrote about it. An alien looking at human bathrooms, would have to conclude we are masochistic, stupid, or have some cultural blind spot.
In many parts of the world you squat on the ground, which actually better for you than sitting. Most toilets in the last 30 years are taller to accommodate ADA requirements and you can get even taller ones for a slight cost.
> The sink that splashes
I've really only experienced that in those awful flat bottom or angular sinks. The traditional hemisphere or egg shaped sinks don't splash.
> you have to spend 40 seconds every time to get the water temperature right.
I'm assuming you're talking about showering? Most American bathrooms are not located near the hot water heater and the water in the pipes between the spigot and the heater generally cools because it's not well insulated. As such, most Americans don't hop in the shower immediately when they turn it on but instead let it warm up for a minute or two.
> The cabinet that's 2 inches deep and things fall out each time its opened.
Are you talking about medicine cabinets? Sounds like the one you used wasn't pitched properly. There's two screws inside you can remove on the inside walls to loosen it, you can then shim the bottom edge and replace the screws. This will pitch the cabinet back so things fall to the back and not out the front.
Generally medicine cabinets fell out of fashion as the size of bathrooms grew and are usually only found in pre80s homes. Fun fact, most of them have a slot in the back to let you dispose of straight razors and if you remove them from the wall you'll find a stack of rust old razors in the wall cavity.
> The mirror that fogs up.
Hmm... so fancy heated mirror that will fail or a bottle of defogger you apply once or twice a year? * Better yet just turn the ventilation fan on before you start your shower.
> The slippery tub.
The only time I've ever fallen in a shower was in Italy in one of those shower coffins. So... yeah that's not a problem unique to America.
> The moldy curtain.
You know you can change those right? And if you spend more than $2 you can buy one that's mold resistant?
> Noisy flush.
That sounds like those jet flush toilets used in commercial property, most residential toilets are gravity flush tanks like their European counterparts.
> Soap gunk by the sink.
I'm guessing by this and your mold curtain comment that you're not one to clean your bathroom?
Remember those two faucets that used to be on sinks, one hot and one cold? Got replaced by the lever-valve that you push right or left to adjust temp? Took a generation to switch, though the benefits were obvious the first day.
Well, those two faucets go back even further. Watch any old cowboy movies? In the rooming house, the wash stand with the enamel basin and two pitchers? One pitcher hot water; one cold. Mix in the basin, then wash and shave.
When plumbing happened, the basin got set into the wash stand, a drain put in the bottom, the two pitchers replaced by two faucets.
Then, for about 100 years, nothing. No progress. Just that old familiar setup without modification.
Finally the kids were like "hey! I'm not filling that dirty old basin with water and washing in there! I'm just washing under the running water." The basin became simply a drain.
So thus the impetus to combine hot and cold. So you didn't alternately scald and freeze your hands.
The 'modern' bathroom sink took 100 years to come about. Not because to took that long to invent. It took only a moment to see the advantages. What it took was, 100 years for the old, hidebound folks to pass away and let the kids take over.
I'm convinced our bathrooms are the way they are (weak explanations notwithstanding), because people are slow to change.
You responded to my comment about the timelessness of an aesthetic as somehow wrong because the underlying technology is not to your liking?
No one is agreeing or disagreeing with what you're saying because no one understands where you're coming from. You've basically said "Green is stupid because we're still using cars!"
Hey, I can speak for myself. No need to put words in my mouth. Thanks!
Design aesthetic is different from 'stuff that doesn't work'. I'm reminded of design students that create something that looks like a bicycle out of cardboard layers, and say "See! I've improved the bicycle! It'll change the world!" And what they have is a useless sculpture of a bicycle.
It's plain to most folks, using ordinary bathrooms in ordinary houses that the stuff is laughably awkward, dangerous and hard to clean. Try to explain it away all you like.
> Design aesthetic is different from 'stuff that doesn't work'
Again, we were speaking about durability and aesthetics, not functionality.
Since you want to discuss functionality...
> laughably awkward
For example? Do you have any better real world alternatives.
> dangerous
What and how?
> hard to clean
Compared to?
> Try to explain it away all you like.
No one is trying to explain away anything. We're not talking about the same thing. You're interjecting your thoughts on functionality as if they're in opposition to our discussion about reliability and design.
To put it another way, we're talking about reality and you're arguing hypothetical. It's like showing us how your air guitar is better than our actual guitars.
I just do most of the work myself and only contract things out directly (hire the tile installer directly, don't use a "remodeling" contractor) to make things affordable.
