Getting the washing done

When we first moved to this house (4 years ago) the backyard had a standard rotary clothes line. It was in an annoying spot though, taking up valuable play-space for the kids, and was in the way of some fruit trees we were wanting to plant. We replaced the rotary line with a wall-mounted line around the side narrower side of the house, and it is great on warmer or windy days. It does get rained on though, so isn't great on wet days. With just myself, Anthony and our eldest daughter, we didn't have a lot of washing though. It was manageable, and being a stay at home mother gave me the wonderful power of being able to choose when the washing got done based on how busy we were, and of course the weather.

By the time Miss 2 came along, our washing baskets seemed to overflow more often, and I needed the ability to get washing done no matter what the weather was doing. Our house is only quite small (by today's standards - more on that in another post), and filling it up with clothes horses with 2 kids running about it was just annoying, though we put up with it during winter.

We toyed with getting a clothes dryer, but first decided to try using our under-covered pergola. I had, in the past, tried hanging our washing under the pergola on clothes horses, but the wind kept blowing them over and they would get dirty again - extremely annoying!

A trip to Bunnings later and we'd invested in a cheap-but-thoroughly-effective retractable clothesline, which Anthony installed. It isn't very big, but it cost under $30 and because it is completely sheltered I can hang our things up in the fresh air no matter what the weather is doing.

Our under-cover line, which is approximately 6 metres across, with 2 lines. It fits a big load of kids clothes, or a few loads of towels or linen. 

I would love to get another one, it's on my to-do list, but now spring is here and I can use the outside line more it doesn't seem as urgent.

We did end up buying a clothes dryer this past winter, purely because even though we have a sheltered line, in the icy cold winter it can still be a struggle to thoroughly dry things, and now needing to have school uniforms ready 5 days a week, I wanted to be sure I'd always be on top of them.

I gave myself some rules (which were just logic for our circumstances really) with the dryer though, to minimise the cost of running it and the environmental side of it. I only use it to finish off drying things, they first must be hung up for at least a few hours, and I am only using the "warm" setting, not the hot. I also only put it on for the bare minimum time, depending on what needs finishing, and I check the clothes regularly to see if they are dry, so as not to have them in there for ages if they only need a quick spin round.