New builds - why so many bathrooms?

I would expect 3 in new builds.

Main bathroom upstairs
Ensuite to master
Downstairs "cloakroom" (loo and basin)

Which is pretty much what i've seen in builds under 10 years old when viewing recently.
I like it, it's convenient. I find it a must to have a down stairs loo and upstairs bathroom at least. The ensuite is just extra convenience.

5 Bathrooms in a 4 bedroom house is just ridiculous, but why would you "have to" rip one 2 out?
 
I've never lived in a house with more than 1 bathroom/toilet before, I feel like I'm missing out. Though I've never lived in a house built after the 1930s.

A lot of people end up with a favourite chair / or spot on the sofa in the living room; if you have mutliple toilets do you end up with a favourite one?
 
I once worked in a very large house that had a few spare toilets, in one they decided to store all their camping gear (floor to ceiling).

As his wife was such a nasty cow and her parents even more so, I didn't bother to point out that if you leave a toilet unflushed for more than a month, the u-bend dries out and you now have an open pipe into the sewer line below :eek:

She was a real hygiene freak too, so I spare an evil chuckle at the thought of all the sewer mould now growing on her sleeping bag :D
 
you cannot count en-suites as bathrooms / water closet or whatever you want to call them.

en suites should be counted separately and en suites are designed only to be used by the people who sleep in said bedroom.

bathrooms and water closets however are designed to be used by anyone visiting the home or living in it.

i know someone with 8 in total (2 w/c's , 1 bathroom and 5 en-suites) therefore only 3 of them are for general use to visitors, 2 downstairs and 1 upstairs.

imo all 5+ bedroom houses should have 2 water closets downstairs and 1 bathroom upstairs, en-suites usually limited to the 2 biggest bedrooms. so therefore 5 for a 5 bedroom house is normal imo and should be standard.

OP either doesn't have many guests who come over to his home on a regular basis or thinks en-suites are okay to be used by anyone.
 
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I don't understand why you want to rip them out. What purpose would it serve?

It would give us bigger bedrooms and more storage space.

I'm not worried about the house being less attractive to buyers when we sell it. With the amount of stamp duty we'll be paying, there's no chance of us moving soon after!
 
Our new place (4 bed) will have a downstairs loo, main bathroom and an an suite to master which is about right for us.
 
I'll never understand you PS. You say WC and use the full name for it, which is stupidly rare.
 
It would give us bigger bedrooms and more storage space.

I'm not worried about the house being less attractive to buyers when we sell it. With the amount of stamp duty we'll be paying, there's no chance of us moving soon after!

need more details.

i take it your planning on removing a bathroom downstairs (to use for storage)? of which there are 2?

and another upstairs which is an en-suite (to make the bedroom bigger)?

in simpler terms:

how many bathroom's are downstairs?

how many bathroom's upstairs?

how many en-suites?

which ones will you be removing?


also how many people living in said home?

also you do realise you will be depreciating the value of said home? a lot more than the 2-4% you will be paying in stamp duty as well and you are paying money in order to do so.

also do you realise sometimes more than 1 person may need to go to the loo at the same time? and/or more than 2 people may want to use the shower at the same time.

say you have a wedding to go to and you have family staying over and there's like 8 of you and you only have 2 shower's.

most people want en suites, you seem to be the only one which doesn't.
 
LOL. You must have a large family and a lot of weddings or spend an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom! I can count on two fingers the number of times it would have helped when I lived at home. The other 99.999% of times I'd rather have bigger rooms and more space.

I grew up in a pre-war four bed house with a bathroom and separate toilet as it was originally set out 50 plus years previously. A bit of planning in the morning and it was never a problem.

I've no idea why I'd need two bathrooms in a 2 bed flat. I find the bigger main bedroom, the extra storage cupboard and the 10k saving over next door much more useful.
 
need more details.

i take it your planning on removing a bathroom downstairs (to use for storage)? of which there are 2?

and another upstairs which is an en-suite (to make the bedroom bigger)

It's a four storey house.

Basement: 1 bathroom
Ground: 1 WC
1st floor: 2 bathrooms, both en-suite
2nd flor 2 bathrooms, both en-suite

We would probably look at removing one bathroom on either the 1st or 2nd floor, maybe both.

Currently there will only be me and my partner but obviously that could change. :p One of the bedrooms will get converted in a study and I'm calling dibs on a games room until our family expands. But even with all four bedrooms occupied, ripping out two bathrooms would leave us with three bathrooms + one WC.

It's over the 5% stamp duty threshold sadly so we're taking serious money here. There's no way we'll be moving in the next 10 years.
 
If that was a two story house, you had 1 wc on the ground and 4 ensuites upstairs along with a main bathroom, that is one thing, its overkill because one ensuite and one main bathroom would do(though some would have a second ensuite for a guest room). But once you start talking about different floors. You don't want to do several flights of stairs just to take a pee, nor go downstairs to take a pee or have a morning shower and find someone is in the bathroom, so you go back upstairs to wait for them to finish and then do the stairs again, and again and again.

