Indoor plumbing

The subtitle of Siesta Lane is "One Cabin, No Running Water, and a Year of Living Green." The individual cabins do not have running water, but the inhabitants of Siesta Lane do have a shared bath and kitchen. Minato mentions that friends and family find "walking a hundred yards outside in total darkness to the bathroom strikes them as barbaric." I certainly don't get the idea that she is trekking all the way to the main house each time she gets up in the middle of the night, but perhaps she is. My guess is that she is just getting away from the living spaces and using the darkness for privacy. I think about this a lot as I am getting my house prepared to install a second bathroom. Right now we have only one bathroom and it is on the first floor of the house. It is an older home and like many of the houses in my neighborhood, the bathroom was built next to the kitchen since the plumbing was already there. All of our bedrooms are on the second floor and for the seven years we've lived in our house I have dreamed of having a bathroom up there, so I don't have to go down the steps and to the furthest end of the house whenever I need to get up in the middle of the night. I recall that when we first moved into the house, my daughter, then five, brought to my attention that there was only one bathroom in the "new" house, whereas our previous residence had had two, and that seemed to be more convenient. I explained to her that the "new" house had no bathroom when it was built and that people used to have to go outside to use the bathroom, at which point she agreed that we had a pretty good deal. Even as I remember this, I anxiously await the luxury of simply going across the hall.