You get the idea. Hopefully you get the point. Hanging your clothes on a line (or other drying device, like a rack or even a shower rod) saves money, energy, resources, and, even better, your clothes.I live in a "neighborhood" in Tucson, Arizona. The neighborhood has a Home Owners' Association (HOA), which I signed onto when we built the house (yes, I know, but that's another issue altogether). One of the edicts of the HOA is the banning of clotheslines.
There are lots of "reasons" for banning clotheslines, though none of them are really based on anything resembling reason. Clotheslines began to go out of vogue with the urban growth of the post-war years when appliances became a status symbol. If you could afford a washer and dryer, why would you hang your clothes outside? You're obviously poor and dragging down our neighborhood and our property values! So there's now a social stigma attached to the clothesline along with a very real belief by a good number of people that a clothesline reduces property values.
See an excellent Doonesbury cartoon series here! As a kid growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, my mother always hung our clothes. We had a dryer (at least at some points--I do remember a wringer dryer when I was really young), but most things were on the line, even in winter. Plenty of action figures used the clothesline as a zip line, too. Hanging clothes and rushing out to bring the laundry in before the rain hits seemed perfectly normal.
So here I am living in Tucson and I'm trying to be a good little greenie and I figure one of the easiest things to do is hang my clothes to dry. Joan thinks I'm going to get busted by the HOA, but hey, if I get busted I guess it'll be time to attend those HOA meetings.
I don't think it'll happen, though. I'm pretty discreet about it, I think. I have mounted some hooks under the patio and hang some dowels from them when it is time to dry my clothes. I don't have big poles with crossbars and three or four cables running the length of my yard or anything like that. But I sometimes, with my three four foot dowels, have barely enough room to hang my laundry. I might have to add another one to the line up (pun intended).
Here in Tucson it is often hot enough, dry enough, and just breezy enough for my laundry to dry very, very quickly. There are times when it clearly dries faster than it would in the dryer and it comes in the house every bit as warm as the clothes from the dryer. I encourage you to figure out your own system and try to dry at least some of your clothing outside. I admittedly don't dry all of mine. For one, Joan doesn't dry her clothes outside, citing allergens and dust. She won't allow me to dry the towels or the sheets, either. But that's fine. Almost all of my own clothing, however, dries on the line and I like it just fine. I haven't noticed any issues with allergens, either. Maybe it's just luck. Who knows? Either way, I say dry away, dry away, dry away.
