Using a Bath

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I would post this as a poll, but I don’t seem to have the option to do so. The weather’s nice, isn’t it? It is… oh, let’s get on with it.

(clears throat)

(straightens tie)

I HAVE A BATH

with no shower, which means that I have to have a bath when I wake up in the morning. Yeah, it’s odd, but on the other hand there is something about lowering your bottom into a nice hot bath on a cold day. It’s like going back into the womb - bottom-first. And when I say “lowering your bottom” I mean, of course, my bottom. This one, right here. (points) Yeah, take a good look.

Now, here’s the thing. I’m a normal man, living in Britain, and I am part of normal everyday society. Which of the following things are acceptable for a normal person to do when having a bath, in normal everyday Western society, in order:

  • Washing
  • Shampooing hair
  • Shaving
  • Brushing teeth
  • Washing clothes (after doing the first four - in the same bathwater)

I’m fairly certain that most people would not be disgusted by the first two things; but that shaving is a bit odd, and the last two are basically Steptoe & Son, e.g. primitive even for the 1960s.

So, assuming you also have a bath, what’s your definition of normal on this scale? Hmm? I imagine that the vast majority of people here are frequent shower-ers, but when I was growing up we only had baths, and I’ve always thought of showers as the other. They’re practical, I’ll give you that. But I never feel that my feet get as clean.

Also, washing the face. Normal way, or do you just roll over face-down? And then roll back again? The world needs to know.

Also, see what I did there, with “I HAVE A BATH (no punctuation) (line break) continue with the sentence”? I was trying to evoke - in writing - the habit that people have of blurting out the beginning of a sentence awkwardly, and then toning things down after realising that they are blurting. Blurt, that’s a great word. Sounds like the thing it describes. Blurt Ward, ehehe. Blurt Russell. William Blurt. ? and the Mysterians, ehehehe. Cloth. Tyres. The freezing of foods. And a lot of bands.

2

The trouble with shaving and brushing teeth is that one presumes you are still in the bath while you are doing them, and therefore at least some of the detritus would then be distributed over your meant-to-beclean body when you stand up. Yech!

As for the clothes washing, do it in the tub, but use clean water please! [This message has been endorsed by everyone who has to share air-space with you - or would be if they knew about it.]

3

The difficulty with the poll is that MPSIMS doesn’t yet have the poll option. You could try again in IMHO if you wish.

I couldn’t tell you the last time I had a sit-down bath in a tub! So my input is that none of those associated activities apply to me.

4

Related link: - YouTube

5

Wash body and shampoo/condition in the bath for sure. If you have long hair, I’d suggest a bucket to rinse with clean water from the tap.

I love baths, but it is annoying that you don’t have a shower. Perhaps you can bathe before heading to bed instead of having to do it in the morning?

6

When we bought the house in Craddock [Portsmouth VA, it was the US’s first planned community, housing for officers and enlisted workers at the shipyard it was next to.] there was a tub only. We hooked up a handheld shower massage unit to the tub, and rigged shower curtains around the tub. They sell kits to do this with here in the US. I would guess they probably do in the UK as well. The reasonably nice thing about this particular kit is that you bolt the support to the ceiling and it is possible to remove it, fill in the little holes with putty and paint over them and nobody would know you had one after you move out.

7

I don’t take baths, but I wash my hair before my body, then rinse both at the same time (only turning the water on to get wet, then to rinse). I don’t do any of the others while in the shower, especially the last one - wtf?! (brushing teeth also sounds weird, not so much for shaving).

8

No, you don’t.

If you want to, you can, but neither custom nor hygiene dictate this.

9

I once had an apartment that had an old cast-iron tub with feet. As nice as it was to take a bath, I never felt entirely clean during the three years I lived there, even with a shower attachment hose. Wash your body and wash your hair, period. Who wants to sit in water with toothpaste and shaving residue, even if you can rinse it off? And washing your clothes in the same water? Maybe if you’re in the Ganges, but not in a bathtub.

10

For the record, this is what I do. I brush my teeth outside the bath whilst waiting for it to fill up, and shave when it’s draining, 'cause my stubble’s nice and soft at that point. Otherwise I’d end up covered in a mixture of tiny hairs and gobs of toothpaste, yuck. Like some kind of avant garde art project. Here’s a video of lady making art by drinking coloured milk and then vomiting it onto some paper. It’s not quite a non-sequitur; there is a thread that binds that sentence to the surrounding sentences, and ultimately it’s more exciting this way, because I can cover more ground.

I was thinking of women, see - they use shampoo and conditioner, which is too much bother in my book, and they do that thing where they wrap a towel around their heads. I’ve never really understood this. Also, coming home from the shops with big paper bags, like in Romancing the Stone. Why do women do that?

11

When I bought the house I now live in, it had only a bath, no shower. I would have been ok with that if it had been a nice deep soaker tub type bath, but it’s not. It’s just a cheap basic bathtub and not particularly nice to have a bath in. Before I figured out how to attach the thing that can direct the water into a flexi-hose shower head, I had to rinse my soapy hair with a pitcher. I did not shave or brush my teeth in the bath. I have never washed my clothes in bathwater. It has never occurred to me to do so, since I have a washing machine for clothes.

