I have a clothesline. This is new for me. Sure, I’ve hung clothes out to dry before, but I’ve never used a clothesline day in and day out. The little brick house has no dryer hook-up at all, so Danny will have do some electrical work before we can even use our dryer. He’ll have to add a breaker to the panel, run the wiring, and figure out if/how we want to cut a hole in the brick to vent it. So for now, we have a nice double clothesline and we USE it.
(I like that picture; I think it’s just the blue of the sky and the fact that Baz took it.)
When we first moved in over the summer, it was kind of fun and novel to hang clothes on a line. The hot Texas sun dried the clothes before I even finished hanging them and of course they have that nice outdoorsy smell. I could hang clothes while the kids played in the sandbox or cooled off in the house and it was usually a few minutes of calm (not counting the many times I got interrupted by someone crying). There was a loveliness about it.
I like to think that even after we get the dryer hooked up, I’ll still do lots of drying on the line, especially in the summer. But we’ll see.
As we move into fall, I can see that a clothesline gets a little more challenging. The weather is not always cooperative and the clothing will get thicker and harder to dry, especially on those cool, cloudy days. I will admit that I wrinkled my nose a little at the clothesline the previous owner had strung across the garage. It seemed so… haphazard. Now I see the appeal. I will probably have a garage line of my own before long.
ASKING FOR ADVICE. On to the whole reason for writing this post. I need advice from seasoned clothesline users. How do you maximize your clothesline? (I totally see a future post with that title using all the advice I garner from readers.)
How do you hang clothes to dry them fastest? Why are some items usually hung upside down? Does each sock get its own pin? What can you do about rust on your line? Do you leave the pins on the line or take them off? What do you do when the weather won’t let you use your clothesline?
Any advice I can gather would be great. Using a clothesline seems like it should be pretty self-explanatory. You get a shirt and stick it up there with clothespins. But I feel sure that there are “best practices” with a clothesline that I (newbie that I am) just don’t know.
A clothesline does not seem all that great when it’s raining out and my husband has no clean socks, but most of the time, it’s pretty nice. And there is something really nostalgic and sweet about a load of baby clothes on the line in the setting summer sun:
So lay it on me: what are your top tips for clothesline use?
House and Ten 