I live in NYC and like I said before, lots of buildings have two faucets/taps. It's only the newer buildings and renovated places that have one where you adjust the temperature, or an automatic one that gradually warms up. TBH, I don't think the one faucet step up is common outside of the kitchen, either. I might see it for half baths, especially if it's a really tiny one, but usually there's two taps for bathrooms.

I didn't realize things varied so greatly across the country, but I'm not surprised. I feel like the southwest & west of the country have way more modern building standards than us on the east coast--at least in NYC. Whenever I watch HGTV, I'm always a little jealous of the things they don't do here. I'm going to have to be on the lookout for faucets, now though! I never noticed that detail before.

Most of the houses I've lived in have two taps with a shared spout the water come out of and our kitchen sink has a spout with a single handle for the tap that adjust from very hot to cold water and everythin in between.I've had to use a sink in a washroom that had a sput for each tap once as a child vising my grandma at their old home which was a very old house.They moved away from there while I was still very little.

Okay, I feel like this is where the confusion is setting in for me (and maybe others?) - spout = tap = spigot. Having separate knobs that control the heat of the water which flows from a single spout is very common in my part of the US (NY, but not NYC).

Two separate spouts, one for hot and one for cold on the same sink is not something I'd ever heard of before tonight. I get the feeling some of us are picturing sink 2 instead of sink 1 during the double tap discussion and thinking of the single tap sink as one like sink 3.

I live in the UK, and almost all our sinks have two completely separate taps for hot and cold (like picture #1 in the post above). Our kitchen tap is a mixer (like picture #2), but bathroom still has separate taps. All the sinks at the school I work in have separate taps, too. I think single taps (but still with separate hot and cold knobs) are becoming more common in the UK, but I would still be more suprised to see one tap than two.

Thanks for the clarification. What I saw in the old buildings I mentioned is the version in the first picture, and it struck me as odd at the time, but as I said and Peni Griffin explained, there must have been a logical reason for the arrangement. The version in picture two is what the sinks in our family home were like until my dad remodeled the kitchen and bathroom. Right now having one faucet with a lever is "in".

I love how this thread has become a discussion about sinks

But it's about SIMS sinks! They are all American, I can tell because they all have one spout!


Look! Two taps to turn for hot and cold, but ony one spout...

Yeah, my downstairs bathroom has two different spouts for hot and cold, too. My kitchen sink has one spout, but can turn either left or right for hot or cold. My upstairs bathroom is similar to the kitchen. The utility room has one spout and two different levers (if that's even the word I'm looking for).

As someone who doesn't live in the states, I had no idea that two different spouts and levers would be a shocker. That's what's fun about learning about new cultures, I guess.

Two separate taps (sink 1 in omglo's post) was the norm in the UK until quite recently, and you can still buy new ones (although they're maybe seen as a bit "retro" now). The first mixer taps I saw were (non-working plastic) ones in my sister's dolls' house. I remember my mother telling us they were called swivel taps. That would be about 1959, and the taps were attached to a modern-style sink unit. (Well, modern for 1959!) It was a long time before I started seeing (or noticing) them in real life.

All the sinks in our old house were renewed in the 70s and 80s, but they still all had two completely separate taps (omglo sink 1). We got a new Ikea sink unit in our main kitchen around 1995-2000, and it had two taps with one spout (omglo sink 2). All the sinks in our new (built 2019) house have omglo sink 3 type taps, but with a lever instead of a tap. Our bath is like omglo's sink 2.

All my Sims have got omglo sink 2 type taps, but I never noticed before until now. I thoroughly approve of the way my Sims wash their hands, as they do it the way my mother taught me. Sadly, most of the time they only wash their hands when I tell ask them.

What a fascinating direction this discussion has taken!

I love playing University & lately I've been playing wants based which I never used to do so this Want is very new to me, much like the fear "Blossom gets expelled" - I love this. Blossom & Klara are romantically involved thanks to ACR so it made it even more cute.

I have seen the "Help ____ with Homework" Want, but never the assignment one.

When a sim can't pay their vacation bills, they pile up in their residential home (hope this sentence makes sense)

Great discoveries, but what are the sinks like where you live?

@omglo
As a French living in Paris I have never seen sinks like the one in picture 1.
I have sink with mixer taps (mixing faucet) in both my kitchen and my bathroom since two years.
I'm more used to faucet like the one in my picture or domotics ones.
I have mixed feelings towards some modern mixer taps. Sometimes it takes minutes to figure out how the thing works to get the right temperature (too cold or too hot).

Here in Germany I also never saw a sink like picture 1. All the sinks in my house are like picture 3 (attached picture style), but you will find many sinks like picture 2 and typical sims 2 sinks also. My parents and grandparents have sinks like picture 2. Their bathrooms aren´t older than my, it´s just personal preference I think. The same versions are for showers and bathtubes.

I like this style because I can open, controll and close it with the elbow or underarm without touching it with my hands. I find that rather hygienic even without corona, like with dirty hands from cooking/baking/gardening. And it´s easy to regulate the temperature.

Excuse the tiles & appearance of the taps.
These are the upstairs taps, downstairs are the same but cold & hot are the opposite sides for some weird reason.

Sims exclusively use mixer taps of various designs.

Could this be the reason the UK has stuck with old fashioned separate taps?

I think the rest of Europe joins with Essa and tigergirl. In my childhood house built in 50-ies we didn't have hot water for sinks, only cold water faucet and boiler in bathroom was only for bathtub with mixer faucet and a shower combo. Just like Colonial ComboClean by Imperial Plumbing Works

I'm laughing tears! Oh my goodness, I had no idea this would become a discussion about sinks. Everybody have a

Does anyone have bath taps like this?

All the shower/bath controls I've ever seen in real life have had one controller, and usually some incredibly idiosyncratic mechanism for controlling the temperature such that it's usually impossible to figure out the first time and you have to ask the owner of the house how it works.

EVERY. TIME.

Not now, Simsample, but some really old places we rented (intermountain northwest, USA) have had that style of tub faucets. We even had one of the two spigot two knob kind once. Old, old claw footed tub. The sort of rental where you're considering if you want to use the really expensive 1940s gas furnace or use the original wood fireplace if you're lucky, or spending all winter saying dear Lord why did they pull the wood stoves that would have been so much more efficient and cheaper, and also has no one who ever owned this property heard of insulation?

My tub has three knobs mounted to the wall. One for hot water, one for cold and one that controls whether the water comes out of the spout or the shower head.

Once I managed to wash the walls in a hotel room that had one of those!

My showertub has four taps, one faucet, and one showerhead. The upper pair of taps turn on the showerhead and the lower pair turn on the faucet, which has a lever on it to (theoretically) open and close the drain. The lever doesn't work very well but it doesn't really matter because, though the tub and fixtures are all relatively new, the pipes are the original iron pipes from when the house was built in 1910, and they're so clogged with rust and limescale it takes approximately eight hours to fill the tub. I haven't had a bath in years.