if your Bath or shower breaks down,an opition?

If we lost our washing facilities I suppose we would cheat a little by going to our self sufficient canal boat.

I would ask a local friend if I could have a shower in her house.
butterandjam you must have lived in a very isolated place. Where we lived in the post-war years, there was no mains water but the well was all right and the coal-fired range heated the water.

Aely in the same situation I would collect"solids" i. Tissue and put in a dog poo bag and deposit in a dog poo bin. I mean pooh is pooh and hopefully it would only be a daynor 2.

My childhood sounds very similar. Horrid Dr .whites and the constant worry of leakage. Water heated by immersion heater or by a coke back boiler. Once a week bath, hair wash. Clothes changed once a week. Wool gymslip cleaned once a term ....or 2. Sponge cleaned of school dinner stains in between.
It was all so normal at the time. And mostly everyone was the same.

Life is so so much easier now. And I do remind myself that too much bathing is not good for the skin.

At my grand fathers house, the family pee and poo contents of the outhouse bucket were emptied (but not until it was brimming) into a trench in the veg garden. The most productive veg garden you've ever seen....

In rural Scotland, where the ground might be froxen hard in winter, the solution to "what to do with poo" in homes with no lav, was to poo on shovel (or in neighbour's case, old newspaper, wrap it up) and burn it in the stove. Pee outside.

I know this because an elderly neighbour did it all his life. Living in the house he was born in, which was exactly the same as when it was built in 1860. No electricity, no water, no plumbing whatever. Cast iron range. Water fetched in buckets from the same river as me. No outhouse.

Butterandjam, your post does bring back some memories of my youth, although our facilities were not so dire. I grew up in a new Council house with a bathroom. Water was heated either by the kitchen based coke back boiler or the electric immersion heater. Such luxury. However, when I was a newborn we had shared the Grandparents' house with its unheated "attached" loo just outside the back door and a pull out bath under a kitchen work surface. There would have been 5 adults, me and my and my sister (two years older) sharing the facilities in the tiny three bed terrace.

My mother told me about "rags" left soaking in a bucket and how lucky I was to have Dr Whites. Of course, the Dr Whites had no "waterproofing", so periods were still a time of anxiety. They still had to be disposed of discretely, wrapped and smuggled to the dustbin (Father mustn't see) or in the winter slipped into the Coke boiler where they would hopefully, eventually, be cremated.

No showers in school when I was a kid. Sweat during games and you stayed sweaty. Still had to wait for the end of the week for clean clothes or half /end of term for gym slip, jumper and sports gear to be washed. We weren't allowed to take sports gear home during term time. Baths were once a week. No exceptions allowed. Daily top and tail was the norm.

As for my toilet or bathing facilities breaking down now, I can go back to top and tail or sponge bath and I take comfort in the fact I still have water tanks, but the lack of a toilet would cause a real problem. When the inlet valve failed and leaked it took several days to get it fixed and I had to constantly empty a strategically place bucket. I was dismayed to find I couldn't turn the water to the toilet off but luckily the leakage was small. However, if the toilet were unusable I don't know what I could do. The new Aldi up the road has toilets but isn't an all-night store! The nearest public loos are a bus ride away and also closed at night. Of course, I could use a bucket, but where to empty "solids" when needed?

When our new shower room was being installed, our neighbour kindly let us rent his flat at cost for the few days that we were without a toilet. I wouldn't dream of going to a gym just to get washed. There's nothing wrong with the kitchen sink.

When our children were young we lived in the sticks on a wonky private water supply (shared with neighbour) which fairly often went wrong, and stayed broke until we fixed it because no plumber would go near it. (Neighbours immediately moved out to live in town with their mother and their sole contribution was phoning to see if we'd fixed it yet.). The longest outage was 10 days. No probs to me.

I can easily bath me (or a baby, child or muddy dog) on the floor in a plastic washing up bowl of warm water.

When the taps ran out, water came from a tank fed from the roof and when the tank ran out, in buckets fetched by my kids from the river across the road. Happy to drink it (boiled), cook with it, warm it for personal hygeine as above, perfect for flushing lavs etc (to our septic tank).

Neighbour once came by from her exile to ask what was taking so long (!) and found me in the garden, squatting by the tin bath in which I was happily hand laundering pants in cold water. (Her face was a picture; "Butternandjam it's like something out of the third world".

