Antares - you say you have never had more than one bathroom. Does this imply that you ever had less than one bathroom?
My grandparents house is 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom. They do fine. Did I mention that they raised all 6 of thier children in that house? In can work.
Well, now I know what to call my house when I want to sell it. “Functionally obsolete,” thanks! 
We have one bathroom and four people (2 adults and 2 kids), and it’s not too bad. Our problem was running out of hot water, so we installed a 50-gallon water heater.
We’re fixing up the basement to be a family room, and we’re putting in another bathroom down there, but rather than just a half-bath, it’s a full bathroom with a shower.
I grew up in a 3 male, 1 mother family and when I married my family was the same. One bathroom was plenty but both places had seperate toilets.
Same here - firstborn of 5, and by the time I joined the Navy, we’d had 8 years of 7 of us sharing one bathroom, although we did have a second toilet and small sink in the basement. Mom taught us early on that one could shower in 5 minutes and get just as clean as if you spent an hour under the hot water. (That was the other issue - enough hot water)
The bathroom was for bathing and teeth-brushing, not for dressing, making up, coiffing, or any other non-specific bathroom function. That’s pretty much the way we treat ours today, even tho we have 2 full baths. Life’s to short to spend it in a tiled room.
We have one bathroom (and incidently, no shower), so it was of the utmost importance to choreograph the bathroom activities for the family of three.
I get first dibs on the bathtub in the morning. My husband uses my water for his bath. No exceptions.
It takes a good 45 minutes to regenerate the hot water. If all three of us had to go somewhere together, I would get up earlier than them so there would be hot water for my son (who won’t be the third person to use the bathwater – and I don’t blame him).
If you’re doing something other than using the toilet or taking a bath, you must vacate the bathroom upon request. That means if you’re halfway through your make-up, you have to let the requestor get in there, do their thing, and then resume doing your makeup.
When other people are home, there are no extended baths. You get in, get clean, and get the hell out.
It was do-able with three, but a family of four would have been a huge drag.
One more thought - regarding resale value, unless you realistically expect that you’ll have to sell the house soon and quickly, don’t fret too much about resale value. You’re buying the place for you, not some theoretical future buyer.
The first house my husband and I bought together was a 1 bedroom 1 bath place, and we sold it just fine. Just because most people consider 3-4 bedrooms and 2 or more baths to be required, the fact is, not everyone wants that much of a house.
So, buy the house for you if it meets your needs and don’t worry about what someone else will want at some indeterminate time from now.
Mrs Pergau and I can’t manage on a house with 3 bathrooms!
If you have kids, it will save on wear and tear in the house if you have a toilet /wash basin downstairs and the bathroom (bath,/shower, toilet, Bidet?, basin) upstairs (assuming you have two floors). This is the the minimum I would go for.
If you can get an ensuite bathroom (perhaps just a shower, toilet and basin) for your bedroom and a bathroom in the house, this is luxurious.
If you can get an ensuite, a bathroom and toilet, you are lucky.
The ideal solution is to have “n” seperate toilets in your house, where n = (no of persons in the house +1).
Pergau, you’re suggesting that you should ideally have more toilets than there are butts in the house to put on them? You’ve got to be shitting me!
We managed just fine on one bathroom when I was a kid. We had to stagger our schedules a bit to make sure everyone had enough time and hot water to shower before going somewhere, but since we all took very different amounts of time to dress and fix our hair and stuff anyway, that really wasn’t a big deal. If you were in there brushing your teeth, or drying your hair, or whatever (Mom always did her makeup in the living room, and I never have worn any on a regular basis), and somebody decreed they needed in there now, you left your grooming half-done and yielded the bathroom to them. If you were on the toilet, and somebody else needed in, you finished as quickly as possible and yielded the bathroom. There were occasional moments of me dancing around pounding on the door, yelling “C’mon, I really gotta go!” while my brother dawdled through washing his hands, and cleaning his nails, and anything else he could think of (my brother was a bit of an asshole), but to my knowledge nobody ever soiled themselves waiting for the bathroom, even when we all had stomach viruses.
Come to think of it, hardly anybody I knew had multiple bathrooms (or half-baths, for that matter), and none of those people had kids. They were all retired folks with two people living in the house. All of my friends had siblings and both parents living at home, and they all managed just fine, too.
I never understood the thing about having two full baths, really. Most houses don’t have enough water pressure for two people to shower simultaneously, so the extra bath just means more cleaning for somebody.
I know other people have mentioned the “plumbing disaster” problem. And you may go 30 years in the house without one. But we were without our upstairs bathroom for months last year because we had a major shower pan leak, and decided the bathroom was in serious need of an update. It added value to our home and is very nice, and we had not just one extra bathroom but several. But imagine, if that were your only one. What would you do? Take showers in a bucket? Walk down to the gas station?
I grew up with one bathroom in a five person family. I am the oldest of three girls.
I don’t recall it ever being a problem…
As said, it entails some rules that my children (living in a three bathroom house) are unfamiliar with. You use the bathroom to shower (or bathe), use the toilet, and brush your teeth. Hair can be blowdried and makeup applied in your bedroom (except my mother, she did get to use the bathroom for these things, but we girls used our bedrooms). This was useful in college when the bathroom was not a place to hang out (dorm bathrooms are only slightly better than bathrooms in a turn of the century apartment that get cleaned on a strict semi-annual basis). A flexible schedule helps as well…we never had more than two on the same bus, so I was always out of the house before my little sister got up. My dad always stayed in bed until all the children had cleared the house and began work around 9:30 or 10:00. My mother would fit her shower in between me leaving and the little one getting up.
