House Downsizing Featured

Yeah but the cleaning people always hide everything. It might be better to live in squalor.

We've never had a person come in to clean. We could afford it, but even before we retired, we considered housework another form of exercise. That way, it's not really taking up more time, just substituting one form of exercise for another. We're not trying to provide operating room standards of cleanliness; just so the dust bunnies aren't visible and mold doesn't grow in the stall showers. We've saved thousands of $$ over the more than 4 decades of marriage. Wife and I share all household chores. I shop, do laundry, clean my office/den and the bathroom I use most. Wife does most of the cooking and cleans our bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom she uses most. We split all other chores (light dusting, vacuuming rugs, taking out trash, etc.) informally. (When one of us feels it needs to be done, we just do it.) Works perfectly for us.

We solved the child bathing problem - no children (by choice, not medical reasons). As far as tubs of any kind, our condo unit came with a Jacuzzi in the master bath. We've never used it and don't plan to. Don't even know if it works; we don't care. Re-sale value? We bought our current residence as a home, not an investment. We also plan to leave it feet first at this late stage in our lives. If our postmortem estate is worth a few $K less, we won't be around to bemoan that fact.

I like my own juices and don't want to dilute them. My dermatologist advised me to wash by taking a quick tepid shower once/wk and only use soap on my pits, groin, and feet. Obviously, if someone is doing something that makes them sweat profusely or gets their entire body visibly dirty, that's a different story.

We did that for over five decades too. For health reasons, my wife could not do it any longer. When the choice came for to to either mop the floor or take care of my wife, we got a cleaning lady.

My grandparents had a big bathroom where the tub and shower were completely different things. Two people could bathe at the same time.

Most dermatologists give similar advice, for example:

Ahhh, we did that with just one fixture too. I'm still available to some females to scrub their back.

Seems reasonable. I'm usually every other day. Could not go a week.

Next door neighbor did a lot of remodeling before he sold his house. The guy that bought it completely remodeled a remodeled bathroom for their aged father.

I've always taken baths, 90% of the time, and my skin has always been perfect**, until maybe this past year when I started mostly taking showers. Might just be a coincidence but I have a 1 sq. inch patch of "orange peel" skin by my knee. And I have to scrub my feet a bit compared to in the tub where the extra skin just falls off after a little while.

This includes when I was working and took a bath every night. Takes about 30 minutes. 39 years ago I put a radio and tv in the bathroom. Within a few years I had a 12" tv with a remote, and later a remote for the DVDR so I could change stations or play videos. Finally a year ago I got a radio with remote control. I keep them in clear bags to not get them wet from my wet hands. I've never dropped one in the tub yet.

When the first water heater failed, I got a smaller one because, heck, I live alone and things I read said my first water heater was substantially oversized, so I got one size smaller. But it was no good for baths. The water seems to get cold and I have to add a little hot water all the time to keep feeling warm. And the small WH ran out of hot water at about 25 minutes.

For a while I measured the water temp to see if it was really cooling off or if I was just getting used to it (like the apocryphal frog) and sorry to say I forget the results. I think the water was 92 or 93, but maybe I'll find the thermometer and measure again.

In the house I lived as a newborn, there was only one bath/shower, but the room itself was as big as a bedroom, 10 or 12 feet square. I think that's because early indoor bathrooms were converted from bedrooms. This house was built long after indoor plumbing, late 30's, but it still kept the same size room.

I like baths largely because the tub area was lined with linoleum, I think, or some sheet of something, not tile, and the linoleom was no longer well attached at the bottom middle corner, where two sheets joined. Underneath a triangle 2"x2" the plaster was crumbling, breaking off, and falling into the tub, and my mother reasonably thought that showers would make it much worse, but baths didn't hurt.

If my father were still alive, he would have fixed it, but after he died when I was 8, my mother was careful not to spend much money, and she liked baths better anyhow. Plus we were going to move. The new owner could fix the bathroom in the way he liked.

When single, my father had a life insurance policy for the benefit of his mother and indirectly his divorced sister and her son, who all lived together, including my father, until he was 53. After he married he boguht a second policy and after I was born he bought a 3rd. By the time he died his mother had died, his sister had remarried, and his nephew had started college, so even the first policy was paid to my mother. (I know he left my cousin $1000 in 1955, which would be 10 or 20 thousand now, right?)

He was born in Europe, wasn't sure exactly when, and two of the insurance companies thought he was 62, one thought 63, and only the one that thought he was 63 and would have charged the *higher* premium all those years complained. Maybe they only noted the problem. They all paid, and my mother was able to send us to college and live, modestly, carefully, but nicely, the rest of her life on what my father left.

When I was a kid, we went to a Western movie where one of the guys said he bathed (in the river) every year, in the Spring. As expected, on the way home my siblings and I badgered our Mom to let us adopt that schedule, but she wasn't on board with that. Back then, we took baths weekly, on Saturday evenings, in a big steel tub on the kitchen floor, with water that was heated on the wood stove. There were 8 kids and the water got changed after the first 4. I was 3rd in my group and the water was usually cloudy.

My paternal grandmother's house in Philadelphia only had water in the kitchen and the bathroom that was in a shed off the kitchen.

Stove was dual fuel, wood or gas.

It used to be illegal in NY or NYC to take baths. I don't know details but it had same scenario, with heating water in the kitchen, and the reason for the law was that too many people took baths in the same water. (Health issues, but I'm sure that doesn't apply to little brothers and sisters.)