Obviously there are still expensive parts, but we don't rebuild the entire bathroom every 15 years and we don't have to do that rebuild all at once.
That would be a ludicrous amount of money to spend for a bathroom renovation in the US, even forgetting that there is no reason to do it every 15 years. A bathtub costs $500 max, toilet maybe $200, sink and vanity maybe another few hundred. Finishes should be another $1,000 max. Labor should be around $3,000 even in HCOL. So ripping out every fixture in a bathroom and replacing all the finishes, total should be within $5k. Even double that is $10k.
And bathtubs, toilets, and sinks last 20+ years easy (it’s porcelain and/or cast iron, what can go wrong?) Replacing the toilet innards is a 1 hour job at most with a $30 repair kit from the hardware store in case the seals wear out or something.
A facelift with e.g. new fixtures or paint I can do myself, that's not what I'm talking about. I mean a full renovation: stripping the room, putting up new drywall, then seal layer, then tiles. Then applying a new seal layer (nothing you are even allowed by insurers to do yourslef). After that tilling, electrical, plumbing, fixtures.
Why would you do all that? I've seen many 1950s-vintage houses where the sink and toilet have been replaced once, with no further changes, and they're fine. No on should hate brown tile so much that they spend so much money to tear the whole thing down.
Yes, your average Swede would rather live in the woods than have 80's tiles. Meanwhile an average american would perhaps rather have 4 80's baths than 2 new ones. And that's exactly the cultural difference the article is about I think. It goes part of the way to describing why I only have 1.5 bathrooms.
I also suppose there is a difference with wear. If you have e.g. one or two baths instead of 3 or four for a large family, then it might be in worse condition after 15 years.
Actually now that you mention it the bathrooms in Sweden when I visited were notably magical.
Maybe the author of the article should write about how many bathrooms Swedes have, installed in series every 10 years rather than in parallel when the house is built. A one bathroom house where the bathroom has been replaced 4 times in 40 years counts as 4 bathrooms.
There are almost no renovations that will return more than $1 per $1 spent. Add in the additional penalty for any time value of money and you're even more underwater. (It can help speed up a sale, but generally will not have a positive RoI.)
Renovate for yourself and your own use, not the next owner.
This is pretty much why I've settled on the idea of buying a small flat.
I've lived in most different types of place now (rurally, in the suburbs, in inner city suburbs, in the middle of metro areas) etc and the idea of having to decorate a massive house is something I really can't be bothered with. If I had children I'd want enough space for them, sure, but that's about it.
It's not even about the cost but just the mental overhead of it all, cleaning, all the stuff you accumulate, etc.
I have a very sparsely furnished and decorated single family home. I felt intense pressure to buy because the cost of houses was increasing faster than my salary. Purchasing a home felt like a closing window of opportunity.
I figure I can always grow into it, and I occasionally buy something to go into it if I find a very good deal. Total cost of ownership is more than a rental property, but I also find my total quality of life has increased due to extra space for pets and decreased noise.
From my perspective, apartments and homes are rising in value at roughly the same rate, so I could trade in a flat in the center for a home in the suburbs later on if I so wished.
I figure at that point I'd have more of an idea about where I'd want my theoretical family (that I'm not even planning at the moment) to live, plus a partner with you know, desires and opinions and stuff ;)
And why do Americans keep using that kind of toilets with high water level and soft flushing that tend to get clogged?
I mean, in my 37 years of life in Europe I haven't ever clogged a toilet, I don't think it's even a thing, at least if you don't throw anything that doesn't belong in there. But in my trips to America... I'm not going to be specific, but let's just say that some experiences have made me very cautious when I use the toilet there.
Yeah, I totally get what you're hinting at ;-) I stopped counting the number of times that I clogged American toilets with...let's say "substances that clearly belong in there". Seriously, am I supposed to hold it in the middle of the action and flush?
Another really, really backwards thing seems to be shower fixtures. If you aren't lucky and find a modern mixing valve, you are likely doomed to experiment with various push, pull, turn-while-pull, push-while-turn-then-pull, turn-until-searing-hot-then-go-on-because-warm-comes-after-hot-on-the-scale moves to get a decent water temperature. And not only is this totally unintuitive, it also differs between every single shower in every single hotel or motel room (especially motels seem to have these weird fixtures).
It took me a long time to discover how some fixtures in hotels work in the US, because the idea that to get hot water you have to open up full-throttle (passing through cold) and there is no way to control the amount of water was totally alien to me. I never expected such a wasteful design.
