The trials and tribulations of using a clothesline

Well it has been a few months since we installed our outdoor clothesline and I don’t regret our decision to forgo buying a dryer. But it has been an adjustment in my approach to doing laundry. Gone are the days when you can just let your dirty laundry pile up. In our old place we had a washer and dryer in the house so if I realized at midnight that I needed that dirty skirt for work the next day, it was only two hours away from being clean and dry. So regardless of the size of the pile of laundry, we were never far from clean clothes.

Then we moved into our house and didn’t have a washer at all. So every so often I made the trek to the local Laundromat and washed about 7 loads of laundry. We got really good at waiting until the last minute to wash clothes. We seem to have enough outfits to just wait and wait and wait. But even then it wasn’t a problem to have all these loads of laundry. In just a few hours I could be to the Laundromat, load washers, then dryers, fold and return home with a ton of dry and clean socks and underwear.

Now everything has changed. Our habit of letting the laundry pile up is not working out so well for us. We can wash clothes whenever we want to but if the weather is bad, we don’t get dry clothes. I can’t even count the number of loads of laundry that have been hung out to dry and forgotten til the next morning AFTER a nighttime rainstorm. Instead of planning the chore of laundry around our necessary outfits or quantity of clothing, we have to plan around the weather. Which as we all know is so very predictable :P

On the bright side, our clothes are getting washed twice sometimes and they have that ‘just after a rainstorm’ scent that you can pay big bucks for in a detergent. Our electric bill remains lower than it would be otherwise and I still enjoy hanging the laundry. But I just may have to invest in a portable indoor umbrella style clothesline for all these rainy days because I suspect my habit of letting laundry pile up will be a tough one to break.