How did they dry clothes in wet weather in the olden days?

[Sven of the Jungle]

I haven't used a drier on my clothes in more than a year. The advantages of line-drying clothes are too many to count: they last longer, smell better and if you give them a good firm shake before hanging, are completely wrinkle-free. Problem is, I live in Florida, and it's been a mite rainy lately. Not just afternoon thunder-showers, but morning drizzles and noontime humidity. Everything is wet, constantly. Cotton mildews quickly in the heat and humidity.

People obviously washed and dried their clothes round these parts long before driers became commonplace. People around here probably wouldn't wait a month or two before the weather cleared up, notions about hygiene in the old days nonwithstanding --- what the heck did they do on laundry day in the rainy season?

[Aspidistra]

Dried it inside.

A flat I lived in in Scotland had a very nifty device which was a flat barred clothes rack attached to the ceiling in the kitchen, which could be hoisted up and down with a pulley. You let it down, loaded up the clothes, then yanked it back up out of the way. The kitchen's likely to be the warmest room in the house pre-central-heating, so that's a good choice, and the pulley arrangement stops it getting in the way.

I actually do a similar thing at the moment, with a fold-up rack and the central heating vent in our bedroom. I figure the heat's on anyway, might as well make use of it. I don't much go for dryers.

[Markxxx]

You recall episodes of "I Love Lucy" where she's drying clothes inside the kitchen. There are comic episodes of "The Honeymooners," where Alice dries Ralph's clothes in the kitchen too. Of course in one episode Alice left Ralph's long-johns outside and they froze :)

[alice_in_wonderland]

Dry stuff in the kitchen and wear it a bit damp.

[Meurglys]

A lot of flats in Scotland still have them. Generally they're just calley 'pulleys' and most of them have 4 horizontal bars 5 or 6 feet long for putting clothes on.

edit to say this is expanding on Aspidistra's post

[SanVito]

I live in a flat and use one of these (http://www.minky.co.uk/index.php?page=products&cat_id=9&subcat_id=13). On warm days I can put it on the balcony outside, otherwise, it's a semi-permanent fixture in my spare bedroom.

In Ye Olden Days, they used a pulley (http://www.pulleymaid.com/Classic_Clothes_Airer.htm) device as the others have shown. Generally hanging from the kitchen ceiling, which would have been the warmest room in the house.

[Sven of the Jungle]

...

I have got to build me one of those!

[Nava]

In Spain the usual models for inside lines are either a foldable rack which gets folded flat and stuck behind a door when not in use, or a different one which is bolted to a wall and gets pulled open horizontally. The first ones are bigger.

[SanVito]

Missed my edit to say, I once inherited one of these old fashioned pulleys in a small Victorian house I once lived in. It was a bit kitsch for my tastes and I didn't fancy enhancing my nice clean washing with Aroma di Chicken Jalfrezi (or whatever else I was cooking), so I used it to dry bunches of herbs and chillis.

[Omar Little]

Depending on how far back you mean "olden days", many people only changed and washed their clothes on a monthly basis or even less frequent basis.

Progress is not a bad thing. Helps you avoid wearing mildewy damp clothes.

[Annie-Xmas]

I remember clothes lines on the back porches of our tenament building.

[CalMeacham]

Come up to Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, NH some time. The 19th century Shakers designed a building set aside as a laundry, and, in good, efficient Shaker fashion, they designed a series of drying racks that could be trundled in and out to efficiently dry the clothes. Kind of a set of separate racks on runners, with (IIRC) forced hot-air drying.

[Harmonious Discord]

During wet weather you don't get fully dry clothes. That's the problem with hanging clothes to dry.

[pulykamell]

Missed my edit to say, I once inherited one of these old fashioned pulleys in a small Victorian house I once lived in. It was a bit kitsch for my tastes and I didn't fancy enhancing my nice clean washing with Aroma di Chicken Jalfrezi (or whatever else I was cooking), so I used it to dry bunches of herbs and chillis.

The pulleys were standard in Budapest flats, as well, but they were typically located in bathrooms, over the tub. And they were constructed of a metal frame with row of clothesline spanned across instead of wooden slats. They were quite handy, and with the high ceilings of the average Budapest flat (usually around 12 feet), your laundry would soar well above head level and remain out of the way.

[SanVito]

During wet weather you don't get fully dry clothes. That's the problem with hanging clothes to dry.