The only way I'd rip out ensuites would be removing them all and putting one bathroom on each floor, but depending on how the house is setup, you'd be losing the space of a bathroom on each floor and would cost money to get basically the same thing.

This is where house set up comes into play, if its a house with stairs in the middle and a big room on each side on 4 floors, there is no real natural place to put a bathroom on each floor so I can understand the en-suites. If its a house with 3-4 rooms on each floor, one bathroom makes sense, but at least one bathroom per floor makes absolute sense.

At some stage in life, stairs become a problem be it having your parents or even grandparents come and stay for a night, friends, you break a leg, twist an ankle, have kids and they will get injuries, stairs become a pain in the arse. You have noise at night, someone gets up to pee, the less rooms they walk past, the less stairs used, the further a bathroom is from everyone else, the better. If you had 3 kids, one ensuite per floor and a bathroom in the basement, then unlucky kid who gets a bedroom on the second floor has to go down 3 floors just to take a leak in the middle of the night.

As for moving, never say you won't move and certainly not for reasons of stamp duty. If you both(assuming you both work) lost your jobs and ran out of cash, and have to sell and move to somewhere smaller, thats life, you don't refuse to do it because of stamp duty. You might have kids, they could be sick and you might need to move near a certain specialised hospital, you might get sick and need the same, you might be unable to do stairs in 5 years due to illness, you might get a job that moves you to the other side of the country, or world.

I'd never change a house based on the absolute certainty that I'd not move for years and years, because anything can change.

One bathroom per floor, is something I would stick with, for certain, unless you can get rid of both en-suites and put in a single bathroom, or make one of the en-suites accessible through another door, I wouldn't be taking any of them out.
 
It's a four storey house.

Basement: 1 bathroom
Ground: 1 WC
1st floor: 2 bathrooms, both en-suite
2nd flor 2 bathrooms, both en-suite

We would probably look at removing one bathroom on either the 1st or 2nd floor, maybe both.

So let's say for instance all 4 bedroom's are occupied, only 2 have en suites due to you ripping them out.

This now means people in the 2 bedroom's without en suites now have to use the basement for showers and the ground floor for toilet.

This would be a terrible setup.

Can you imagine if someone on the 2nd floor needs to pee during the middle of the night? They would have to go down to the ground floor to do so. Also can you imagine how people would need to walk through the entire house naked in order to get from the bathroom in basement back to their room.

Imo the setup in the home is perfect, you would have to be mad to change it. I would stick my gym in the basement (could use the bathroom down there as "changing room"). the toilet on ground is for everyone and then every person has their own en-suite.

i cannot think of a better setup apart from having 2 toilets on the ground floor to prevent people from waiting if you have a bunch of people over.
 
Yeah, there would be at least one bathroom on every floor even if I took out two bathrooms. :)

no there wouldn't, you cannot use an en-suite as you do a bathroom, en-suites are only for the people using said bedroom it is attached to nobody else.

to have what you are suggesting is madness, where people walk into someone else's bedroom to use their en-suite because you ripped theirs out, you would make your home depreciate in value by a lot doing so, as potential buyer's would immediately want to install 2 en-suites.

en suites =/= bathroom

because your house is spread over 4 storey's it is an unusual setup had it been 2 floor's you could have ripped out en-suites because then those people could use the "open" bathroom. since the bathroom is in the basement and bedroom's are 2-3 storey's above this it would be madness to do this.

there's only 2 of you living there, it's not as if you are struggling for space, so why tear out anything which is integral to the setup of the home?
 
Yup, as I said, 1 bathroom per floor as in, one accessible to anyone. Kid number 3 who gets to be in the 2nd floor bedroom without an en-suite will be going down and up 74 flights of stairs to pee in the middle of the night.

My guess is the house setup doesn't really suite a "proper" bathroom on each floor due to having to take a significant portion of one room out to have a bathroom as you have to take the space for a bathroom out, but also the room loses the space to add essentially a piece of hall for two doorways, into the bedroom and bathroom.

The only way I'd do it would be rip out all 4 ensuites and on the 1st floor take one of the rooms and depending on the size make a WC, a big bathroom and if there is any space left a boxroom or whatever. That way all three bedrooms are at most one flight of stairs away from a bathroom.

Without a floorplan and seeing what size they take up, how the house is laid out, I wouldn't guess whats best, but I wouldn't rip out thousands worth of bathrooms, do thousands in a new bathroom, and ripping out walls, redecorating, i'd leave as is and have smaller bedrooms and a more sellable house.

A two storey house with 58 bathrooms upstairs and you rip some out is still very sellable, a 4 floor house with only 2 ensuites on the two upper floors, that become unusable for the other bedroom on those floors, becomes a very ackward house that would be much harder to sell and be worth less.... as I said before, no matter how safe you think you are, most people aren't, even if they are "safe" it doesn't mean some offer comes along or some change in your life that means you want to sell.
 
as above the only way to do it sensibly would be completely remodelling the whole house which would cost you so much money, you would have been better off just buying a bigger home in the first place.

also with drunkenmaster's suggestion it essentially becomes 3 bedroom house with no en suites, which imo is retarded as you would lose a lot on the value and you would be paying for the privilege to do so.
 
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