Worst ones are (although not limited to America) ones where you have to reach under the water flow to get to the control.
Eg the knobs are on the inside wall of the shower facing the entrance. So to turn on the water you have to reach your arm and sometimes half the body across the shower. Then you have to turn the bloody thing past cold full blast, with the cold water coming down on you. And to add to it, you can’t really tell where you set the temperature to unless you feel the water. If the temperature is wrong you have to reach through the water stream again to change it. Annoying if you set it too cold, good luck if you set it too hot.
Yeah, those are the greatest. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can pull on the fixture to control the flow rate, but on others you are basically limited to full throttle if you don't want to shower with cold water only.
Modern thermostat mixer valves are fantastic. I will not tolerate a shower without one and am baffled every time I see a shower without one. They're much easier to use, more comfortable, and it saves water, because you're wasting less time fiddling with the taps and waiting for the right temperature.
In the spectrum from (what I consider European) thermostatic valves through pressure-balance valves down to simple, static gate valves, the problem is often that retrofitting from one to a better type involves plumbing changes in the wall (necessitating re-tiling in a lot of cases, which cannot be done cheaply to look "never been disturbed").
For a house built in the 60s, it can be a mid-four-figure job all-in just to change the shower valve type. For several grand, I can manually change the valve and adjust it when someone flushes a toilet or runs the hot tap somewhere else.
That's not without health risks. As a life-long skin problem bearer it's a thing that has messed me up more than once. The upper layers of your skin get de-greased like that and that in turn can cause all kinds of issues. Better get him to understand the possible consequences before there is actual damage from this.
Especially during winter the effects can be quite harsh.
And not only that, but every time you turn the water off to soap yourself up, the temperature resets so you have to freeze and burn all over again! Pretty terrible design.
I know, but how do you soap up with the water running? You're just wasting soap and water by rinsing it off immediately as you apply it. I've never managed to have a good shower in the US.
Sometimes I’m not sure how much of our habits can be attributed to cheap utility prices and how much can be attributed to differences in environmental opinion.
And for a serious answer, our cisterns usually have two buttons, one which uses 30% of the cistern (for light flushing) and one which uses 100% of it (for heavy flushing).
This is only possible in the low-water European toilets, obviously, US-style toilets where the water is already filling the bowl can't do this.
The half-flush simply empties the bowl and refills it, the full-flush crashes a full tank of water on top of it and flushes it all (which is how American toilets typically flush).
Ahh, I see, I didn't realize they used more water than a single fill, though now that you mention it it's kind of obvious, since they fill to the brim when they clog.
You aim the shower head so it doesn’t spray water at you. This is a lot easier in a tub+shower than it is in a pure shower due to the extra room offered.
I scrub the front of my body while the shower is rinsing down my back and when I turn around to rinse the front of my body, I scrub my back. This also keeps me warm and comfortable.
>Groundwater 47°F, Heater set to 110°F: 63° rise x 8.33 Btu x 40 gallons = 20,992 Btus
>Groundwater 47°F, Heater set to 120°F: 73° rise x 8.33 Btu x 40 gallons = 24,324 Btus
>Groundwater 47°F, Heater set to 140°F: 93° rise x 8.33 Btu x 40 gallons = 30,988 Btus
Average of 25,435 Btus.
0.000293 kWh/Btu for electric so something like 0.19 kWh per gallon for electric.
Looks like 1lb of coal makes about 1kWh (wow!)[1].
1 pound of carbon combines with 2.667 pounds of oxygen to produce 3.667 pounds of carbon dioxide.
So roughly 0.7 pounds or 0.32 kilograms of CO2 per gallon of water in an electric water heater?
The average American shower uses 17.2 gallons [2], so if you showered daily and only used hot water your CO2 from showers alone would very roughly be something like 2000kg annually.
That's an interesting question, but I think it's a bit moot; we don't have any leeway in the form of amount that's safe to emit. Anything we can save, we should save.
Most step out of the water and leave it flowing. I install a flow control valve (aka "water saver") behind the shower head which lets you take a "Navy Shower" where you lather up without the water spraying.
Yeah, this is something that I'm vaguely surprised by every time I'm in the US; the thermostatic mixing valve seems to be considered magical future technology. They definitely _exist_ there, but you tend not to find them in hotels.
I replaced every single one of mine with a Toto. I don’t care if it’s four times the price of American Standard or whatever: I have literally never had to use the plunger since.
