I don't mind cleaning toilets, but I do mind walking up or down stairs more than I have to, at this point. :|(Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
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I don't mind cleaning toilets, but I do mind walking up or down stairs more than I have to, at this point. :|(Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
Two sinks in a bathroom are good for hand washables, though that's about it; I have a bottomless wash tub in my utility room that would be a joke to try to use for anything short of washing a standard poodle. Believe it or not, that was a selling point. :D IMO, they should routinely design houses with baths standard with each bedroom. It makes perfect sense to me. But I could make do with one per floor as long as I lived alone.
I'm not someone who needs an over-large or particularly fancy dwelling, but I know what I like. At this point 900-1200 square feet, a pleasant view, safety, quiet, and convenience are all important to me. And a kitchen that knows its place, which is not in my living room!
It's good, TeacherTerry, that you have some time to look at the possibilities available in your area.
Oh I understand why have two bathrooms if you have more than one person living there. And also if you have more than one floor. I just didn’t get why two bathrooms for one person and on single floor living would be a requirement.
As for Jane’s comment about a bathroom per bedroom—that’s what I see here in my neighborhood as the Victorian replicas are built. More bathrooms, smaller. And it does make sense. When we renovated our house in the early 90s it was the thing to dedicate one Room on the second floor as a very large bathroom. That has gone by the wayside for more bathrooms of smaller square footage.
One of the things I think about for when we get our real estate finalized, if that ever happens (meaning if we get our Herman house renovated) we’re going to have a bunch of small bathrooms. We’re going back to pre-WWII era where bathrooms are small places of necessity, you get in, you get out.Quote:
Originally Posted by catherine
in that scenario I will have four toilets to clean(3 in Hermann, one in the city) , but not much tile because the rooms are small.
I was describing our Hermann house renovation to architect friends and I found myself apologizing for the size of the bathrooms. And one of them said well you can always bump out the wall and make it bigger, and it was at that moment that I thought to myself wow – I really like the idea of small bathrooms. Why am I apologizing?
And yes, there is no room in a small bathroom for double sinks. Who needs them anyway? We have them in our “big “bathroom in the city and I’ve never once, not once, used them at the same time. We also have one of those giant bathtub with jets that we have never used once, not once.
When I lived in homes with 2 sinks I hated it because of losing the counter space and we never brushed our teeth at the same time. I raised the kids in a house with 1 bathroom and there were 5 of us. Two would have been nice. Tybee, I appreciate the advice but this can’t be dragged out because our income is greatly reduced by splitting. If he rents there’s no money to help me with house bills and we would have to use our savings. Each of us buying a small condo is way cheaper. I plan to list the house 4/1 and find a condo at the same time. We need this time to have him get rid of his junk and I want to get the house into tip-top shape. It would sell fast regardless but the more money we can get the better. We only have 2 weeks supply of homes so really a hot market.
We have one full and one-half bath for 2 people. It is great. I would even be happy if the full bath was just a walk in shower.
Since 1981 we only had 5 years with more than 1 bathroom, and those years were 1 full bath and 1 half bath. We had 3 kids.
It never bothered us ...
Oh - one time we cleaned up an 80 year old toilet in the basement so we would have a spare for emergencies. It was a toilet in a corner. No sink. Ha.
When I was a kid we had one outhouse, well, most of the time we had one, I accidentally burned it to the ground and we were without for a short while. Later we had one bathroom for a family of 7 and to me it felt like quite a luxury.
Today my wife and I have 3 full baths, one for us, one for the grandboys when they're about and one for overnight guests. That seems like the right amount to me.
