My wife and I are in San Antonio for a conference. We’re staying in a relatively nice hotel room. This room is actually a pretty nice suite. It has a living room area with couches and ottoman, a bar area with a special sink and a mini-fridge, and then the bedroom area which includes the vanity, the bathroom and the closet. It’s a pretty nice arrangement. Nothing wrong so far.

Until we enter the bathroom…

Which is actually quite difficult to do in and of itself. You see, there’s a problem with the bathroom that presents itself anytime you try to enter or exit the small room. Well, let’s just take a look here at the situation. This is from me standing in the bathtub to get the shot:

Do you see a problem here? Well, so do I. Not only is it difficult to get in and out of, but it presents a serious obstacle if ever someone in there were in need of rescue. What if someone collapsed while sitting on the toilet, and fell forward onto the floor? You’re not getting that door open. What you might not be able to see here is that the tub is the same distance from the toilet as is the wall. So it would literally be physically impossible to push someone out of the way with the door. The corner into which the door swings just doesn’t have enough room.

This is just silly. The designer could easily have taken a foot or two of space from the living area, or the vanity table outside the bathroom to add to the size inside. That’s the solution. You don’t design bathrooms where the door has to be that close to the toilet. I see this all the time in homes too. They have these large, luxurious bathrooms with a separated toilet closet that’s no bigger than the toilet times two. So someone can stand in front of the toilet with the door closed, but to close the door you actually have to stand by the toilet. If someone falls forward off that toilet, you’ll have to break the door down. Clearly the people who built this didn’t do any testing.