As a counter anecdote, I’m an American living in Australia, and I own and have used a toilet plunger in Australia because my Australian toilet was clogged. But that is a single occurrence in 12 years as opposed to multiple occurrences annually in the States.
The only time I’ve had anything close to a clog, it was as a young teenager and because of excessive quantities of toilet paper. And the solution was just to add more water into the bowl, which increased the water pressure in the s-trap and pushed the blockage through.
Really it should be impossible to clog a toilet with poops alone.
And if you find yourself excreting an unusual amount in one sitting, or need to use an unusual quantity of paper, just do an intermediate flush.
In the US, they're for sale everywhere. And I must acknowledge their ingenuity when it comes to toilet plunger design: American plungers have an additional "lip" at the bottom of the rubber thingy that fits into their toilets quite nicely and seals them up better than the usual plungers in Europe would do, which don't have that extra rubber lip.
Apparently the extraordinary demand for plungers resulted in better plungers, not in someone asking "why the heck are we so reliant on plungers?" and possibly making better toilets ;-)
I think the ship has sailed on better toilets in America, unfortunately. A big part of the problem is just that the standard waste pipe is too small AIUI.
I just moved into an apartment with a Toto toilet and it replaced the plunger with toilet brush...
I've needed a plunger once in the last 2 years of apartments (didn't even get around go buying one at my last one before I left)
I need that toilet brush every other day, it's a really gross problem, and I hate the idea of having guests and them having to choose between leaving a dirty bowl and whipping out my toilet brush...
Although the design and expectation is the same in my native Britain as most of the rest of Europe, I've only seen signs like this in France and Germany [1] -- usually in quieter public buildings, like government offices.
I have the Toto Drake II line and they all combine a self-cleaning design with some sort of non-stock coating which they say lasts forever as long as you keep away from harsh cleaner compounds and only use the nylon bristle brushes. But who knows what the previous inhabitants used in your case.
I replaced the first one in 2015 and haven’t had any issues yet.
Pro-tip: the actual first thing I do when any family members or myself move into a new home or apartment is install a kitchen side spray in the bathroom as a hand-held “point and shoot” bidet. Those can be used to quickly clean in a contact-free way.
American toilets essentially suck water, pulling everything with it. Euro toilets just dump water from above. The disadvantage of Euro toilets is that they become dirty, which is why there's always a brush nearby. Also having that step with all your poop on it just sitting there is unpleasant, at least to me.
> Also having that step with all your poop on it just sitting there is unpleasant, at least to me.
That's wildly exaggerating it. Normally the brush isn't really dirty and you can soak it in soapy water every couple of weeks/months and you are fine. The water pressure seems higher in Europe (or at least in Germany, where I lived before moving to the US). After you cleaned the toilet, you would normally still be able to clean the brush off with the water of the current flush (should that be needed).
In fact, I find it bewildering that there is normally no brush in the US. It is unavoidable for almost all toilet types to get dirty and I find it frustrating if I can't leave the toilet how I would like to find it (clean), because there are still traces clearly visible in the toilet and no brush is available. Especially when I am visiting somewhere or we rent a vacation house with friends. Really awkward to see traces in the toilet of people who were in there before you (or the other way around).
I’ve never seen pressurized tanks in Europe. They flush from a tank that isn’t directly connected to the water mains, so
water pressure in the water mains doesn’t play a role. The water just falls down from the cistern to the bowl, a height difference of about half a meter for modern designs and up to 2 meters for more traditional designs.
Wikipedia says “it has been found by ceramic engineers that improved waterway design is a more effective way to enhance the bowl's flushing action than high tank mounting.“ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet#Flush_tanks)
Hah so true. Having lived mainly in Europe and Australia I have never once managed to clog a toilet but without fail I seem to manage to clog almost every US hotel toilet. We're not talking about a few unlucky incidents but many.
Just on the general topic of the number of bathrooms increasing surely it could be related to the obesity epidemic. They do seem correlated. People getting fatter and fatter every year, they need to relieve themselves more often and of more material, this all takes time so it goes without saying they would spend more time in bathrooms.
Much of the smell in a toilet is your butt, not the bowl. If smell is an issue, wipe sooner or do an intermediate flush. (Or take the hint and change your diet.)
I must say that I find it oddly satisfying to flush down poop from such a shelf. Especially if it goes down just fine every single time and doesn't clog.
I live in Europe (Netherland) and regularly clog toilets. I don't know if my colon is unusually big, but in my experience, both deep and flat flushers are quite capable of getting clogged, though deep flushers seem more vulnerable to it than flat flushers. I suspect that with deep flushers, it may help to flush immediately and not let the turd soak up water while you add more toilet paper.
