In March we bought a house and thought it logical to also live there. So we moved, leaving behind a stellar rental townhouse that I’d lived in for nearly five years, longer than I’d lived in any one domicile since the house I’d grown up in. It was a great place that I was sad to leave behind, but it was a rental and we’d simply outgrown it.

The thing I miss the most? The bathrooms.

Here was a truly glorious set of bathrooms. First off, there were three. Three! For a 1300-square-foot townhouse. We were awash in excess. (And, washing in excess.) Yet quantity was only one of the great aspects. Each was uniquely terrific in its own way.

I’ll start with the ground floor half-bathroom.

I loved this bathroom.  The house was built in the late 1970s I think, and while the rest of the world grew up, this bathroom stayed exactly the same.  The olive green fixtures served as an ode to a bolder time.  The wallpaper wasn’t just dizzyingly patterned, it was fuzzy!  I affixed a note on the mirror encouraging guests to touch the wallpaper.  I left the note behind when we moved.

Next was the hallway bathroom at the top of the stairs.

As you can see, this bathroom was very, very red.  It reminds me of the bathroom from The Shining.  Also, harder to tell in the pictures, it was huge!  I’m pretty sure this bathroom is bigger than my freshman dorm room.

The only real negative of any of these bathrooms was to be found in the tub/shower here.  There is actually a sliding door behind the curtain.  So why did I need the curtain?  Because the caulk on the door was the most stubbornly useless water repellent ever encountered by mankind.  It proved utterly beyond modern human technology to prevent it from leaking.  In fact, I believe that I could initiate a flood simply by applying this caulk to the outside of a major dam.  Water would somehow seek out the caulk, through the dam, in order to leak through it.  After a while we gave up trying to use the door and just put a curtain over the thing.

Finally, the truly excellent master bathroom.

Like its counterparts, it is a very distinct color.  In this case, purple.  It also has a jacuzzi bathtub! I can tell you these are no fun to clean because they’re huge and gunk gets in all the jets.  But the trade off is worth it.

The new house also has three bathrooms (or, to be accurate, both houses really have 2.5).  But these three are sorely lacking what was left behind.  We’re planning some remodels once we’re feeling like spending the money and putting up with the hassle.  But even when we do, it’ll be hard to match what we had.

So I have to admit: my lifetime peak access to great bathrooms is now sadly in the past.