Some people are very hesitant about other people going into their house, even if they aren’t strangers.
ETA unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Well, you really can’t hire an electrician to add stuff to the inside of your house without letting them in the house. 
When house hunting we came across a house that must have originally been a very basic cottage style, front door center, back door center, and a concrete exterior stairwell than led down to the basement as well as an interior staircase back to the first floor.
One of the past owners must have wanted an attached garage so they built it on the side where the concrete stairwell was. So I guess if you parked in the garage and were carrying groceries in to stay out of the rain you would haul them down the stairs, through the basement, and back up the stairs to the kitchen.
Just a curious data point: in Central Europe it was quite frequent until about the 1980s to have a separate toilet room and a separate bathroom which were not to be mixed or confused.
Maybe some Europeans can share their experience and let us know if that’s true also for their country.
Too late to edit…
Imagine my slight confusion as a young boy learning English, when English speakers asked for the bathroom when they really needed the toilet room…
;o)
It was at least true for my grandparents’ bathroom/toilet. We all lived in a multi-generational setting in a house that my family had built in 1893, and while my family’s apartment had only been built in the attic in the late 1960s, my grandparents had a single toilet and a separate bathroom. And even that was a relatively new set up (maybe from the late 40s/early 50s), because at the back of the house on the basement floor, there still was a stand-alone toilet you could only reach by crossing a piece of the backyard which had been the only toilet for the whole house (which at some times housed up to 15 people) for the first five or six decades of its existence.
Now you reminded me my friend in high school had one of these in the backyard. It was a wood shed but pretty roomy, had full carpet, a mattress laying on the ground but fully sheeted, and most of all had a TV and a window AC unit made from a custom window cut into the side. It was basically our hangout room as we could make as much noise as we wanted and not bother his parents which I assume was the point since my friend also had his drum set in there.
Well, it’s someone else’s house now, but it used to be mine. It was my favorite house I ever lived in. A one-of-a-kind design, probably an architecture student’s senior project. It had many clever features and a few whimsical ones.
The room wasn’t so much weird a a rare feature. Upstairs there were, conventionally, 2 bedrooms and a bathroom. And the dedicated darkroom. It had a fully functional long, low sink. There was a hinged “counter” that folded down to cover the sink when it wasn’t in use. So there was lots of counter space, tons of storage cubbies and a bump-out window that ironically sported the only glimpse of the bay available in the house. No doubt the window was easily blacked out when the room was being used for its purpose.
Since my husband and I weren’t photographers, we fashioned it into an upstairs mini-kitchen for our guests. We installed a coffee maker, a small drinks fridge and a basket for snacks. We left the hinged counter in the up position and put a dish rack on one side of the sink so guests could rinse their dishes. The room was also was styled as a gift wrap room and provided storage for out-of-season clothing.
I really appreciated that odd little room!
Probably the weirdest thing is that it does not have air conditioning, or a hole where one could be installed, or windows. Those are things you would definitely need around here if you were using it for one of those purposes.
In the Philippines they don’t use toilet paper, you either use a spray nozzle to wash you butt clean or use a bucket and a dipper to wash your arse . Actually very refreshingly clean.
Well. I’ve been in houses where there was a room with decoration in poor taste. Or where there was a hygiene problem. But just weird, as in, bizzare? Well, I’m hard-pressed to think of one. The closest I can get to is describing a house that spooked me as a kid, seen through the filter of a sensitive 6-7-year-old.
My parents had a colleague at work called Miriam and the family visited her in her house a few times. I can’t zoom in on one specific room, but this lady really liked cats; she had a number of kitschy cat figures around the house. One of them really creeped me out; it was really big and all smooth and shiny, almost like a panther, and with big green eyes with prominent radial lines to the irises (or so I remember it). I remember feeling super unsettled at that visit. I might have even knocked something over and gotten Miriam mad, and we may have gone home earlier.
The last time we went there, when I was seven and a half in 1987, I saw something there that creeped me out probably even more, in Miriam’s kitchen. She and her husband or boyfriend took my family there and showed us a drawing that would have been posted on their fridge. It had been drawn probably by the couple, with one of them drawing one half of the picture and the other one the other half. The result of this experiment in artwork was a depiction of a young two-headed pregnant woman (the fetus seen in a cutaway of her belly), singing while playing a lute or guitar. At least that’s what I remember. I found the image uncanny to the point of being unsettling.
For many years, ending in the early 1980s, my grandmother lived in a house with a bathroom that had two doors, both of them opening into bedrooms. In other words, you had to go through a bedroom to access it.
That’s called a Jack and Jill bathroom and such things are relatively common, such as between two children’s bedrooms.
I knew a guy who was renting a room in a house in the Santa Cruz mountains, it had 2x4 bare wood beams and plywood as “walls” and a shower with a wooden slats as a floor…“rustic” would’ve been putting it mildly.
Nowadays, I could understand it, but this was just a sink, toilet, and bathtub in the middle of the house, and the only bathroom.
Just a sink, toilet and bathtub? Doesn’t that define a bathroom?
The “Jack and Jill” bathrooms I’ve seen had the toilet and bathtub/shower in the middle, with a door, and sinks on either side and sometimes in the bathroom itself. KWIM?
When I arrived for a temporary stay in a private room at one of the older Oxbridge colleges, I opened what I thought was a closet door and discovered to my surprise that there was a sink behind it, complete with mirror and medicine cabinet. Never seen such a thing before or since.
Now, that’s a category of room which I’ve never seen in a real estate listing!
In melb.vic.aus I’m presently living in a dual-bathroom house. The master-bedroom ensuite is American style, the other is outhouse style (separate bath and toilet rooms).
I’ve recently been in a new small cheap single-toilet rental where the toilet is across the hall from the bathroom, but I think that was mostly because “small, cheap” and the space worked out that way.