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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
My workplace has typical commercial toilets and somehow they manage to get clogged at least daily. I suspect the "nest builders" are somehow to blame for all this. I would hate to be a janitor here, honestly. They do keep the bathrooms clean here because we have a lot of foreign nationals whose toilet behavior is um, sorta 3rd World. There are signs all over the place in the bathrooms describing proper etiquette and requirements to wash hands afterwards, etc. So while disgusting, the company is at least trying to keep it under control. The funniest are the signs that show you should not stand on the toilet seats.
Contrasting with previous workplace, it was much the same but the company didn't clean nearly as often and didn't have enough bathrooms. That place had mostly young, white guys in their 20s, and so Mondays you didn't even want to go near those bathrooms because all the excess food, alcohol, and probably drugs consumed over the weekend ends up in dire remorse by Monday morning. Sad, but totally predictable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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 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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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'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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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).
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).
*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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't forget US houses being much lower in latitude - allowing savings in insulation, and generally thinner and lighter construction. New York is further south than Rome.
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.
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.
"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 ...
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
- 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 ...
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadOftentimes 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.
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.
I.E in a 4 bedroom, 4 bath home, there are likely 4 people living there, each person cleans their own bathroom,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
Contrasting with previous workplace, it was much the same but the company didn't clean nearly as often and didn't have enough bathrooms. That place had mostly young, white guys in their 20s, and so Mondays you didn't even want to go near those bathrooms because all the excess food, alcohol, and probably drugs consumed over the weekend ends up in dire remorse by Monday morning. Sad, but totally predictable.
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 ;-)
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.
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...
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChR8ubSW4AEeDcV?format=jpg&name=... from https://twitter.com/hashtag/toilettenb%C3%BCrstenbenutzungsa...
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.
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.
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).
You also have to figure out if electric or gas for the water heater.
This site has some good starting figures though https://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/waterheaters-figures....
>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.
[1] http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm
[2] https://www.home-water-works.org/indoor-use/showers
Either way, this thread reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/oCDW_TSZjVg
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.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/100676582
Genuinely curious, do I need to keep soap on my body for a minimum amount of time for it to be effective?
Especially during winter the effects can be quite harsh.
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.
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.
Who designs these things?
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)
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.
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.
This gets worse if it's 4 unrelated people
[1] https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/06/08/new-california-wa...
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.
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.
Top loaders were popular in the US for a long time, and they 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.
Now the modern washers don't trust you to make the proper selection, and often don't get your clothes completely wet.
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.
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.
I am afraid that is physically impossible, unless you are washing a single pair of socks.
* 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)
This also typically allows for a larger drum.
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.
Another trend that I think is poor design is the "open-floor" trend for newer homes.
I’ve never heard of this pressure control
Pressure-balanced valve - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure-balanced_valve
> 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.
thermostatic showers - https://www.steamshowerparts.co.uk/how-to/thermostatic-showe...
> 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.
left-right controls the temperature, up-down controls the flux
The smaller knob controls if the water goes to the showerhead or just out the faucet
https://www.kludirak.com/pub/media/catalog/product/cache/b3b...
Just picture a one-handle kitchen faucet with a long hose attached. At the end of the hose is the shower head.
It’s much easier to convert an old tub faucet to a shower this way, than by opening up the wall to run a pipe up to a fixed shower head.
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.
The 'wood' used in tall buildings is a heavily processed product that is indeed pretty fire-resistant.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri...
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 ...
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 ...
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.)
I can still remember pointing this out to someone on HN who stated that Europe would fit inside Texas.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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".
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.
Interesting note on the brick veneer. Even if they are not structural I think they are more durable than other types of siding.
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.
https://blog.icihomes.com/2010/03/19/concrete-block-vs-engin...
My current house has 4 people and 4 bathrooms.
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.
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.
edit: any explanation for downvotes?
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.
You forget how advanced we've become with disposable toliet paper.
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.
These SinkShroom's have greatly improved my life. I put one each in my SO's tub and sink. They catch an impressive amount of hair.
https://www.tubshroom.com
I never really appreciated how advanced we are at plumbing. Perhaps it's a product of having to take water management more seriously.
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...
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.
Cross section : https://www.maven.co/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/toilets-00.j...
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.
This article has a rather biased overview: https://toiletfound.com/siphonic-vs-washdown-toilet-which-is...
Personally I find US toilets need to be flushed repeatedly because you don't want to risk a blockage.
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.
As soon as you have >1 persons, you are going to find the bathroom to be a bottleneck at some point.
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.
Need in the sense that, it improves the quality of life, and it's a worthy expense.
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.
(edited)
These aren't small houses.
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.
I don't want to shower and brush my teeth just a meter away from the toilets.
https://q-cf.bstatic.com/images/hotel/max1024x768/214/214010...
No one wants to hold it while the other person is having a nice relaxing poop.
Dual toilets have rescued us twice now from inevitable accidents.
> 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.
Extra bathrooms are absolutely worth the cost.
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'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 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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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?
> Plumbing that leaks and clogs under normal use.
That's not normal.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
Renovate for yourself and your own use, not the next owner.
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.
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.
Up to date breakdown for a cheap one ($12k) (Google translate it if curious) https://www.byggahus.se/badrum/kostnad-bygga-nytt-badrum
labor $6.8k (carpenter 40h, electrician 16h, tiling 60-70h, plumber 1-2days) material: $5.2k fixtures: $3.5k
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From what I understand many in the UK, European countries have separate rooms for toilet and bath.