OK Alan, now you can't just leave us hanging without telling us the story of the fire.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
Probably went there to have a forbidden cigarette and got preoccupied with looking at the Sears Catalogue :devil:Quote:
Originally Posted by rosarugosa
Quote:
Originally Posted by rosarugosa
I think I told this story here once before but I'm happy to tell it again.Quote:
Originally Posted by razz
We lived way out in the middle of nowhere Missouri surrounded by cotton fields and the occasional soybean crop. Our outhouse was attached to a fairly large shed which also doubled as a chicken coop, there was a 55 gallon drum behind the shed which we used to burn trash. My mother sent me out with a paper bag filled with household trash and one kitchen match to burn it with. One of the items in the bag was a pair of pants that had apparently been patched enough times to not bother with another. When I started the trash fire, one leg of the pants was hanging over the edge of the barrel and I noticed that the leg which was inside was burning nicely. I grabbed the outside leg and pulled the burning leg out of the drum and waved the pants around over my head a few times just watching the flames. Now of course a burning section of fabric separated itself from the pants and flew into a pile of straw against the back wall of the shed and before I knew it, the entire shed and accompanying outhouse were in flames.
The closest fire department was about 20 miles away and we didn't have a phone to call them anyway. That fire did empty the fields for miles around as farm workers abandoned their work and headed towards the smoke they could see in the distance. All those fine folks began a bucket brigade from our well to the house, keeping it doused well enough to keep it from burning too.
My dad was picking cotton in Texas that month and it took nearly a week before one of his uncles showed up with a hammer, a saw and a box of nails to construct a new outhouse out of scrap wood. That thing was ugly, drafty and leaked terribly when it rained, but it beat nothing.
Interesting account. I didn't realize that cotton was grown that far north into Missouri. It would be an educational experience for you to go through. How old were you then?Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
I was 7 or 8 at the time and yes, cotton was and still is grown in S/E Missouri.Quote:
Originally Posted by razz
He is pulling your leg.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
Interesting.Quote:
Originally Posted by frugal-one
which part is not true?
It seems reasonable to me. My grandparents bought a farm in rural Missouri in the late 50's that still had an outhouse. They used it for a few years until they had enough money to add the second tiniest bathroom onto the house that I've ever seen. (The tiniest being the one in the 250 sq foot apartment I lived in for 12 years in Manhattan.) That farmhouse was a step up from the house they'd lived in in the nearby city, which my dad grew up in, which didn't even have running water. Only a handpump well in the back yard.Quote:
Originally Posted by frugal-one
There is a house in Hermann, now owned by the state of Missouri as an historic site, that was occupied by the same family from the time it was built in the early 1800s. The last member of the family live there until the 1970s. She never had an indoor bathroom.
Maybe what some find incredible is that there was no government AKA fire department to ride to the rescue and people solved the problem of the fire themselves.
As to the original question of how much space, my 250 sq foot apartment was fine when I moved in. I didn't have much stuff and I was more interested in all the things that I could do in the city than I was in living in a nicer, larger space. By the time I moved out I had definitely outgrown it. I had acquired two computers, a tv, vcr and dvd player, and most importantly taken up beer brewing, which requires a fair amount of equipment and space to store 100 beer bottles. Now we live in a 1600 sq foot townhouse and I love all the space. It's nice having a dedicated office, and rooms big enough that we actually have walls that don't have furniture against every inch the way we did in our 1200 sq foot apartment in San Francisco.
As far as bathrooms, we have 2 1/2 now with only one sink in each. We've never had two sinks in the master and I don't really see the point. But we've lived in places that had 2 or 1 and they were fine. Having more is nice, but not necessary, because once the cats are ready to inhabit the whole house we can put their litterbox in an infrequently used one so that we don't have to deal with the annoyance of a litter covered floor every time we use the bathroom. And I don't see the point of large bathrooms. It's just wasted space that has to be cleaned, and it means that the room will still be cold when one gets out of the shower.
I tend to agree with Iris on extra space. We actually use all of our space, but if it were just me I wouldn't need nearly as much space. I wouldn't need a separate den if I lived alone. Or a separate office. I would just use the living room for all non-sleep activities and the bedroom for sleeping. The smaller but more lovely apartment Teacher Terry mentions sounds perfect for one person. And having her son sleep in the living room when he visits seems reasonable. Obviously they get along and I assume that he won't be sleeping until noon while visiting, etc. If he will, then yes, maybe a place with at least a second bedroom would make sense.
That’s funny Alan:))
JP, my son can sleep through anything. He gets up by 6 am. Yes him and I get along great. He has been living with me since April because of the pandemic.
