Can't stand it the way people hate nails on a chalk board or Ryan hates the smell of cat food. Crunchy, stiff clothes make me grumpy and vaguely nauseated. I'm getting grumpy right now just thinking about it.
There were other obstacles too - like our Homeowners Association. Oh yes, the Suburban Farm is in a neighborhood with a Homeowners Association. I know what you're saying. "But!?! You keep CHICKENS!!?!" We do keep chickens. We carefully researched our zoning restrictions and our property deed and the deed has some room for interpretation. It's creative interpretation and if we ended up in court I'm sure we wouldn't win, but it's enough to keep my conscious clear. Outdoor laundry lines, however, are forebidden. Clear as day, black and white, "Thou shall not hang your laundry (or rugs (and it does say rugs)) outside no matter what."
I'm sure we could challenge it. Our Association is pretty flexible and easy going and it's run by a group of reasonable folks in neighborhood full of reasonable folks. But, you see, we keep chickens and by certain interpretations of the deed restrictions we really shouldn't have chickens in our backyard. So, I'm not sure we should go rocking the boat. Just in case, you know, the whole chicken thing comes up.
This means we've had to get creative about hanging our clothing inside. We started with an accordion rack, which I really like. It holds a load of Zane's clothing (it's all small stuff) or a load of unmentionables (aka underwear and bras, I know I just mentioned it, but I like the word unmentionables.)
We added a (total piece of crap) retractable line rack over the tub in the bathroom, which can sort of hold a whole load of diapers, if you're very careful when you hang them and don't breathe much. It can't take anything heavier than a slightly damp tissue and there's no air circulation so actually hanging a load of grown up sized threads is out of the question.
There really isn't anyplace else to put a drying rack or line in our house. Someday when Ryan builds the laundry room there will be some space, but until then we've hacked this solution.
Chairs, hangers, and sticks on the back porch.
It works surprisingly well. There's plenty of air circulation and the rig can bear the weight of several pairs of wet jeans along with the rest of a grown up load of laundry. If we need to hang a blanket or rug we can use the same sticks set on open closet doors. Perfect, temporary, can quickly be disassembled for storage, and as a bonus the clothing just needs to be migrated into closets when it's dry.
Much to my surprise very little of my clothing ends up crunchy. Some of Ryan's and Zane's do, but they don't mind and Ryan says that they soften up after 10 minutes of wearing them. The diapers line dry perfectly. I still machine dry some blankets, towels, and my pants, but out of the 7 loads of laundry we do a week we only do 1 dryer load. All this will help the dryer and our clothing last longer, it's easier on our electric bill, and I can wear my "dirty hippie" badge with honor and pride now.
