Toilets, Wild and Mild
IF you have been reading my blog, you know I have had some pretty “wild ideas” at times, that I try to share with you. In this blog, I have both a few Wild and one practical (I will call this a “mild” idea) idea to share about toilets. I will try to make this short. Wish me luck!
In the arena of Wild first, most such ideas stem from some life incident that happened to me or someone I know. I usually look at such “happenings” and ask if I could possibly design a home idea which might solve the dilemma-du-jour. Here is the life incident and this time, it happened(and still happens) to me.
Whenever I and my wife Jacquie go to bed at the same time, I can never “go” to use our private toilet area unless Jacquie has “gone” to it first. Since my usage may render it unpleasant (read between the lines here) for her to use the toilet, she wants me to use it AFTER she does. I have learned to cope with this, but it is frankly an inconvenience at times.
The master bathroom has seen an evolution where the toilet is now commonly found located in it’s own toilet compartment. The master sink area has evolved to become the master sinkS(plural, as in two sinks) area. Let’s focus on the reasoning. WHY do we possibly need 2 sinks in a Master bath? Are we so inconvenienced that one spouse can not wait for the other to finish brushing their teeth before they can use the sink to brush their own teeth? Anyone who has a double- vanity in their master bath would be hard pressed to give it up. Two people sharing one bathroom seems to make sense to have two vanities.
So I ask, are we really so inconvenienced that we need our full privacy when using the toilet in front of our spouse? YES! I want (maybe not NEED) my privacy, and so does my wife. Here’s how I see toilets compared to sinks. If we don’ want to wait for our spouse to finish with the sink, so much that we created the second sink idea, what is holding us back from having two toilets just like we have two sinks?
Think of it this way, I would rather have two toilets and one sink if I had to make the choice of having two of something and one of the other in the bathroom. If we had one sink and I waited for my wife to finish, the worst I would have to put up with is a little water not cleaned up by the sink area. I could immediately use the sink when my wife was finished. Relate this to the toilet. If I had to wait for my wife to finish her use of the toilet and she had rendered it “difficult” to get near due to smell reasons, unlike the sink, the toilet is now rendered hard to use for some time after the first spouse’s usage. I could find a solution by having us both agree to use the toilet in the hall if we were going to make a smell issue. In the same way, I guess we could just use the sink in the hall bath if we both wanted to use a sink at the same time too! Ladies and (mostly) gentlemen, is it not time that we all started putting the same OR MORE emphasis on twin toilets as we do on twin sinks?
I am seeing more and more couple’s asking for twin shower heads , why are we overlooking the only bath item which can not always be used immediately after the one spouse has used it? You might say it could be a matter of price but a toilet just is not that expensive. As for the plumber, sure it would cost more, but it would be less than installing that second sink since we don’t have hot water run to a toilet.
Now for the MILD idea. When I built my first house 20 years or more ago, I thought it was logical that all of the doors would be a full 3 feet wide. Today they have a name for this called “universal design“ . This “universal design” idea also has you thinking about placing electric outlets higher and having at least one exterior door being flush to the ground level so as to roll a wheelchair if needed. Today, it seems whenever I sit with some one to do a custom design, when the 3 foot extra-wide door subject comes up the client immediately warms up to the idea. They usually say this might be handy if either they or someone in their family ever needed to have a wheelchair.
My next question is whether they wish me to make one bathroom to be wheelchair accessible or at least wheelchair “possible” in the future. I explain what this entails and I rarely get any takers. What are we thinking here? We are putting in wide doors in case of a wheel chair in the future but lets hope that wheelchair person does not have to use a bathroom?! This make no sense to me. Let’s see what it takes to have a wheelchair friendly bathroom.
A wheelchair takes about 5 feet to comfortably maneuver and turn so if a common bathroom has a 3 to 3.5 foot travel path in front of the sink and toilet, you should now have 5 feet of a travel path in front of sink and toilet. That makes the bathroom 7 feet wide instead of 5 feet. C’mon folks, you can always squeeze in a 3 foot door in most openings but putting 2 extra feet in your bathroom would be a huge , expensive task to do after the home is completed. The second big thing that is needed is you need about 30 inches of open space next to the toilet so you can park a wheelchair NEXT to the toilet and off-load onto the toilet. That means instead of having a (code required for normal non-wheelchair toilets) space of only 30 inches of wall space for the toilet, you will need to have 60 inches of space. This would make the normal 9 foot long bathroom with 4 foot vanity 11.5 feet long. Again, this is hard to do later, so think about it before the nails start pounding. If you had a 4 foot vanity next to the toilet and later wanted to reduce this vanity and put another 30 inches on the toilet area, I suppose you could achieve the wheelchair space BUT, you would now only have a tiny 18 inch sink/vanity. Think ahead.
I do have another quick WILD toilet idea I will leave you with. I just saw an idea I had thought about for a few years , which is now actually being manufactured! Imagine a toilet that has the back tank raised a little higher and the top is off of the tank. Nicely moulded into this tank ’s top opening is a nifty hot and cold water sink faucet. You wash your hands directly over the toilet tank! This is a VERY “green” idea since you are re-using your gray water(which you created when you washed your hands) for flushing the toilet. For cost savings, you would not need a vanity or counter top. I envision this idea working best in a very limited space OR in a space where you want a sink in a private toilet compartment so you can wash quick before you touch the door with germs on your hands.
Keep reading the blogs. I have enough Wild and Mild ideas to last a very long time. I hope to see you at either Jackson (last day open is tomorrow), or in Milwaukee tomorrow from 1 to 4pm. We had a great day today and the housing market continues to feel like the “good-’ol” days of 5 years ago.
Blessings,
Tom Hignite
Whewh! 1297 words for this blog. I beat my 2000(+) of my last entry but still quite long. I will try again next time to make this shorter. Comments?