12

I have always hated baths, and never feel that I get particularly clean in them.

However, needs must, and my parents LOVED baths, and I didn’t have a shower for a while after college, so I do have a strategy.

If I have to take a bath for cleanliness, I get into the empty (no water) bathtub and leave the stopper out so the water continues to run through. I run the water from the tap to the right temperature, and then leave it on long enough to wet myself by splashing, and wet both a washcloth and some soap. Then water goes off while I clean myself. Then water comes back on, and I rinse off myself and washcloth, then use the washcloth to soak my hair, which I shampoo while the water is off again, then rinse it, then ditto for conditioner. Lastly, I use the washcloth to scrub my skin down one last time (to get rid of the conditioner residue, and any remaining dead skin now that I’ve been damp for a while) and rinse off for the last time (I find that a plastic drinking cup helps a lot with the rinsing). At no point am I sitting or crouching in standing water. Eww.

Afterwards, if I wanted a soaking bath (which I think I’ve done less than ten times in my life) I splash clean water over the tub to rinse it, and fill it up for a nice soak of my clean self.

When shaving and tooth-brushing are involved (which happens frequently for shaving, rarely for tooth-brushing (don’t you have a sink?)), they both happen before the washing process, so that any hairs or nasty scum stuff gets washed off during the bath.

The only time clothing got washed in the bath was for bathing suits, which get rinsed as I peel out of them before washing to minimize chlorine/salt damage, and when I was traveling overseas and didn’t have access to washing machines often enough to have clean undies, so they got washed before me, then hung over radiators to dry out. In both cases, I find showers to be much easier for that process than baths, but again, needs must.

13

IMHO, the Japanese have the only civilized approach to bathing - cleanse, then bathe.

14

I like baths and showers both, and feel clean after either one. But baths take longer and make me more sleepy. I don’t have time in the morning for a bath, so it’s always a shower before work. But I will take one in the evening to relax if I’m feeling tense or cold (and, usually only on weekends).

15

I have a bath and at the moment, no shower (we’re refitting the bathroom in stages), however, my preference has always tended toward the bath.

I shave before I bathe - I do this in the hand basin while the bath is running. Wouldn’t want to do that in the bath, as the bristles would make a mess of me.

I shampoo my hair in the bath by lying down to wet it, sitting back up to apply shampoo, then lying down again to rinse. I don’t have a lot of hair, so I only use a pea-sized blob of shampoo each day.

I wash my face using soap and flannel washcloth (or soap and hands if no flannel is available, rinsing off by splashing water up to my face with both hands cupped together. The bath is of a size that if I sit, my legs are submerged, if I lie down, my torso is 75% submerged and my knees are up and out of the water - thus, by changing my body position, it is possible to wet any part of me, then raise it out of the water to apply soap, then submerge it again to rinse. If necessary, a plastic jug is used to scoop water up for extra rinsing.

“Sitting in my own dirty water” isn’t the problem that some would make it out to be - because of the chemistry of soap - and when I stand up to dry myself, I squeegee most of the remaining bathwater off my body with my hands before towelling dry. I guess if I was caked with mud on entering the bath, the ‘dirty water’ thing would be a non-imaginary problem.

When we get our new shower fitted (in a month or so, hopefully), I’ll probably shower in the morning rather than bathing, just because it’s quicker - but I generally don’t feel as clean after a 10-minute shower as I do after a 20-minute bath - the running water washes the soap away before I can really scrub it in (I guess the solution would be to turn off the shower to lather up, then turn it back on to rinse - maybe I’ll try that).

I clean my teeth over the hand basin after getting out of the bath and drying off.

I do something that some might consider gross in both bath and shower, so it’s spoilered for the sensitive:

I blow my nose into my hands and (in the shower) rinse them over the plughole or (in the bath) use the suction of the draining bathwater - the steam of a bath or shower is great at loosening nasal encrustations - and it’s the ideal opportunity to clear the passages.

16

It’s impossible to read this without imagining Gromit standing next to you, shaking his head.

17

If you have hair longer than a few inches, and/or if you color your hair, conditioner makes your hair easier to comb through when wet. In fact, without conditioner I could not possibly comb through my hair after shampooing. We wrap a towel around our hair because (do I really have to spell this out?) longer hair holds a lot of water, and the towel helps soak it up so that you do not have water dripping off your hair while you are trying to dry your body, getting you wet while you dry, and cold…and then when you put clothes on you don’t have hair water soaking your clothes. Then, when you remove the towel, your hair is nicely damp but not dripping everywhere.

When you shop at a store they generally put your purchases into a bag for you to carry home. Sometimes the store uses big paper bags which double as advertisement. If you shop at more than one store in a particular shopping trip, you may accumulate several bags, which you then carry home. Not sure why this is a huge puzzle.