Seems you visit some places with poor plumbing then.
In my 40 years of life in the US the only time I have experienced a clogged toilet is because someone put something down it that did not belong (or the entire plumbing system was backed up do to tree roots or other issue unrelated to toilet design)
I don’t think this requires that much analysis. As the article acknowledges, American houses are on average double the size of ones in the EU. That leaves plenty of space to place bathrooms to maximize convenience (as opposed to just handling maximum expected occupancy). For example, our 1950s house growing up had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, one upstairs shared by the bedrooms, and one downstairs for the family room. My parents’ current house has one more bedroom, but two more bathrooms. Two of the bedrooms get a private attached bath, and the other two share a Jack and Jill bathroom. The main level gets a powder room. If we finish the basement, that’ll be another bathroom, because people don’t want to have to go to another floor to access the bathroom.
There's an historical error in this article; public baths were very common in Europe up until the Black Death. Actually people became really dirty from the late 15th Century onwards, and yet with stark differences between countries.
> The Dutch philosopher Erasmus, writing in 1526, notes the fall of the public bathhouse. “Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths,” he remarked. “Today there are none, the new plague has taught us to avoid them.”
That is, water does spread disease, and public baths went out of fashion during the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages.
> In the mid-19th century, American sanitarians came to believe that disease stemmed from “sewer gas” emitted by toilets, which encouraged home builders to cram tub, sink, and toilet into one well-ventilated room with exposed pipes, in order to limit the spread of disease.
To be fair, sewer gas is indeed gross and can be toxic. So modern plumbing carefully vents the sewer gas out the roof and has traps that prevent sewer gas from entering the room.
(The P trap under your sink isn’t to catch valuables that go down the drain. It’s there to hold water so that gasses and critters can’t come through.)
> The P trap under your sink isn’t to catch valuables that go down the drain. It’s there to hold water so that gasses and critters can’t come through
Yeah, I have a P-trap in the kitchen space of my single-room flat, in theory for the dishwater; but since I don't have a dishwasher, there's no water and I got sewer smells until it was plugged by rags.
Meanwhile, American showers still have a fixed showerhead mounted on the wall and a single control that doesn't let you adjust pressure, only temperature.
Meanwhile, every European shower I've ever used is so tiny that I knock my elbows on the walls when I reach up to wash my hair. In short, the world is a place of contrasts.
*Some American showers. Probably most, but plenty of them allow for controlling both. My shower has a separate temperature control that can be left at the desired setting.
What we get here in the rest of the world, is something that allows for control of both temperature & water flow. Usually (but I can't really speak generally) with a freely-moving showerhead connected by a metal-jacketed rubber hose (which can be placed on a fixed position to the wall for overhead showering)
We have those too. In particular, I have one of those. You can buy them at Wal-Mart. I rent and I take it with me when I move (re-installing the original hardware).
> A pressure-balanced valve provides water at nearly constant temperature to a shower or bathtub, despite pressure fluctuations in either the hot or cold supply lines.
> A thermostatic shower seems like a regular shower, but it has something very unique inside; a thermostatic valve. Thermostatic valves mix both hot and cold water together to a consistent predetermined temperature, preventing scalding and thermic shock.
Here in Brazil, we usually have either two separate controls, one for cold water flow and one for hot water flow, or when using an electric shower head, a single control for water flow (and a winter/summer/off control for the temperature in the shower head).
A lot of people get more utility from an extra half bath than an extra closet
Bathrooms make entertaining people easier, both by having them conveniently located and by reducing the privacy infringement of making your master bath available (everyone's an asshole and goes through everyone else's medicine cabinet)
It's not wasteful since having more bathrooms doesn't mean you go to the bathroom more.
There is also an emergency health issue. I had c.difficile and was instructed by the nurse to use a separate bathroom from my spouse to avoid cross-contamination. We only had one bathroom so this meant I had to bleach the toilet whenever I "took the boys to the pool".
I can't say I've done a full study on this, but at least anecdotally, the claim of this article seems over-blown. I'm a software engineer for a large tech company (i.e., I make pretty good money), and I live in a relatively well off part of the US (New Jersey, in the New York suburbs). When I was looking for a house, most houses in our price range had either 1 full bathroom or 1 full bathroom and 1 half bathroom. So even in a pretty well-off situation, it's not automatically the case that you live in a huge house with lots of bath rooms.
