Washbasins in bedrooms

[PaperPanama]

When I was a child we each had a washbasin in our bedroom. Several of my friends' families also had washbasins in the bedrooms. It wasn't unusual then. But you rarely see it nowadays, even in houses without multiple en suites. Why is this? They are very useful because they reduce the time each person stays in the family bathroom.

Actually, this reminds me of a hotel in Paris many, many years ago. One of those old Hauseman apartment blocks, converted into a hotel. The first time I stayed there, there was a basin in the room, but no en suite. You had to go down the corridor, one way to a toilet, the other way to a shower room. Both had lights on timer switches. The next time I stayed there, a couple of years later, they had 'en suites', ie a stand-alone shower next to the basin. 5-10 years later, they had full 'en suites' in some rooms, ie they had boxed in the shower and basin, and added a toilet. But the walls that boxed in these facilities did not extend to the ceiling!

So cheap and cheerful and atmospheric. I loved staying there. It was weird and friendly.

Wouldn’t the carpet around the base get damp? Or maybe it’s just my family who can’t keep the water in the basin…

Our house had a washbasin in every bedroom. We made it a priority to install an en suite in the three largest rooms and designated the family bathroom as exclusive to the smallest bedroom. (DH has uncomfortable memories of queuing for the shared bathrooms at boarding school and was determined none of our guests would be subjected to similar indignities.)

We put one in our bedroom when we first moved in (3 bed semi - definitely no room for an en- suite). Really useful when we had children, and now they've left home its still useful when we have guests. It's never dripped or smelt.

That’s what those funny little fitted mats that go round the pedestal are for!

I believe you get the same for toilets because it took a while before loos were in non carpeted rooms (wooden floors made it difficult I believe for a long time to have something other than wood or carpet)

It's what you DO in the sink which could be unhygienic.

I had one in my room in the home I grew up in. Really valued it from around 12 years old upwards. I didn’t have to share teeth brushing or face washing facilities with my brothers and it was lovely to have doing make-up as a teen.

Don’t have in house now as an adult and mother of boys. I would love my own back again!

I don't know, but our bathroom sinks and occasionally kitchen seem to periodically develop a rotten egg sort of smell, and not just ours, I've noticed it in small bathrooms attached to e.g. doctors' surgeries as well (so you would assume they don't have much going down there other than hand washing) - the smell comes up from the plughole when you run water down it and when I've disassembled the u-bend before, it's full of slimy, smelly stuff. It does clean away if I rinse it with a combo of loo cleaner and boiling water, or one of the chemical drain cleaners, but I don't remember this ever happening in my childhood home or my house in the UK (which was Victorian, so had older plumbing).

I googled it just after posting this actually and the google AI thing suggested it's to do with modern plastic plumbing being rougher on the inside than copper pipes, so it collects bits of grot and bacteria which build up into a stinky biofilm 🤢 of course it could just have made that up, but it seems to make sense.

It’s an old-fashioned throwback to when you only had a bath once a week and your toilet was probably still outside. You would freshen up using a washcloth in the sink, a “pits and bits” wash as my grandma called it.

I had one in a house we moved into when I was 12. Like a pp I really liked it, I could keep all my face stuff there and toothbrush. We had a family bathroom upstairs and a downstairs loo, so having the washbasin in my room (called a “vanity unit” ) made it much easier for me to get ready for bed if someone else was in the bathroom.

We had a couple in our house when we bought it, it was an old house. I guess they date back to when people had wash stands and did strip washes rather than daily showering/baths. We removed them mainly because the sinks were large and ugly (think they were 60s) with exposed pipe work, and they limited the layout of the kids bedrooms.

We had one in our house when we moved in and removed it. At night the wind found a way in through it I hated it

Growing up in the 70s and 80s our house had one in one of the bedrooms. My mum later moved into a flat with one in the spare bedroom.
I once lived in a student house with 11 others. One shower and separate toilet for the whole house! We had a basin in each bedroom. Student halls with shared bathrooms sometimes still have them.

We had 2 in the rooms in our house when we moved in. One will replaced with an ensuite when we can afford it. The other one we built into a cupboard for my teenage daughter and it's been brilliant!

I remember my aunt living in a Flat we call them Tenaments in Scotland, they had basins and fires in the bedrooms I thought it was very grand, i mean it was a council flat but still grand in my eyes 😀

They were in most of the bedrooms of the house we moved to when I was a teen.
Really, really useful. I don't know why they aren't put in anymore.

My dd had one in her student flat / halls.
6 people, two rooms that had a toilet, small basin and a shower, and each bedroom had it's own basin with a mirror behind it, in their rooms. So useful, and never any clashes over people waiting for the two shower rooms.

I once heard a story of a basin crashing off the wall in the middle of the night. 😀

A few years ago we stayed at a hotel in Scotland where the sink was in the bedroom and an ensuite (just shower and loo) had been retrofitted into a walk-in wardrobe. The building had once been the town’s cottage hospital so I suspect the sink dated from those days.
i really disliked it. The bedroom floor was carpeted so goodness knows how much liquid or toothpaste or whatever had previously landed on the floor and not been properly scrubbed off. You had to come out of the loo without washing your hands, so the door handles would be pretty disgusting. And I don’t particularly want to see (or hear) DH brushing his teeth or shaving if I‘m lying in bed a few feet away. Overall it was a pretty disgusting experience.
I‘ve also just remembered that my room in student halls had a sink only, but it was sort of separate from the rest of the room, in an uncarpeted area, and only I was sleeping in the room. So it felt a lot more tolerable.

Oh yes we were in an older hotel in Aberdeenshire a few years and they had a sink in the bedroom