Bring them inside a warm, dry house, then of course you do :confused:

[dracoi]

Depending on how far back you mean "olden days", many people only changed and washed their clothes on a monthly basis or even less frequent basis.

Yeah, exactly... there's a reason for the term "Spring Cleaning" - for many people, it was the first time they could properly wash and dry laundry after winters that were either too cold or too wet for outdoor line drying.

[Rayne Man]

Bring them inside a warm, dry house, then of course you do :confused:

Especially if you can finish off the operation in the airing cupboard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airing_cupboard):-

An airing cupboard is a large built-in wardrobe, sometimes of walk-in dimensions, containing a water heater; either an immersion heater for hot running water or a boiler for central heating water. Shelves, usually slatted to allow for circulation of heat, are positioned above or around the heater to provide storage for clothing, typically linen and towelling. The purpose is to prevent damp and to dry wet clothing. Other names include "boiler cupboard", or (in Ireland) "hot press".

[engineer_comp_geek]

I remember when I was young that my uncle had an old fashioned setup in his basement, even though by then it was very much antiquated. He had a modern washer and dryer as well, and may have used the older setup just to save money on occasion.

He had two tubs in his basement, both of which had legs so that they were at a comfortable height to use while standing. The first tub had a washboard in it. You'd fill that one with soapy water and scrub the clothes. The second tub had a wringer attacked to the top/side of it. You'd rinse the soap out of the clothes in this tub then run the clothes through the hand cranked wringer. This would squeeze so much water out that the clothes would only be damp instead of wet.

If it was nice out, you'd hang the clothes on the line outside. If it wasn't so nice out, you'd hang the clothes in lines inside the basement.
ETA: Since the clothes were only damp instead of wet after coming out of the wringer, they wouldn't need anywhere near as much drying time as they would coming out of a modern washer.

[Harmonious Discord]

Bring them inside a warm, dry house, then of course you do :confused:

On a humid day the inside of the house is damp. The clothes don't dry.

[Superfluous Parentheses]

On a humid day the inside of the house is damp. The clothes don't dry.

Whatever. It may take longer, but my clothes do get dry in the end (which may take more than a day). Just put it in a warmish room.

[Petrobey Mavromihalis]

On a humid day the inside of the house is damp. The clothes don't dry.Do you live in a rain forest? In which case you have a point.

[Chronos]

My mom has clotheslines in the basement, and she's about a half-mile from a Great Lake, so humidity is never all that low. They still dry; it just sometimes takes a couple of days for some items.

[pulykamell]

My mom has clotheslines in the basement, and she's about a half-mile from a Great Lake, so humidity is never all that low. They still dry; it just sometimes takes a couple of days for some items.

Oh, I didn't even think about that. I live in Chicago and we have a clothesline in the basement. It's fairly common here, I would think.

[flodnak]

My mother hangs her clothes to dry in the basement laundry room. She finds it difficult to hang them outside these days, but even when she still did that she hung them in the basement when hanging them outside was not an option. When we used to live in an old house with a damp basement, she had lines in the attic that she used in the winter or in wet weather.

(eta: Drying lofts are common in Norwegian apartment buildings - even many newer ones.)

Folding drying racks are very common in these parts - there are always some clothes that are happiest if you don't put them in a dryer. Some people also have retractable lines in the bathroom, often over the tub.

And if you're really in a hurry, there's always ironing your clothes dry.....

[even sven]

After living in a damp, humid environment without a dryer....

Inside is a good option. In China, most clothes are dried on a covered porch, which allows a bit more air circulation but keeps them out of the rain. Sometimes, though, a batch of clothes just turns out bad. Either you re-wash them or you let them air until they don't smell too bad. In many places, having slightly musty clothes is nothing compared to all the other things that smell bad.

Larger things like sheets just wait until sunny days. On the rare sunny days in my city you will find sheets, bedspreads, house slippers and all manner of heavy articles spread out everywhere.

I also concur that people had fewer sets of clothes and wore them more times before washing, so they probably had a few items to dry at a time rather than a crowded line full of clothes. It's easy to dry one or two shirts in front of the fire, but you can't do that with thirty of them. Some areas also had old-fashioned charcoal-powered irons, which could get stuff dry in a pinch.

