In the old days, it wasn’t uncommon to have a house full of 8 or 10 people, all of who had to share the same bathroom. Of course, in some places, that bathroom was little more than an outhouse. In some ways, the “good old days” are best left behind us.

Today, homes are more likely to have a higher number of bathrooms, and that’s a good thing. Figuring out how many bathrooms you want out of a home is an important part of the home buying process. The more bathrooms you need, the bigger the house is likely to be, and the more money you’re going to probably have to take in a home loan.

One option is to have a bathroom for every bedroom. In the average family, you’re probably talking about having 2-3 bedrooms and 2-3 bathrooms. Each person in the family has their own bathroom, except the parents who likely share a bathroom.

Now, are all of those bathrooms necessary? Probably not. The odds of all of those bathrooms having to be used concurrently aren’t very high at all.

In addition, the more bathrooms you have, the more cleaning you’re going to need to do.

As a rule of thumb, you can probably get by with these proportions:

• One bathroom for two or fewer people
• Two bathrooms for between two and five people
• Three Bathrooms for between five and eight people.

There are other reasons you might think about looking for a home with more bathrooms. If you do a lot of entertaining of large groups, for example, you might consider having an extra “guest” bathroom, or at least an additional half-bath. You also might consider buying a house that has a bathroom in the basement, if there’s a good bit of livable space in the basement. Of course, if you have a home office, it doesn’t hurt to have an extra bathroom nearby for those occasions when you might have people in your home office for business purposes.

Photo via RealEstateZebra