I'm be curious if you could have pushed back on the bedrooms one. The term "bedroom" has a legal definition in many places (ex, must have door and closed).
> In the United States, a room must have a closet to be considered a bedroom.
Source? I can't find any that confirm that using actual codes (at least on a national scale), and many (from sellers and lenders, no less) that rebut it [0][1], nor do I see it in the FHA housing policy handbook [2, PDF]. It's possible that real estate businesses customarily don't let you market bedrooms without closets, but that's not regulation.
According to bobvila.com, it's a difference between safety codes and assessing the property.
> Fittingly, property assessors will follow the same bedroom definition when determining the number of bedrooms in a given home—that is, it must have a door, a closet, and an egress window. It is in the interest of homeowners, sellers, and buyers to know the subtle bedroom definition differences between the safety/builder perspective and the real estate/home value perspective, and to know one’s state and local guidelines for determining what can and cannot be considered a bedroom.
This act defines what should be counted as 'room' for overcrowding purposes.
Now courts are not stupid. In such cases 'bedroom' would take the meaning that is generally understood. A kitchen or living room with beds in them are not understood to be 'bedrooms' if you ask someone at random, and thus advertising "3 bedrooms" when in fact there is only one with beds in the kitchen and living room would most likely be deemed misleading and false advertising.
It should be noted that this act doesn't define what a bedroom is, it only says that a room is available as sleeping accommodation if it's a type of room that's normally used as a bedroom or a living room. This would likely rule out larger kitchens with a bed in them but I'd be surprised if a living room/kitchen combo are ruled out given that studio flats with a combined bedroom/living room/kitchen are fine.
In a certain US jurisdiction I have a room with a bed in it I can call a “nanny’s room” but I cannot call a bedroom on a real estate listing, as the closet for that room is through another door in a sort of hall.
In Europe though, where armoires are a thing, and I actually can’t remember living in any home that had a closet in any room with a bed, I don’t see closet being in the definition.
In continental Europe, where armoires are a thing, I actually can’t remember living in any home that had a closet in any room with a bed, so I can’t see closet being in the definition of bedroom.
NYC has a law that for a room to be legally called a bedroom, it must have a window that's not on a lot line. I can't believe California doesn't have a law like that.
> Force arrangement of shared interior walls such that your bedroom will never be adjacent to the neighbours living room, so that if noise does leak through it should not be able to disturb anyone's...
I have to confess, based on similar situations I've been in, that I wasn't sure until I got to the end of that sentence whether it would be "sleep" or "TV watching".
In the current culture bedrooms are more than simply a place to sleep. In multi-member households, a bedroom is typically a person's only personal space.
A bedroom may be required to have a window (and a closet), but an office, dining room, or "bonus" room doesn't. Thus you have apartments or houses, where people sleep in offices, dining rooms, etc. Legislating this just causes people to work around it.
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