[Chronos]

It's easy to dry one or two shirts in front of the fire, but you can't do that with thirty of them.You can also dry one or two shirts in front of the fire to wear while you're waiting for the other thirty to finish drying on the line.

[RealityChuck]

I didn't have a clothes dryer for a for several years and hung the clothes up in my basement in the winter and damp weather. They always got dry and mildew was never a problem. And this was using a cheap Hoover washer that really didn't wring out the water all that well.

I used an indoor clothesline in the winter and an outdoor clothes dryer (http://ace.imageg.net/graphics/product_images/pACE-954737dt.jpg) when the weather was good. I even did it a few times in the winter, even below freezing. They got dry; if ice formed, it sublimated away in the wind.

If it's raining, of course, you could wait a day or so. But, really, folks, it's not that hard. I never had damp clothes. Maybe it took an extra day, but they would dry just fine.

[CalMeacham]

We have clotheslines strung up in our basement, too. Things get dry there in the summer. In the winter they dry faster, because the furnaces heat them up.

[alphaboi867]

Grandma was extremely reluctant to use her dryer. When the couldn't hang her laundry up outside she'd use the clothlines in her basement. In the winter with the furnace on they'd dry pretty fast.

[Improvisor]

Do you live in a rain forest? In which case you have a point.

I live in Seattle and have always wondered how miserable it must have been to live here through the winters before modern heating. Yes, you can get around a fire and warm up and dry your cloths, but pretty mush everything is damp for months on end with no respite. As soon as you go outside, your clothes are damp again.... and damp for the whole day while you are working. I grew up in the Midwest, and at least in winter the sun would be out and while you may be cold, at least you were dry. Must have sucked out here back in the day.

[Ignatz]

I rigged up 2 clotheslines between walls of the back room where the central heating oil-then-natural-gas furnace was located. Mom would use that rig when she couldn't use the solar dryer in the back yard. I bought her a gas dryer when Arthur Itis got to bothering her too much. She loved it but would have preferred the solar system.

[Kyla]

I love the idea that no one has to deal with this issue anymore. If only! I had to explain the concept of a dryer to my host sister in Bulgaria, as she had apparently never heard of such a thing. In ye olden days of...2006.

Back in my own personal olden days of having to think about this, I, like other people in this thread, hung up my clothes inside. (I actually did this all the time, because my house had a little backroom with lots of windows, specifically for hanging clothes up to dry.) More problematic than wet weather, though, was cold weather. I heated my house with a wood-burning stove that kept only one room (my bedroom) actually warm. The rest of the house was freezing (the concept of insulation has yet to reach Eastern Europe), so my clothes would actually freeze solid.

I considered hanging up a line in my bedroom, but decided against it because it would be too much of an obstacle. What I ended up doing was rotating my clothes from the laundry room into my bedroom, where I hung them on hangers on nails in the wall, where they would be close to the fire. They'd dry in about a day. As a result, I would have about two or three new clean articles of clothing a day. Keeping this going meant that I had to do laundry every day or I would run out of clothes.

This in itself was a problem because for a large part of the winter of 2007/2008, my pipes all froze and I didn't have running water in my house. So I would take my empty water bottles and tromp down in the ice (no salting) to the town square, which has a cheshma (fountain), and collect water. I'd heat the water up in my tea kettle because otherwise it was very unpleasant, and wash my clothes by hand.

And that is how you do laundry when you don't have a washing machine, a dryer, running water, or above freezing temperatures. Truly, an experience I hope never to repeat.

BTW, most people I knew did have outdoor drying. My little laundry room was kind of unusual. If your clothes got rained on, no big. Eventually it would stop raining and they'd dry.

[SciFiSam]

Come up to Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, NH some time. The 19th century Shakers designed a building set aside as a laundry, and, in good, efficient Shaker fashion, they designed a series of drying racks that could be trundled in and out to efficiently dry the clothes. Kind of a set of separate racks on runners, with (IIRC) forced hot-air drying.

There's a basement laundry room in my block of flats that's like that - I always feel like a Victorian chambermaid or something when using it.

In Ye Olden Dayes, people would also use a mangle or (more recently) a spin dryer - either electric or hand-operated - to get a lot of the wetness out. I don't mean one that looks exactly like a washing machine; it looks more like a bin, of varying sizes, and is top-loading. A launderette near me still has one enormous spin-dryer.