Thinking more about my tiny apartment in NYC, my upstairs neighbor who had the same layout, had plenty of room. By the time I moved out he had lived there about 10 years and the only furniture he had was a sleeper sofa, a table height wide dresser that sat opposite it and on which he had a tv, a small bookcase, and a small table/chairs in the 10 x 10 kitchen. He was almost ultralight level minimalist, so he just didn't need a bigger place.
It would actually be kind of cool to go back to such a simple life like I first had there, but I'll never be able to commit to the level of decluttering necessary. The only way it will ever happen is if we have the unfortunate experience of this place burning down. There's plenty of stuff that we have that may get used from time to time (the box of orphaned computer cables for instance...) that wouldn't get replaced if we had to start from scratch with furnishing a place.
In the 1950's when we moved into the farmhouse that I grew up in, water was drawn from an artesian well by a hand pump, the usual outhouse and the only indoor toilet was upstairs using a wooden throne with a bucket underneath that needed regular emptying. Within a year, my parents installed plumbing including a bathroom.
It was a rugged 2-storey large brick house beautifully built but most people on farms of that time used outhouses and indoor thrones.
I find it funny how many people today cannot imagine that life was like that and in many places still around the world.
Indeed. My grandparents' house was crazy primitive by today's standards. The electric pumped well that they had produced the most "flavorful" water I've ever tasted. And eventually produced water with so much iron in it that it looked more like V8 juice than water, so they spent the money to join the recently installed county water system in the mid-80's. And their electric service was pretty minimal with literally just a two circuit fuse box for the whole house. Basically one or two outlets in each room downstairs and in the two bedrooms upstairs the only electricity was one bare lightbulb in the ceiling of each room, activated by a pull chain on the fixture. They had strung a strip of old sheet from one to the bottom of the stairs so that one didn't have to climb the stairs in the dark. Seriously, they were so frugal that they didn't even spend money on a proper string or rope. When, in the mid-80s around the same time they joined the county water system, they decided to get central air for the four downstairs rooms they had to have a bigger transformer installed because the a/c unit was going to draw too much electricity.Quote:
Originally Posted by razz
Thanks for indulging us, Alan. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
I know Alan is younger than I am and the only people I know who had outhouses were my parents years before I was born probably in the 40s or earlier? It just seems unfathomable to me. It sounds as though he came from a very poor family. Was that in the Ozarks?
BTW in the last month we updated our electric fuse box to a circuit breaker up to 100 amp service and buried all lines. House was built in the 40s. Thought it would be wise since we don't plan on staying winters in the future. If it storms tree branches could bring the lines down. The city water here also has loads of lead. We filter it out.
As a very small child I remember not having a central heating system and standing in front of the "furnace" to get dressed because it was so cold. That seems unfathomable now too.
I'm 62, and when I was a kid (guessing around 10 or so) we visited some households in Maine where the only bathroom facilities were outhouses. This was on Deer Isle.
Coming back to the OP's question...
IMHO, you need to decide what your absolute priorities are in a list, those which are flexible and coming back to the earlier observation, what place makes you sing.
As I think about all the diverse dwellings that I have lived in, I realize that each of us can adapt provided that those absolute priorities are met.
As a result of this discussion, I now understand better why my list of 15 absolute priorities was so easy to develop, the house was so easy to find and my utter contentment in the decision I made.
Believe it or not there's probably a great deal you'd find unfathomable if you base everything on what you've personally seen. Yes, my family was poor and no we weren't in the Ozarks.Quote:
Originally Posted by frugal-one
When my family moved into town in 1965, we had a furnace set into the floor in the center of the house with a 2'x2' grate you had to step over when coming out of the bathroom, otherwise you'd burn your feet if you were barefoot, just out of the bath. I loved it though because it beat the hell out of bathing in a wash tub in the kitchen after drawing the water a bucket at a time from the well using a hand pump and then heating it on the kitchen stove. Then, if you wanted to warm yourself you had to stand by the coal stove in the living room because there was no furnace. My mother still lives in that little 800 sq ft house, the only one she'd ever lived in with running water. It has central heat and even central air now as part of the re-build after suffering a great deal of tornado damage in the late 80's or early 90's.Quote:
As a very small child I remember not having a central heating system and standing in front of the "furnace" to get dressed because it was so cold. That seems unfathomable now too.
