Scenes From My Dream Bathroom

Reflections on the tiny room that completes me. (And all the cute & useful things I can't live without:)

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Eight years ago, when my partner and I were looking to buy an apartment, a few people advised us against buying anything with just one bathroom. “Terrible resale value,” one said. “If you ever want to have kids, it will be a nightmare,” said another. “What if God forbid you all need to poop at the same time?” (Fair.) I remember telling someone who used to be a friend/colleague about the apartment we saw that we loved, that we bought and now live in—and the fact that it had only one bathroom—and he said…nothing at all. He just made a face as though he had to urgently poop himself. (For the record, he had three bathrooms in his apartment.)

Whatever…

I grew up with one bathroom, which my parents, my sister and I all shared. And other than times when someone was ill or extremely busy and indignant (aka: being a teenager), it was never a problem.

I have a friend who has a very fancy job in the marketing department at a global fashion company. When she met her partner, they moved into his two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment that he had lived in with roommates since he had moved to NYC in the ‘80s. They never left. And eventually they had two kids, who grew up to be teenagers, and later moved out to go to college. I remember asking her at lunch, leaning in like we were about to talk about our sex lives, about what it was like to really live, over time, with just one bathroom. Was it hard? Did she dream about a second bathroom like I might dream about a secret sauna in a spare closet?