To the extent that the claim that American houses have so many bathrooms is true, I'm not sure you can think about American real estate in such a homogenized fashion to assume it is universally true. I think it applies in certain particular circumstances, but is not universal.
Northeastern suburbs tend to be much older than suburbs in the rest of the country...
Your anecdote seems hardly enough to refute the article. How much do you know about newer suburban developments outside Atlanta, or Dallas, or Phoenix?
Counter to that, I live in the DC suburbs, where housing tends to be from the mid-1970s or newer. The house I grew up in was a "standard" colonial (1800swft 4 and a door) with 2.5 bathrooms and 4 bedrooms. The first home I owned was similar. My current townhome is 3 beds with 2.5 baths.
In all cases, we could have done without 1 of the full baths, or the half-bath, without problem. The extra was purely convenience (but appreciated growing up with a sister who could take some time getting ready).
NJ is the most population-dense state in the U.S., so that (and its being really old, and comparatively expensive) might have something to do with your experience.
> NJ is the most population-dense state in the U.S., so that (and its being really old, and comparatively expensive) might have something to do with your experience.
Yeah, a house built in the eighties or the nineties is pretty new in Journal Square of Jersey City. However, the city (Manhattan mostly) has it worse. I saw an ad for a tiny room that explicitly said no access to kitchen or the bathroom. I don't think it is even lawful to say that.
Imagine someone living in that room comes across this article...
I spent a lot of dough on a master bathroom renovation (large steam shower with elevated seat, THREE showerheads and 3/4-inch pipe direct from the boiler), double sinks, all-LED lighting, WC room with this Toto: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B009IJ2JQW/ref=ppx_yo_dt... and a jacuzzi tub)
... and it's just been a fantastic place to start and end the day in. The universal response people have when they walk into it is "wow". It's a significant quality-of-life improvement IMHO.
American houses have too many square feet, and about enough bathrooms. I don't see how a three-bedroom 1-bathroom house is compatible with two people getting to work on time, especially with kids around throwing things off-schedule.
Because it is a nice luxury to never have to wait on someone else to be done in the bathroom. This is further amplified because our bathrooms customarily have more functions that tie them up, as we don’t use separate water closets.
Yeah after travel in Europe that's one that irks me being back in the US. Why does my toothbrush need to be in the same room that everyone is dropping deuces?
I can't help but think of the sprawling McMansion my extended family vrbo-ed in Houston during a wedding. The home comfortably housed 14 people across 7 bedrooms and I counted 6 bathrooms. While the rest of the house was thoroughly maintained (and a little gaudy), one bathroom tucked in the corner of the house had an awful mildew smell, white duct tape covering a crack on the toilet, and a bunch of stains on the wall and tile that I could only assume were a rush job to remove mold.
Just a little anecdote that fits my worldly philosophy of the more things you own, the more things that can break.
I thought it was status signalling: a house with more toilets implies higher social status. Especially holds in one state (Arizona?) where Healy costs for local water connection were much higher for more toilets.
Another strange thing to me is the ridiculous number of bedrooms in new single family homes, and the assumption that more is better.
Sites like Zillow don't even let you put an upper limit when searching. Agents can't believe you don't want a bigger place. I don't mean cheaper, I mean I don't want all those rooms and stairs. In my area, you perversely have to go to the ultra-luxe range of the market to get a high quality 2-3 bedroom single family home, while 5 bedroom new constructions are a dime a dozen. That makes no sense.
"In my area, you perversely have to go to the ultra-luxe range of the market to get a high quality 2-3 bedroom single family home, while 5 bedroom new constructions are a dime a dozen."
Same in the Boston area...you're either getting an older, reasonably sized home, a new-build condo/apartment, or a new-build McMansion / cookie-cutter development. These new-builds are often much larger than millenials want, bigger than boomers need, and too expensive for their blandness.
My guess is homebuilders simply make a better profit on these huge homes...for now...while the market is upheld...
Maybe houses have many bathrooms, but my experience from the US was that it is incredible hard to find public toilets which is very annoying when you're a tourist.
When we found one, they were pretty disgusting. Even places like Starbucks didn't even have a toilet. I mean what the hell? How can you serve people coffee which makes stomachs rumble without having a single customer toilet?
From a European perspective, this was very uncomfortable and I also have a condition which makes my stomach untrustworthy.
Having been well traveled in both places I found for the given population density of a particular city finding a toilet is harder in Europe than the USA but both are horrendous. Public toilets are a basic human right in Australia.
