From the end of World War II to the mid-70s and beyond, Phoenix built block ranch homes with beshingled rafters. Here and there was a split-ranch, very rarely a basement home. We had learned how to build on slab, which meant that all production homes needed was level lots – and we had a desert full of ’em.
So: Two bedrooms, one bath. Very common at first. Even three bedrooms, one bath and an inadequate wall heater, all in 995 square feet. If you find half-baths in vintage ranch homes, they’re likely to be after-market additions. The big luxury upgrade was the three-quarter bathroom in the master bedroom – toilet, vanity and shower, often in a 6 x 8′ closet-sized space.
Builders put up zillions of these homes, all across the Valley of the Ever-Fecund Sun: Three-quarter bath in the master, eventually with extra space and other luxury amenities, and a ‘full’ bathroom in the hall. What a full bathroom meant was a tub but not a shower. Babies, toddlers and children need bathtubs, so the kid- and guest-bedrooms have access to the tub.
Del Webb built much of Sun City just this way, three-quarter in the master, sometimes with the vanity out in the bedroom, and a tub-bath in the hall. A very common after-market upgrade was to convert the latter into a shower-bath; if you have to duck to rinse off the shampoo, you found one.
But given that the distinction between a two-bathroom home and a one-and-three-quarter is ultimately academic – where the true ‘full’ bath is substantially less useful than either a shower or a shower-bath – I plan to ignore it altogether, going forward.
In other words, in my listings if there are two places to bathe, that’s a two-bathroom home. The inspector or the appraiser can quibble, if they choose, but if they actually look at the photos in the comparable listings, they’ll see that the two types of bathrooms are continuously conflated. The way to search is from 1.75 to 2 bathrooms, to catch everything, and the way to list is to not get bogged down over functionally-equivalent amenities.
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