We did have an occational problem…we lived in the boonies and had well water, which was dependant on electricity. Living in the boonies, when your power goes out, you aren’t on the electric companies high priority list. Fortunately the house was on a lake and had an artesian well - self flowing and deeper than our house well - the provided water. Every few years we’d go back to something that looked a lot like turn of the century living for two or three days. Once this happened while my cousins (three more teenaged girls) were in town, so there were ten people “bathing” in the lake.
You people ARE spoiled! And I win too! 
I grew up in a family of 9 - seven kids and two adults with only one bathroom. OK it was pushing the boundaries a bit but you just get on with things. As people before have mentioned visits to the bathroom are staggered and scheduled for important occasions like weddings/ Christmas/ family occasions etc. where the whole family was going out and needed to use the bathroom. You check with others if you’re going to spend a long time (and this teaches consideration of others…). You get out if you’re doing something not very important and someone else is in a hurry etc.
There were rows of course and it would have been nice to have had two bathrooms but no one ever had any accidents and we managed fine.
I think another toilet would have been good but I honestly can’t envisage a situation where three people need to go to the toilet at the same time. Also two people showering at the same time - rare and needs careful plumbing anyway. The only reason to have extra bathrooms is for more luxury but it’s not essential. To suggest otherwise IS being spoiled.
On the no-bathrooms front…I am not yet 40 and I went to school with a girl who got their first indoor bathroom (and indoor plumbing) when we were in junior high. Would have had to have been around 1980. I think that family had five kids and three generations in the house - course an outhouse doesn’t break.
By the way, she was one of the “popular” girls who was always well groomed and made up. Even taking her baths from pumpwater out of a tub in the kitchen.
I grew up with 1 bathroom for a family of 4 – there’s no reason you have to have any more than that. Live with your family, not just near your family.
You know, I’m late for work a lot more often now living by myself than I was ever late for school when growing up. Hitting that snooze button back then meant spending the day at school without having had a shower or brushing my teeth - it just wasn’t worth it.
I will offer one caveat, though. Our nearest relative lived less than three miles away. That was vital the one time I can remember our one bathroom being out of commission for more than a day. Of course, the plumbing problem we had would have put all bathrooms out of order, no matter how many we had.
My two scents worth…
There will be times when a bathroom has been rendered uninhabitable. Were you to just have the one to choose from, you’re then faced with a rather unpleasant dilemma. But should there be a back-up, then you’re not all forced to scamper about with crossed legs and pained expressions.
Actually, our power was out for three days, and because we’re on well, we had no tub, no toilet, no kitchen water (and no heat) for three days. It was a real drag. I bathed at a friend’s house. I also use a curling iron, so I had to do everything there. I was reading Angela’s Ashes at the time (by the firelight) and was able to relate in a small way to the poverty THOSE people had to endure. It sucked for us, but lots of people have it worse.
Actually, there is one big advantage to a family sharing a single bathroom- fewer illnesses. What happens is that the family is exposed to one another’s germs- the ones little Timmy picked up at day care, the ones Suzy picked up at the playground, the ones Dad and Mom picked up at their respective workplaces, which gives the immune systems a chance to build up resistance to more different kinds of infectious agents.
Incidentally, a lot of doctors are now saying that those anti-bacterial soaps aren’t such a hot idea for the same reason- kill all those little germs before the system has a chance to be exposed to them, and the body never properly develops immunity to them, making it more vulnerable to infectious diseases down the road.
CrazyCat and others,
I think you are taking me too seriously. I said that the ideal situation was to have an abundance of conveniences.
But that said, I like the privacy of having an ensuite bathroom. If we have guests (not often, but it does happen) it’s great to have a separate bathroom for them. and as our house is a two-storey, it is great to have a toilet downstairs.
I agree that this isn’t necessary but you’ll have to agree that two toilets is a much better situation than just one. And an ensuite is (standard in the master bedroom in new builds in Ireland) really nice, esepecailly if you have teenagers in the house.
When you are buying a house, it is your budget that will eventually make the decision but given a wish list, Lots a loos, is on mine.
WC’s all round I say.
Thank you everyone who responded to my query – your observations and experiences were quite educational. (Though I just can’t imagine living as did YoudNeverGuess, with a 9-1 humans-to-bathrooms ratio – yikes!)
We’re declining to make an offer on that particular house, since there were some other downsides (no storage space/tiny closets, for instance), but I’m less inlclined to consider 1-bathroom a deal-breaker after hearing all of your opinions. All of the reminders about resale value were good too, though the rationale is strangely recursive. (“Why would you want more than one bathroom?” “The people who’ll buy the house from you will want more than one, and will pay more.” “But why will they want more than one?” “Because the people who buy the house from them will want more than one, and will pay more…”
Ah well.
-P
[QUOTE=BiblioCat]
Well, now I know what to call my house when I want to sell it. “Functionally obsolete,” thanks!
QUOTE]
Not to worry, Bibliocat. He’s a realtor–he HAS to say these things.
Every time we go to tour a house, he spends what seems like hours looking at the floor joists and foundations and roofs and such, and I spend the same amount of time standing in the kitchen, turning around and around and musing about whether the house has enough “character.”
Unfortunately, the houses with all the character are also the ones with bad floor joists and foundations and roofs and such. I’m pretty sure the qualities he wants and the qualities I want are mutually exclusive. 
My best friend growing up was the youngest of 14. They had one and a half bathrooms. Somehow they managed.
The neighbor to one of my best friends raised 11 kids on a one bathroom, three bedroom house.
You learn to live without.
However, you have to think long term for resale value down the road. If you cannot add a half bath somewhere, possibly the basement, or add on another level/addition, you may be creating a selling nightmare 5-10 years down the road.