In many places in Europe, restaurant codes demand appropriate toilet access as condition for the license - and licenses can and will be suspended when inspections find your toilets to be inadequate / damaged / unclean. (source: worked in the industry)
I've never had this issue in US cities. I don't think I've seen an actual _public_ toilet facility, but I've never suffered because of it. Unless you are in a shopping mall it is required by law to have a restroom.
Starbucks, McDonalds, Burger King, these all have restrooms and are open to the public. Sometimes they might require a small purchase (like a water bottle). Heck, I was in NYC not too long ago and was surprised to find that all Starbucks have open restrooms (in other cities I've visited sometimes you needed to ask for the key).
The overloaded term "bathroom" is not very helpful. What do these bathrooms have in them? Do they have a bath, or a toilet, or both, or what? I think we should be told!
More toilets than bedrooms - e.g., the 20:8 ratio mentioned in the article - makes perfect sense for a house that might see large numbers of guests at once.
One bath per person surely can't hurt, if you can afford it, though averaged out this is probably going to mean a bath:bedroom ratio of around 1:1.
I grew up in a Brady Bunch house: nine people and 1 1/2 bath. The father had priority, then high school kids, then grade school. The bedroom config was more interesting than bathroom. Always a minimum of two, sometimes up to four. A rearrangement every couple years.
Perhaps that is why I sought mainly single bedrooms in college and grad school.
I think all of the next generation were nver more than six in house and every child with personal bedroom.
2-per-person (round down) sounds about right. We have 2.5 and the 2nd full-bath (in the basement) is rarely used. I'm flabbergasted to know that, as an upper-middle-class Canadian in a 5-person family, my home would be below average compared to a new American development. One-person-per-bathroom is madness.
Stephen Colbert said it best: "One for dinner-guests and one you poop in".
Yeah those quora comments really made me think that Americans have diarrhoea way too often since it is mentioned numerous times as a reason for the high number of bathrooms.
The same way I've often read silly threads on reddit mentioning those fecal problems (like after mexican food, it seems like a ritual for us folks to crush the toilet bowl) which don't seem as common or popular in europe.
It’s not the number of American bathrooms that’s fucked up, it’s their size. I’ve seen bathrooms big enough to host a dinner party. It’s insane. In student housing I had a perfectly usable bathroom that was very cramped and I’d love to have two of those in a house and a normal sized one.
The question is: what happens when you have few bathrooms (maybe only one). It's a constrained resource that is usually used by people at around the same time frames.
Sharing one bathroom across a family of 4 is not easy. Two or three make more sense.
Having at least two bathrooms is an absolute life saver - if you only have one and something goes wrong you pretty much have to stay in a hotel. Not to mention having some privacy from guests is great. So that doesn't seem like an excess to me.
> In the past half century, the number of bathrooms per person in America has doubled.
Most people who grew up in the past half-century grew up in a household with several siblings and appreciate the luxury of not waiting in line to use the toilet ^_^
Is the ubiquity of "master bathrooms" peculiar to the U.S.?
I don't mean this lewdly, but: I would imagine parents everywhere appreciate the ability to clean up after sex without having to first walk though the house's public areas.
I've shared an apartment with 3 other people (single bathroom) and it can be either utter chaos or totally fine depending on schedules. Staggered morning work times are the best, everyone gets their time without feeling rushed.
Having visited my brother for Christmas... I came to appreciate the large number of bathrooms. (It was originally a farmhouse, so many were added over time.) It makes having a bunch of visitors a LOT easier to accommodate.
Is it exclusively an American thing, or is it simply that newer houses have a lot of bathrooms? I was recently in a tiny two bedroom house in England (built in the 90s, I believe) that had three toilets (two full baths).
Some of it is age. I only have one bathroom in about an 1800 sq ft house. Presumably the indoor plumbing was added at some point. But, while a house that size would have 2 brs today, there’s just no easy way to add one and I don’t need it.
Because "everybody poops". If I gotta go, I want to be able to without waiting on someone else. I spent the first 12 years of my life in a single bathroom house, not doing that again.
We have one bathroom for the four of us, and I’ve never had a particular desire for more. That’s just extra toilets and showers to clean and extra pipes to leak. No thanks.
I like to be able to have multiple options to do my things comfortably, at some point when trying to come up with a house design i liked it ended up with 6!
I mean, you could certainly describe it as frivolous, but I like being able to shower or use the toilet without worrying about my wife doing the same thing.
