Monday, May 30, 2011

Save the Socks!

Adopt a clothesline!

Luke built this beautiful clothesline two years ago and it has served us well.  Though, now that we are a family of four, we go through many more clothes and some of us use a lot of cloth diapers.  To get the most out of air drying, Luke lengthened the clothesline to 25 feet between the posts and cemented them in place to reduce the slack. 


Hanging clothes out to dry may seem like an uncomplicated, easy, green transition to make.  Not so, here.  We both work full time and spend most of the sunshine-filled day away from our home which makes it ever more of a muddle.  We found ourselves constantly checking the weather and taking bets on whether or not it would rain while we were away for eight hours at a time.  Or rushing around during the already-busy evening time to get the clothes out before the sun went down and the morning dew got to them. 
"Annoyed" doesn’t even come close to describing how we felt after wasting those precious moments putting laundry out only to come home to a sopping wet mess and end up throwing it into the dryer after all.  Defeated.  Demoralized.  What was wrong with us?  How could we not accomplish even the simplest of tasks? 
Enter: the indoor clothesline.  Ta-dah!
Thank you to my parents for inspiring this easy fix.  I grew-up with one of these lovelies in our basement and remember constantly hanging laundry to dry.  $4 spent on supplies: one 7 foot stud sliced in half, 10 eye screws (for five lines to run from wall to wall), a few nails, some string and about an hour later we had this little number.
 

Dryer, be damned.  You’ll no longer consume our socks and cause us unmitigated guilt!  Hooray for the power of the air around us!

3 comments:

anna said...

how long does your laundry take to dry indoors? we've got a wooden rack we use on rainy days, but it seems to take a couple of days to get dry. in the winter, we set it up next to the woodstove and THAT works well.
great idea!

Giselle said...

We have a fairly short indoor clothesline, which is really a pole suspended from two chains attached to the ceiling (it was here when we moved in - we would never have the ingenuity to hook that up), and also a drying rack, and I find the indoor clothesline works MUCH faster than the rack. Maybe being higher, the air is warmer, or maybe because we hang the clothes on hangers, which helps them dry better. It looks like you might have some natural light in your laundry room Andrea, which helps too.

Profe said...

We have a folding rack for indoors too, but the clothesline works much faster. Though it still takes a while - depending on what it is. Diapers are a whole day (eight hours at least) I think it's better because the laundry is up high so air can freely circulate around them. Also, they aren't folded over on themselves.