Given that you didn't know anyone living that way I'd have to say you were quite fortunate, but on the other hand I feel sorry for you too, for not experiencing enough of life to know otherwise.
When I was living in the efficiency apartment, I knew I very likely would end up living in a house (mine or a possible future MrsSteveinMN's was the question). But figuring it probably would be just me for a while, I created my list of must-haves and nice-to-haves. The house I bought (the place we're still in now) ticked almost every box (missed out on "nice view" and I would have chosen a color other than yellow but similar homes in this neighborhood show me that yellow was one of the better choices). I'm still quite happy living here.Quote:
Originally Posted by razz
The place does not tick every one of DW's boxes, though she's slowly coming around (another couple of decades and she'll love the place :)). We can't really fix what she doesn't like about the house (she claims the house is "too dark" but her preference is for operating-room levels of light and that's not going to happen) and it serves us better on many levels (location, finances, etc.) to stay here.
The point of my ramble, though, is that by taking a good amount of time to evaluate criteria, you can honor your absolute priorities and make a choice you won't soon regret.
We have owned 4 houses in St. Louis that did not have a centralized source of heat. They all had coal stoves at one time, but in modern times they used electric heaters. Except for our own house, people were living in all of them.
This is in an area where natural gas is cheap and is the common heating source for a forced air system, it’s just that someone has to spend the $ put in a forced air system. People did not have the money to install these systems in these old houses.
I’m serious when I say find out about the rental policy of your condo building. Do they allow short-term rentals ( Air bnb?). Do they allow long-term rentals?
Since security is a major issue with you, you want to think through that issue.
IL, we have owned 3 condos and I always ask about rentals. I didn’t when I bought my first one and it seriously negatively impacted how much money I had to put down and the interest rate. I learned that the hard way.
Oh! Didn’t know that buildings with rentals concerned the mortgage holder but I can see that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Teacher Terry
In my current condo building where there’s 40 units, the owner is not allowed to rent it if it was purchased after October
2017. I’m sure that causes some concern for some people who can’t get their unit sold. In the building there was a foreclosure that people are talking about but I never knew about it. In the same building is another unit that they’ve been trying to sell for months now, but I’ve truly don’t know if it’s overpriced, it might be. It’s a nice enough unit two bedrooms two bathrooms. Was way too big for me when I was looking to buy in that building .
My house is so old we have 3 bedrooms and one bath. The bath has 2 sinks, though, and DH and I often brush teeth together! Maybe once a week one of us has to ask the other, "Are you almost done in there? I really need to get in." Otherwise, no real problem with sharing. Two bathrooms would be a luxury, and additional cleaning.
Having had experience with outhouses, I have no nostalgia for them--or, for that matter, for any of those "can you top this?" stories of primitive living. I'm unapologetically thankful to live in an era of reliable heat and running water. Fortunately, any place I'm likely to purchase will have those amenities. :D
I’m in that sweet spot where we had an out house but we also had an indoor bathroom. It must’ve been installed just before my dad bought the place. It was fun for me as a kid to use the outhouse because it was so different from what I was used to. Dad maintained that out house for about 20 years, and then when it needed major repair he demolished it.
You don't have to feel sorry for me. I have seen enough of poor people and a multitude of living conditions in many places in the world I have traveled. Sadly, it is a shame we had/have to have this in the US. I agree I am fortunate. I know my parents struggled during the early years of their marriage. I was born later so did not have the same experiences as my older siblings. I feel sorry for you to have had such a tough childhood.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
No worries, it wasn't a tough childhood, it was an educational and philosophical opportunity to learn how to rise above your surroundings. I feel bad for everyone denied that opportunity.Quote:
Originally Posted by frugal-one
Good attitude... opportunity... ha.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan