How funny that last year’s thread would be resurrected on the day I intend to hang outside again! We’ve got an early, lovely mild spring going and today will be perfect for outdoor drying. In fact, when I finish typing this, I intend to start a load of jeans!
Now that I’m retired, I expect I’ll be using the lines regularly, weather permitting.
That’s a pretty bold statement there, Paddy.
mmm
I don’t like them because they make my clothes crispy, not soft. It’s irrelevant now that we are in an apartment, but I hated clothes dried on a line. As far as displaying my unnerpants, I couldn’t care less…
Joe
We don’t have a dryer. Our sunporch has windows on 2 sides, and 6 clothes lines hung near the ceiling. We can usually hang 3 loads of laundry to dry at once.
I love the smell of clothes and sheets dried on he line, but like some of he rest of you, it’s not allowed in my subdivision.
There is a lot I like about our association - if you’ve ever had a car on blocks next door or a semi parked down the street like I have you’ll know why I like it.
Really want a Hills hoist for my yard NOW but shipping to Indiana is going to be awful.
I’m another one who doesn’t want an HOA to be a pain in my ass, but the HOA i live with now just collects money for trash pickup and snow removal. I don’t think they do road maintenance, but if they would some more streetlights would be great.
I’ve never noticed clothes-crispiness with line-dried clothes. Are you folks using a fabric softener/conditioner in the washing machine?
No, Mangetout, but that’s because they can’t.
In the US, the softener is these sheets that go into the dryer, rather than a liquid that goes in the wash (or a powder, but IME liquids are more common on this side of the Atlantic).
The liquid-for-the-washer type may be findable, but my experience is that people from that side of the Atlantic expect it about as much as I expected the sheets when I first went there - not at all.
I was just thinking this morning that it won’t be long until I’m using the outside line again!
I happily hang everything on that line during the warmer months, and our backyard has a canal with a public walking track on the other side, so everyone sees our knickers - oh the horror! 
I don’t even have a dryer.
I hang my launtry on an indoor line in the winter (in the basement) and outside in summer. I have a covered line, outside, so I don’t need to get it in quickly if it rains. I hang my three loads of laundry on Sunday and my cleaning lady takes them off and irons/folds them on Thursday.
Works for me. And I like stiff towels.
In my experience the liquid fabric softener doesn’t do much when you’re line drying. Towels and jeans still come in stiff, as do other clothing if I don’t bring them in quick enough after drying.
I love line drying though, even if it does make clothes fade quicker and seems to make my shirts wear funny.
The stiffness usually goes away with a couple of shakes, though, at least IME and that’s without softener. Mind you, I’ve lived only once in a place where I could line-dry and using softener made a perceptible difference (Seville); there, skipping the softener changed jeans from “whip twice before folding” to “omg wooden boards” - my older than me bedsheets needed ironing (which they’d stopped needing about 30 years before) and felt distinctly stiff. There has to be a wide range in water hardness in the US/Canada, but if the whole “soap” system is formulated assuming the existence of dryers, it simply won’t work well when that assumed element is taken out. The soaps sold in Spain already include some softener nowadays, maybe the formulations available in the US/Canada don’t have it.
Oh, and try hanging your shirts in hangers, then the hanger from the line.
We’ve got one in our back yard, but rarely use it, as it’s a good hundred feet away and we’re too lazy to schlep the wet clothes up from the basement to hang 'em. The only time we use it is when we wash something really big, like our comforter.
Actually, liquid softener is readilyavailableand widelyadvertisedon TV, plus many stores carry their own brands. My understanding is that liquid softeners are designed to remove any detergent residue because that residue contributes to the stiffness of the fabric. That’s the main reason I use liquid softeners.
Still, my clothes are a bit stiffer coming off the lines, unless they happen to freeze while drying - thawed out bath towels are amazingly soft. It doesn’t really bother me, and as others have said, a quick toss in the dryer for a few minutes can solve that.
I got to thinking yesterday after rereading all the comments about hanging so that certain garments were not readily visible. Maybe it’s just me but in all my years of noticing clothing on lines, I never really paid attention or cared about what was hanging there. If my neighbors see from my clothes lines that I wear either white or pastel granny panties, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to wither from humiliation, nor do I expect them to be shocked or amused. They can see the same items in stores and websites all over. If my laundry affects them so much, they’ve got bigger problems than I can address.
I notice many people talking about the “freshness” of line dried sheets and clothes. Depending on where you live, that is just a mixture of dirt that the wind picked up, different species of pollen (tree sperm), and industrial air pollution.
OK, another one of those things where perhaps I couldn’t explain myself, or I just happened to run into a lot of people who didn’t know what was available, or lived in areas where it wasn’t available at the time.
I asked for “softener for putting in the washer” and was told “uh?” and brought to the dryer sheets, repeatedly.
This is one of my problems, too. I have about 27 oaks in my backyard, and surrounding my property. So the grass, while it grows, is never thick and lush, which means a lot of dust and dirt. Plus the birds and the pollen…I don’t miss having a clothesline much (even though I am not allowed to put one up.)
I don’t have any objection to clotheslines for other people, but I personally hate hanging wash. My mother hangs her wash on the line and has forever. She owns a dryer, but has maybe used it 3 times in the 40 years I’ve been on Earth. She loves line dried clothes and linens. She uses her line year-round. Which means when I was a kid, one of my chores was hanging and gathering the wash. I despise it. The jeans are always stiff, the towels are scratchy, and I’m allergic to pollen. Birds sit on the line. I’ve put on a pair of jeans with a bee in them. I’ve had to hang laundry in sub-freezing weather. I just can’t stand actually doing the chore.
My husband and I do our laundry separately because he doesn’t like to use the dryer any more than my Mom does. We live in a sub-division that prohibits outside lines, so we have 3 drying racks in our bonus room that he hangs his things on. He will dry his underthings and gym clothes in the dryer. I think he’s afraid of shrinking his good t-shirts and jeans or something. Whatever. As long as I don’t have to do it. I like pulling the wet clothes out of the washer. giving them a shake to knock out the wrinkles, and tossing them in the dryer. Easy peasy.
It really is highly amusing the practical difference between realtors’ suggestions of what you CAN do with a bonus room when showing a house and what people actually DO with their bonus room.
Realtor: And this is the bonus room…you could make it into an office, or a den, or a family room, or a hobby room, or a home gym…
Reality: Drying clothes in it, using it for storage, “home gym” (meaning convenient exercise-machine-shaped clothes hanging place) and most real of all, junk room for pretty much anything there’s no room anywhere else in the house for…
Considering how much you seem to loathe laundry-related chores, you can skip this part. They’re going to get the shit knocked out of them rolling around in the dryer anyway.