Bedrooms usually take up most of the space on the second floor. Bathrooms are necessary for getting ready for the day and winding down before the night ends. With only so much space in a home, the question now is if every bedroom needs to have a bathroom?
Ideally, each bedroom should have a bathroom. The minimum size of a bathroom is 30-36 sq ft( 6 ft x 5 ft) which can easily be constructed and fitted into any bedroom. Bathrooms are often the first and last place that people go into during their day, and it’s more hygienic to have one for each person.
Aside from these reasons, having individual bathrooms increases the real estate value of your home. It’s especially useful if you plan on renting out a room to a tenant or Airbnb soon.
Should every bedroom have a bathroom?
We first need to establish the context of a bedroom. The typical American home has a household of 3 – 4 members, entailing that the average house has 3 to 4 bedrooms. Now, 3 to 4 bathrooms might seem like a bit too much but let’s examine step by step why having an individual bathroom for each of these rooms.
- Primary Bedroom
The biggest room in a home is usually reserved for the owner/s of the house and their partner. It makes sense that they also have the largest bathroom since master bedrooms are often designed to be used by 2 people.
You want a bathroom specifically for this bedroom because the house owners must have all their hygiene needs just there in their room. It makes sense that they need to have their space to make themselves presentable to others.
- Bedroom for Kids
Most families have a family bathroom on their second floor to bathe their kids. However, as kids age, they tend to want more privacy and autonomy. Having individual bathrooms in your kid’s bedrooms helps teach them how to follow a routine and care for their own spaces. Aside from that, it’s much more practical for them to be able also to have access to a bathroom.
- Bedroom for Guests
Some houses with extra space tend to have a bedroom specifically just for guests. It would be quite uncomfortable for everyone if you could all hear a guest taking a shower or spot them walking around in a towel in your house.
This is why most accommodations provide bathrooms in their units. Activities such as using the bathroom must be kept entirely private.
We’ve covered the more social and personal reasons as to why you would want to have a bathroom inside every bedroom in your home. In this case, it all boils down to privacy and hygiene reasons.
How do you put a bathroom in every bedroom?
We’ve answered why it helps a lot to have individual bathrooms, but the question now is if it’s practical to have one. Typically, you want your plumbing utilities to be aligned vertically and horizontally in a home to maximise their efficiency. More often than not, most homes already have some water source at every corner of the house.
To add a bathroom( completely from scratch) to an existing space costs around $5000. The price tag may be steep, but this already includes all expenses from start to finish. This includes the following:
- Additional walls for your new bathroom
- Utilities (Pipes and electricals)
- Fixtures (Sink, Toilet, and Shower)
- Finishes( Tiles, paints, etc.)
- Windows/Vents
- Labor
- Permits
You can also go for an alternative if you currently have a public bathroom on your second floor. You can change the door position and fixture position so that the bathroom is instead facing inwards into the room beside it, which is more often than not a bedroom.
How often are bathrooms used?
With all these costs and talks about benefits, it’s important to get an idea and how often a bathroom is used.
A person typically does their business in a bathroom around 8 times a day, takes a shower around twice a day, and does other activities(putting on makeup, brushing teeth, washing hands, etc.) at least twice a day. All in all, we enter our bathrooms at least thirteen times a day over 24 hours.
This means that we use a bathroom at least 4,628 times a year. If 2 people were to share a bathroom, then that bathroom would end up being used almost 10,000 times a year.
A personal bathroom doesn’t add up to this, considering we rarely spend time in our homes( as people are usually at school or work), but we can say that bathrooms play a big role in our day-to-day routines.
Design Interventions for shared bathrooms
We understand that not everyone can have individual bathrooms built for each bedroom. Just to give context, in terms of cost-saving and space efficiency having a shared bathroom is the best way to go and that’s why architects design that instead of individual bathrooms.
We’ll be assuming that a shared bathroom will be for 2-3 people. Here are 3 ways to make a bathroom more welcoming for multiple users.
- Store items for individual users
There should be separate containers and hangers for each user of that bathroom. For sanitation and hygienic purposes, it’s best to avoid sharing toiletries and towels. Since these are lightweight items, you can easily fasten containers to your bathroom walls to hold them.
- Increased privacy
Increasing privacy might seem weird considering most of the time the users will probably be using the bathroom themselves, but it does help to set up an additional barrier. Curtains, glass screens, and even walls can be used to cover up to show areas and also effectively prevent water from spreading across your bathroom.
- Proper Ventilation
A shared bathroom will definitely be used more and this entails that smells(from your toilet) and moisture(from showers) will be much more abundant. You can circumvent the negative effects of these by increasing ventilation either by having a wider opening made or by installing a ventilation fan inside the bathroom.
Conclusion
Having a bathroom in every bedroom is a great project that comes with many benefits. Getting it built from scratch can get quite a bit expensive, but, in the long run, it is well worth it. Adding spaces is a surefire way of increasing your home’s value, and adding amenities improves the quality of life by a noticeable amount.
Sources
- https://www.mydomaine.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-add-a-bathroom-5115545
- https://www.houseplanshelper.com/bathroom-dimensions.html
- https://www.homify.in/ideabooks/272491/7-options-to-cover-the-shower-area
