This is Day 288 of the Green in 365 series!
I’ve been line drying our clothes for several years now, since we first put up a clothesline the summer after we moved into our current home. We’ve had warm, even hot, weather this fall so I’ve been trying to take advantage of the chance to line dry our clothes before the winter weather sets in. (Which, ironically, is suddenly this week – with cold and rainy days. Why does it always do that – jump straight from hot weather to cold and gross? Where are our beautiful 60° fall days?)
After reading through Becca’s post on Wednesday about finding a line-drying system that works for you, I’ve been trying to think through how I can continue line-drying our clothes over the winter.
Although I love the benefits of line-drying our clothing – it extends their life, keeps them from shrinking and staining, and saves us energy and money – I usually resort to using the dryer in the winter time, unless this year I can come up with an indoor system that will work for me.
I pretty much always line-dry most of my kids’ clothing (except for socks, undies, and some pj’s and play-clothes). I have found it really helps to extend the life of the clothes and makes it so much easier to keep them stain free, because if a stain doesn’t come out in the wash it’s not set in by the dryer. Right now, I have a load of kids’ clothes on hangers on my shower rod because it was too cold and rainy to hang them outside yesterday.
But, hanging clothes on hangers on the shower rod it not really a great indoor drying solution for a couple reasons. 1.) There’s not enough room for adequate air circulation to help the clothes dry quickly and 2.) we have to move them when we need to take a shower and because they can take over 24 hours to dry inside, that can mean moving them multiple times.
I’ve mulled over the idea of adding a retractable clothes line to our front porch/sun room. It gets warm out there when the sun is shining even when it’s really cold outside. So I think that could be a good place to dry clothes, but I’m not sure if I’ll really want to go out there and hang the clothes or take them down when it’s really cold and cloudy.
I know I definitely need to get another drying rack, or two (our previous one broke recently), and that would be a good option for indoor drying, but may not have enough space to dry an entire load.
And I’m not sure how Jer would feel about always having our laundry drying all around our house. Maybe a clothesline in the basement like Becca has is the best option, but I’m not sure I would want to stand down there and hang up clothes, it’s always freezing down there in the winter!
So, I’m kinda like a fair-weather fan; I’m a fair-weather line-dryer. It do it when it’s easy and convenient and warm to hang my clothes outside, and fall back on the dryer when it’s cold and bad weather and I don’t have any where to dry my clothes inside. Hmm, I’m trying to decide if I’m okay with that about myself, or not.
What about you? Have you figured out a system for line-drying your clothes in the winter time? Or are you a fair-weather line-dryer like me?
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When we moved into this house we did not have a dryer (or dishwasher) for several months! Lucky for me it was summer . . . the weird thing is that I like putting my clothes on the line–I find it almost meditative. Once winter came I made a smaller line on the deck until the snow fell! When the snow was just too messy to deal with I moved the clothes line into the garage.
Now I have that handy pull out rack that I showed in my post–it does hold a smaller load of clothes or I just dry 1/2 on the rack and 1/2 laying on the edges of the laundry basket. I will say that when the clothes get bigger it is much easier to dry them–maybe it isn’t the clothes are bigger but when kids are smaller they wear more clothes?
Be Blessed.
I haven’t used my dryer in years! I have various racks, most waist high. The one I love though is a rack that was intended to be like an alternative to a closet. I hang lots of shirts on it!! That leaves room for pants and everything else on the smaller racks. Where I live (SE WI) it gets very dry in the winter, so it is nice to put the racks by a sunny window and get some moisture back into our home.
I hate being cold, and the best motivator I have found for hanging laundry in a cold space is to promise myself a hot drink and a reading/TV break when I am done! Also, I make sure to put on adequate clothes and shoes while I’m doing the laundry even if it’s “not really outside”–normally I go into the basement in my regular clothes and put on “the basement shoes” (man-sized cheap Chinese cloth slip-on shoes that we keep at the foot of the stairs) when I get down there, but when the outside temp is below freezing the basement does get chilly. It’s worth the extra effort to put on my coat and thick-soled shoes before I go down there to handle cold wet laundry–instead of feeling like I’m going to DIE, I’m only mildly uncomfortable!