Do you live in a rain forest? In which case you have a point.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used this. 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.
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.
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.