We were of course, all wearing our pants for two days (turn them inside out for day 2). A concession for modern times.
I had already explained to the kids that in my postwar childhood, in our first home which had mains water, hot and cold taps, and a washing machine, we only got one set of vest socks pants on Monday and wore the same ones all week; and we got one bath a week on Sunday night (in shared water) . Mother had a woman who came on Mondays to help her do the laundry. Mother also had one bath a week (last in the shared bath) and kept herself spotlessly clean with a daily all-over wash in hand basin. She impressed on me that this is what ladies did; as taught by her own Mother in a house with NO PLUMBING WHATEVER.

When my Dad died we left the house with hot and cold taps, bath, basin, flush lav and went to live in Mum's NPW childhood home. My job was fetching the water every day; in buckets from the iron hand pump in the garden (shared with next door). This was the sole source of water for drinking cooking, cleaning, washing and laundry. We didnt need any for flushing because the only lav was a bucket under a wooden bench seat in an outhouse.

By now I had periods and just like my grandmother, mother, aunts every day I took some warm water from the electric kettle up to our shared bedroom, put it in a china bowl on the wash stand, washed all over, and threw the water out of the window. Mother told me how lucky I was that now (1959) we could buy disposable sanitary pads ( still an under-the- counter request at the chemist). They had to be burned in the living room fire but not when Granmdpa was around. In her teens, she and her sisters had all used rags, and at the end of the daily lady- wash they washed the used bloody rag in the basin before throwing the water out the window. Mum and her three sisters shared the washed rags.

Try that, you "transwomen" with imaginary periods.

I only shower and wash hair once a week anyway cos it triggers worse atrial fibrillation. In between I have a "festival shower" involving dry shampoo, a good deodorant and lots of wipes. It is what it is.

I've been a member of health club/gym/swimming pool for years so their showers were always a reserve for that sort of eventuality, although I'm racking my brains to think when I used them as such. Maybe in the chaos of having new bathrooms installed.

Why not just have a bath? Maybe people don't have baths anymore?

We have just had four days when our septic tank broke down, so no water or anything else going down drains, toilets, sinks, baths or showers. I won't go into details of the improvised toilet arrangements, but we solved the washing problem by buying a cheap blow-up paddling pool to put in the bottom of the shower and then pumping the water out into a bucket.

sponge bath duh

How can a bath breakdown? We did have a fortnight without gas, so had no hot water, which is a slightly different problem and we did actually do what infoman suggested, but we were members of the leisure centre because we were daily swimmers there.

We have three en-suites. If they all broke down, a strip wash at the kitchen sink….just as we used to do when I was young.

I'd just use the tiny spare bedroom ensuite shower room. If that was also out of action, then I'd go and stand in the back garden in the rain.

At one point my neighbours had 8 adults (2 dogs and 8 cars!) in a house with only one full bathroom! As they were all real gym bunnies, the 6 youngest went there to work out and shower before work, leaving the parents to get ready at home.

I think at our local gym, you can pay to use the showers, nothing to do with using the gym.

Useful if you’re having your bathroom replaced or similar.

The best bath I've ever had was in the Public Baths in Inverness. A friend and I were on a fruit picking working holiday and the provided shower was very primitive. Word got round that the Public Baths were very good and they were - huge deep bath, lashings of hot water and a big fluffy white towel. Each bath was in its own cubicle but you could chat to the person next door and there was a lady handing out the towels and a tablet if soap.

I don't have a shower, just a bath. I often use the bucket-in-the-bath method of an all over wash down (using a sponge) on hot and sticky Summer days. Very economical at times of water shortages. A refreshing cleanse using 2 gallons of water maximum.

We went to our friends, just round the corner, daughter was another option.

If my shower packs up I use our bath mixer shower. The bath mixer tap hasn't failed to date, but I'd use the shower if it did. If all the water has to go off I guess I'd go to the local leisure centre or family/freinds.

I could manage without my daily shower if I really, really had to I wouldn’t be happy but better than waiting in the cold or rain to take me by bus to the nearest gym and the embarrassment of using their showers when I dont actually use the gym
I d just stick my head in the kitchen sink and then have an all over body wash

Crikey buckets in baths and towels on cellar floors. That all sounds a bit skiddy.
If and when plumbing is out of action, I have a stash of Age UK adult wipes bought on line. Brilliant large and effective. Hair I would have a weekly hair appt for wash and blow dry probably just a one off extra expense.
However a loo out of use would/has driven me crackers. I do have a small oval shaped bucket which is useful very short term. But of course if the loo is out of ordee where do you pour the bucket contents away. That would send me to a gym....or Travelodge.

When my shower was out of action I found that I was quite good at washing all parts, including my feet, in the wash basin.
I'm not quite as agile now. Perhaps I need to join a gym.

When our house was being renovated we rented an awful old house with no heating. I used to drop the kids to school and call into a sports club to dress and shower.