Thursday, January 14, 2010

Doing Without my Dryer Revisited

Last month on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception I found that my dryer was broken and wrote about it here. I had decided to hang up my clothes to air dry until the dryer was fixed and indicated that maybe I would even continue to do so after the dryer was fixed. Well I told myself that, in an effort to save on utilities and to use less of the worlds resources, I would hang up at least one load of laundry each week to air dry.
Did I follow through?

Well... I did this exactly once since I got the dryer fixed. I hung up dish towels and other whites on my drying rack. There are three things I told myself as to why I was just going to go back to using my dryer for now:
1. My pesky cat insisted on sitting underneath the drying rack and that left me with cat hair on my dish towels, which would leave me with cat hair on my dishes if I used these towels in the way they were meant to be used. That is undesireable I'm sure even for the most ardent cat lover.

2. Even with my newly purchased drying rack, it is still difficult to find a place to hang everything and we end up with laundry hanging up all over the house.

3. I'll just wait until warmer weather and hang it outside then.

Next Day--Another Try--Another Perspective
I wrote the above yesterday. Last night, however, I did , once again, hang up my laundry to dry and it seemed so easy.  I moved my drying rack to the bedroom where my cat would be less likely to get it and I also hung up a lot of laundry on hangers on the shower rod. 

I have come to the conclusion that , once you work out the logistics, hanging up clothes to dry doesn't add any more work than using the dryer because, in the act of hanging up your clothes to dry you are also taking care of most of the work of sorting and folding.  Dare I say that taking the time to put clothes in the dryer is just an extra step that adds more work? 

For more on the subject of air drying your clothes here is an article and a web site on the very topic.  Isn't that a hoot?  There is a web site about this. 

2 comments:

Jordana said...

I love hanging my laundry out to dry in the summer. But as soon as the cold weather sets in, laundry outside stops drying and I don't have room inside to hang it. I'm looking forward to using my drying racks in the summer again. I love the feel and smell of sun dried clothes.

Julia said...

Jordana, I think the only reason we have enough room to dry clothes insde is that my family is relatively small and two of them have clothes that are small enough that they don't take up that much space. Otherwise...

I look forward to hanging laundry outside in the summer. I haven't done it yet, but I remember my mother hanging up clothes to dry when we were younger.