Amtrak bedrooms!? I need to see this my search is on.
I once lived in a very small house where the only way to get to the basement was to go outside and enter through a bulkhead. So you had to go outside, then come back in, to do your laundry.
I also visited a house in Providence, RI where a lot of college kids lived in very small rooms. I was told it was once a bordello.
This was fairly common in places where people, mostly men, came home from their work dirty. They would enter the basement and shower there before entering the rest of the home.
Look on YouTube, @Si_Amigo. A lot of the travel vloggers who travel by Amtrak have shown the wet toilets in their cabins off before. Two I recall are Mike Downie of the “Downie Live” channel, and Paul Lucas of the “Wingin’ It” channel.
Here’s the compact teeny wet room shower/toilet combo in some Amtrak bedrooms.
I stayed in a place in Denmark like that: the bathroom had a sink and a toilet and a drain in the center of the floor and a shower head. It wasn’t really possible to use the shower without getting the toilet seat wet.
What I wonder about such arrangements is where do you stash the toilet paper and towels so that they don’t get soaked.
On a hook outside the bathroom door. But there wasn’t really room for them.
Oh, i forget about the toilet paper. It stayed dry if you were careful, i guess. But the only place to hang a towel was outside the bathroom.
Yeah, I also had that in an inn room in Northern Holland in the 90s, it was just a niche in the wall with enough space for a shower, a sink and a toilet. How we kept the toilet paper from getting wet, I don’t remember at all.
From what I’ve seen on those YouTubes I mentioned, the paper is in a waterproof drawer.
I had an acquaintance who rented a similar small house for a short period of time. Except that the shower was in the basement. So he had to go outside to get to the shower and then, after showering, back outside to return to the main floor. He moved rapidly on cold winter days.
Probably my uncle’s house, which has a basement. Which wouldn’t be so unusual, except that he lived right on the beach (as in, you could step out of his back door onto the high-tide boardwalk). He designed the house himself, and was bound and determined that he was going to have a basement to put his train sets in, no matter how difficult the waterproofing was.
My grandparents’ house (in western PA, but rural) had that (though they also had a curtain around it for privacy). When you’re busy with something in the basement and need to go, it’s convenient.
For many years, my mom’s house had a couple of swings hanging from the basement ceiling. No sliding board, though.
My first apartment in the West Village was like that. The shower stall was in the kitchen next to the fridge, and you had to walk through one of the bedrooms to get to the toilet.
That looks like an accident waiting to happen. Imagine using that at night and stepping just so slightly wrong.
Other channels to check out are Jeb Brooks and Trek Trendy. (Trek Trendy seems to focus mostly on ultra luxury travel experiences nowadays, but he traveled on Amtrak in some of his older videos)
It might have been an accident waiting to happen - but it was in the basement , so no one was using it in the middle of the night with the lights out.
Accidental double post. NM.
Definitely not a waterproof cupboard.
I think it was just a small handheld shower head, and you had to be careful. But the room was so small that you were basically brushing up against the toilet seat when you used the shower, so you couldn’t keep all of the seat dry.
Oh, I lived in a house like that. It was smallish, 1300 sq.ft. farmhouse built in the 1940s. Another weird thing about that house was the bathroom. You’d expect a house of that size and age to have a small utilitarian bathroom, but instead it had one of the biggest bathrooms I’ve ever seen. Probably 20% of the house’s floor plan was that one bathroom. It had a huge vanity with two sinks and about a dozen drawers, a closet, and two doors so you could enter either from the hallway or from the kitchen.
Years ago, my wife and I were shopping for condos. One condo we saw was kind of shaped like a donut: there was an outer ring that was one large open area (containing the kitchen, dining area, and living areas) and then there was a walled-off box in the middle of the ring containing the bedroom.
Our downstairs bathroom in our house in Toronto has a washer/dryer in it (as well as the usual sink, toilet and shower). I guess I thought it was a bit odd when we first bought the house, but now I don’t even think about it.
About ten years ago a buddy took me down to his basement for the first time.
When he had the house built, he had the builder pour concrete walls for a 12’ X 20’ room in the basement. In one of those walls he installed a safe door. Inside… lots of guns and ammo.