Also, why do american houses have so much damn pavement? i mean every single house i go to there's these massive driveways sometimes even wider than the garage itself! with even more pavement on the side for god knows what and behind that some more pavement along the side of the house.
and it's not even nice pavement, it's just concrete, like a big airport.
it's especially bad in CA because the lots are so small making the pavement look even bigger proportionaly.
"... foreigners when we first arrive here, and the sheer number of bathrooms in suburban houses is very high on the list" and article still contains square foot without any conversion to metric
The dirt does not go up with the number of bathrooms but rather the number of uses. With more bathrooms you either have to clean less often or less as much.
They don’t get dirty as quickly when they aren’t used as frequently.
Usually in high-bathroom-count houses, there are the “main” bathroom(s) and some bathrooms are mainly just used in the instance that the primary choice is occupied. Like when you really gotta take a leak but people are getting ready in the morning and bathrooms are in high demand.
When visitors are over, the "main" bathroom becomes #1 only, and #2s have to be taken in the less convenient bathrooms.
Like forcing longer-running processes onto a different CPU when congestion occurs.
#1s are usually quicker and more time-sensitive. Nobody wants to piss in the backyard because someone else is pooping. And that has only happened while visiting a 2 bed/1 bath place. Fine for one, but five people overloads the resource, and the scheduler can't pre-empt the running process.
Really, the problem is that the bath or shower and the toilet are in the same room. Occupying the bath or shower should not exclude others from using the toilet. It's bad design that has propagated via real estate marketing.
> Do middle class Americans clean their own homes?
Middle class Americans (petit bourgeois) might, but probably contract out for at least some of it; middle income Americans probably can't afford to contract out and probably do their own cleaning. But Americans often say the former when they mean the latter, so it's not usually clear what is being discussed.
a house i am looking at has a bathroom for every bedroom. it makes no sense and i am contemplating removing 1.5 of them for more storage if i buy the house (it's not looking likely).
It adds significant value to the home, every room is basically a potential high-value rental unit, especially if they're full baths.
Oftentimes homes with many small rooms each having private bathrooms were actually designed specifically for the purpose of room rentals, think elderly shared housing type places.
No offense, but you have no clue what you’re talking about. It’s new construction and going for $1m. I need storage, not a bathroom for a nonexistent elderly rentals.
I never asserted the home you were buying was an example of such a home, no need for the personal attack.
Such homes are actually fairly common in California, I've rented such a room on two occasions.
My understanding is there are quotas requiring housing be built for low income tenants in a regulated proportion to other residential developments. The way classy SF bay area neighborhoods prefer to fulfill this requirement is to build shared housing units for the elderly, for obvious reasons.
The two I personally experienced were indistinguishable from regular residential homes from the outside, but once inside there were some telltales like exceptionally robust fire suppression/alarm systems, and a high density of small bedrooms each having a full bath.
It was actually illegal to rent the rooms to people like me, but enforcement is lax and with CA rents so high, apparently worth the risk for the owner.
Well, Americans do eat quite a lot more food than most people in the world, and thus they need to relieve bowl movements often. This can be a problem if this causes a queue in your house due to a shortage of toilets. There are a few ways to address this bottleneck. One is to apply scheduling to when individuals eat and carefully study the bowl patterns of each person to adequately predict when a toilet is available, say, in a house of two or more inhabitants. Another method is to increase the available resources and add more toilets.
Problems with a single bathroom which includes the toilet:
If you have kids, everyone is fighting over a scarce resource in the morning. Showering/shaving/etc all takes time and you're all leaving in a narrow window.
If you don't have kids the people buying the house may, and they will care. It makes selling the house so much harder.
The bathroom _must_ be cleaned to be guest ready, and they get to accidentally snoop through everything. I love my ensuite for this reason. (and if you don't care about it being clean, your partner probably does)
If you have the room, why not have an extra bathroom? So much easier to build in new construction than add later.
When I lived in Australia the toilet was in a separate room, so the 4 bedroom house worked ok with only 2 bathrooms. The toilet wasn't blocked/held hostage by someone taking a shower. (washing your hands on the other hand...) But this also helped sell the place, since with 2 full bathrooms you can have kids/house mates/etc.
My current house has 3 baths with 4 bedrooms. One is in the in-law suite, which I airbnb, so we have 2 on the main floor. It makes 2 baths for 3 bedrooms. This feels like a nice "adult" house. We have a spare rooms for house guests, and they have a full bathroom they can use. This means we can host friends/family for days/weeks and we can be annoyed by their personality, instead of annoyed fighting over a bathroom. ;)
Of all the weird things in the US, a house having "too many" bathrooms really doesn't seem like a problem.