Where on earth do you dry your hair?

[ynkee0107]

Okay. So I'm American and while I love my adopted home, one thing that really really annoys me about this country is the lack of real plug sockets in bathrooms. (Honestly I could just as easily fill the kitchen sink with water and drop my hairdryer in it if I wanted to off myself... the "safety" issue is a bunch of bs... rant over).

Anyway. Where do you dry your hair?!?

I wash and dry mine every morning. And right now my hair dryer lives in the kitchen (yuck).

I desperately want to use the bathroom mirror but would have to run extension cords through the house.

Suggestions please! :-)

Not everyone has a combi boiler.

I agree re. two seperate taps. Ridiculous and I can't understand why people would knowingly install them nowadays, when so many two in one are available. Another thing we did when we had renovations!

I don't have a combi boiler either and not sure our set up is suitable for one as we have 3 bathroom/toilets. Not sure what's floating about in the tank up in the loft!

Re: combi boiler - I was talking about complete newbuilds, surely they would have combi boilers so don't need two taps (if the necessity for separate taps was actually somehow dictated by things in the loft tank! surely washing your face with dead pigeon water is not advisable anyway!! I guess another UK specific issue)

Our house has two bathrooms+ downstairs loo and a combi boiler, and two of my friends have numerous bathrooms and both have combi boilers, I don't think it's a problem, they just need to be bigger in size to accommodate extra capacity.

there are all sorts of different systems though. My house for example has six bathrooms and is heated using a dual zone system and a wood fired log gassification furnace/boiler. A combi boiler would simply not be an option.

Anyway - off point completely.

We chose not to have a mixer tap in one of the new bathrooms since they're a bit shite.

I have found the solution! There's one of these for sale in my local charity shop...

Haha I haven't seen one of those in ages!

My Mum had one of those....

Bathroom here but have a plug on landing.

Prefer the bathroom as it is pale and I hoover the hair up afterwards - I shed like a moulting dog and the thought of that all round the bedroom where I can't see it .......

If I had a washing machine upstairs I would worry it was going to come through the ceiling on the spin cycle!!

So would I dollybird. I don't think modern houses in the UK are built to withstand having washing machines upstairs.

I don't get what the problem is with separate taps. You use the hot water to wash your hands - it's usually warm although I accept there are places where it's scalding hot. If you want to mix hot and cold you can do that in the sink/wash basin.

Because wasting your time filling the sink just to wash your hands is a faff that the rest of the civilised world has done away with.

"dire English bathrooms" 😂😂

So glad to see the rage at separate taps is not just me. They're still building houses with them because it's £25 less than a mixer tap. Acording to an American friend we've had the right plumbing for mixer taps since the thirties. A Swedish friend once asked what he was supposed to do: run a sink every time he washed his hands, stick one hand in the cold and one in the hot or swish his hands between the two. I also get annoyed about: not being able to plug in a shaver/epilator/hair roller/straightening irons/hairdryer in the bathroom, lack of wardrobe and storage space, and no sockets I can manage to hoover one floor of the house plus the stairs from. I'm British, I live in a house built in 2009 and I think we're cheap and/or impractical.

I live in North America and don't think that bathrooms here are particularly great. Baths in particular are a bit shit (never big enough and much shallower than their UK equivalent). I don't dry my hair or use makeup though so don't really care about plugs or lighting too much. I also much prefer plugs with switches and that fit securely. I often see sparks around the plugs here, and they have much less power (we had to get a transformer to get some of our appliances to work).

I'd like a Japanese bathroom with a heated loo seat :)

My hair falls out terrible and it's really dark so on nice days I dry my hair in the garden with the plug just inside the kitchen! I also put my hair dye on in the garden, just prop a mirror on top of the wheelie bin- how classy
Seriously though saves a lot of mess.

Bet our electrocution numbers in bathrooms are very low given that we generally have no sockets for things like hairdryers, mine has
been dropped several times, I wouldn't feel as safe doing it in the bathroom.

And lack of under counter lighting at the time the house is built. Far harder/more expensive to put it in later.

I second Japanese bathrooms. They're massive. The bath's massive. Lovely.

Bedroom floor in front of mirror. I would piss everyone off if I dried my hair in the bathroom as they would all need the toilet at once no doubt !

You can buy a weird wall mounted hair dryer with a tube air thing that has an electric adapter in it for the shave power point.

Where from?

I fucking love this thread.

We have moved back across the pond and I now have mixer taps, no risk of dead-pigeon-legionella, a bathroom extractor fan I can turn on and off at will, a utility room on the same floor as the bedrooms, and enough outlets in the bathroom to plug in eleventy million hair appliances. Aaaaahhhhh

ruby - If you're going to wash your face you're going to use the washabsin anyway aren't you? If you're washing your hands you just use the hot tap. It shouldn't be scalding hot. I've had mixer taps and not had them and don't have a problem either way.

When I lived on the continent, it took me a while to understand that the socket in the bathroom only worked when the light was switched on from outside the bathroom.

Gwenwhyfar (as in Mists of Avalon?) don't you find the hot tap waaay too hot?

Hearts living the dream

Gwenhwyfar if you're washing your hands for 20 ish seconds as you're supposed to - the hot top is scalding by the end. Until I moved to the UK I had never filled a sink to wash my face. Why would you when you can just turn on a mixer tap at the correct temperature and splash your face?

We just redid our bathroom. Key priorities were proper built-in storage, mixer taps, no dreaded pull cord (my husband's pet hate) and dimmble operating theatre strength lighting. Still can't dry my hair, but it's a huge improvement in terms of practicality and comfort.