[Rushgeekgirl]

On a humid day the inside of the house is damp. The clothes don't dry.

Mine do. I don't have a dryer and have a family of five to wash for. I have clothes hanging all over my house all year long. I have a line outside too, but my dogs like to play with the hanging clothes now. I'm not about to waste money lugging wet clothes to the laundromat. I've never noticed a difference, humid or not. And humid it is in Memphis right now. The only place I wouldn't hang clothes is the bathroom. Anything left in there for more than an hour stinks of mildew. There's no vent so we have to keep a window cracked to avoid mildew all over the bathroom.

[amarone]

In Ye Olden Days, they used a pulley (http://www.pulleymaid.com/Classic_Clothes_Airer.htm) device as the others have shown. Generally hanging from the kitchen ceiling, which would have been the warmest room in the house. Not so Olden Days either - my previous house in Georgia had one, and it was built in about 1991. It was in the laundry room, though, not the kitchen.

[R. P. McMurphy]

I faced the problem while traveling in the humid climate of Costa Rica. If you could get the clothes in the sun they would dry very quickly. Otherwise, forget it.

Clothes will dry if hung out in sub-freezing temperatures. The get frozen and stiff after they are left out all day but you can bring them inside and they will dry rather quickly. In the cold climate most of the moisture will leave the fabric and then when brought up to temperature they will be fairly dry.

[monavis]

I haven't used a drier on my clothes in more than a year. The advantages of line-drying clothes are too many to count: they last longer, smell better and if you give them a good firm shake before hanging, are completely wrinkle-free. Problem is, I live in Florida, and it's been a mite rainy lately. Not just afternoon thunder-showers, but morning drizzles and noontime humidity. Everything is wet, constantly. Cotton mildews quickly in the heat and humidity.

People obviously washed and dried their clothes round these parts long before driers became commonplace. People around here probably wouldn't wait a month or two before the weather cleared up, notions about hygiene in the old days nonwithstanding --- what the heck did they do on laundry day in the rainy season?

Having done that my self, we strung lines in as many rooms as we could. We had to do a lot of ducking! If it was a summer shower we waited until the next day. When we hung them out of doors in the winter,(that was my job at age 8), I used a ladder and we let them freeze dry! Some times they hung for over a day. Oh, we never hung ours in the kitchen, except for a few that we hung on a rack,that was mostly for socks and other thick clothes.

[Superhal]

I used this. (http://www.manufacturer.com/images/buyLeads/www.alibaba.com/0718/f/Laundry_Drying_Hanger.jpg) On sunny days, it was outdoors, on rainy days it was indoors.

People who wash clothes in the sink have told me they just throw it on a towel rack or shower bar.

When I was young, we only were allowed to use the dryer when it was raining.

Side note: it's not the heat, it's the humidity. My physics teacher told me that you can hang clothes out to dry when it was snowing, as water would still evaporate.

If I were you, I would have an emergency clothesline hung on a patio. At my parent's home, I could see an old clothesline hung in the garage.

[naita]

I dry all my clothes inside, on a collapsible rack. Can't imagine it being much different in the olden days, except depending on how olden they might not have washed clothes as often.

[Chronos]

In Ye Olden Dayes, people would also use a mangle or (more recently) a spin dryer - either electric or hand-operated - to get a lot of the wetness out. I don't mean one that looks exactly like a washing machine; it looks more like a bin, of varying sizes, and is top-loading. A launderette near me still has one enormous spin-dryer. That's also not exclusively Ye Olden. My mom still uses an old-fashioned wringer washer and a couple of big basins in the basement, because it's more water-efficient (even though she lives in one of the few places in the world where fresh water is effectively unlimited). The biggest problem is that it takes more time, since you have to feed the clothes through the wringer by hand.

[legalsnugs]

I have a clothesline that stretches across my bathtub (the lines can be retracted and hidden when not in use). It's not a terribly humid city (we're landlocked) and clothes are dry within 24 hours. Clothes dry faster in winter because the central heat will be on. Our building's outside walls are 2 feet thick so we're well insulated.

The bathroom is the most convenient place for a clothesline as my washing machine is in there. While clothes dryers are not unheard of here in Budapest, the vast majority of people in Hungary do not have one and use lines or racks. Lots of flats have the retractable ceiling racks, but here ceilings will be 12 or 14 feet high.