I haven’t used mine on a few years other than beach towels, but I leave the umbrella solar drying device up year round. It’s the white trash look to discourage speculators on the adjacent property. I have a vintage laundry pouch with wooden pegs i do use when the mood strikes to hang towels, t shirts, jeans and more outside on the lines.
How about your clothes will last longer? Although I don’t have a clothesline, I dry all of my clothing either by hang drying (mostly on the shower rod or hanging from doorknobs) or by laying flat as appropriate. It’s amazing how much longer they last. I have a lot of ten-year-old items that look like new. My dryer is strictly for sheets, towels and socks.
I live in an apartment in a city, and I have clotheslines outside one of my rear-facing windows. I use it to hang stuff I don’t want to get crumpled up in the dryer - mostly khaki pants and button-down shirts - as well as some of my wife’s unmentionables. I’d use them all of my laundry, but I’m lazy.
My neighbors have clotheslines too, and some of them use them all the time. Why not? It’s not visible from the street.
Have a a retractable clothes line attached to the back of my house, which extends to attach to the garden shed. I use it in summer as I love the smell of sheets dried outside. The rest of the year I’m drying on a rack in the spare room.
My garden is pretty sheltered so can’t really be seen by anyone except my next door neighbours from their upstairs bedrooms.
No drier for me - I’d have to sacrifice cupboard space for it, and I wear a lot of delicates (silk/wool) which couldn’t go in it anyway. (The washer/drier combos are useless).
One can:
a) take a load of clothes out of the washing machine, put it in a basket, haul the basket and a bag of clothespins outside to the clothesline, hang the clothes reasonably neatly over the clothesline, wait several hours for them to dry, go out again, put the dry clothes in a basket, and bring them inside; or
b) take a load of clothes out of the washing machine, toss it into the adjacent dryer, wait an hour for the clothes to dry, and put the dry clothes in a basket.
Most people (including yours truly) prefer* (b). That’s why you don’t see many clotheslines anymore.
And the more loads you’re doing at once, the greater the advantage of (b). The washer and dryer both take roughly an hour, so every hour, you take dry clothes out of the dryer, move the clothes from the washer into the dryer, and put a new load of dirty clothes into the washer: you keep everything moving along without having to do much at all.
Beats making a trip out to the clothesline every hour, or having clean but wet laundry pile up in a basket.
*Yeah, I know, some people don’t have the space for (b), including some in this thread. But most people do.
I love hanging my clothes outside. I look forward to the first day it’s warm enough to do so. Unfortunately, I have another month, maybe longer before I can do it. It may get warm enough sooner, but the snow will still be over a foot deep under my lines!
Why I hang my clothes outside:
The smell of clothes, especially sheets, fresh from the line is amazing.
My clothes don’t wear out as fast. When I see all of the lint in the dryer’s lint catcher, I wonder how I even have any towels left.
Yes, it might be a little more labor-intensive but it’s a reason for me to be outside in the beautiful weather.
If I forget my clothes in the dryer after they’ve dried, some items are a wrinkled mess. If they’re outside on the line, they stay nice and wrinkle-free until I take them down.
When I’m sitting outside in my backyard, I love watching the clothes gently flap in the breeze. It’s very calming.
The only con I have is if it rains on my clothes. Most of the time I just leave them to dry again unless, of course, it rains for days.
Clothes line is still the normal in England, and it’s not seen as ‘low rent’ - but energy is much more expensive here, and they will keep it expensive to discourage you from wasting it
In the 80s, a woman I know came home from a trip to Costa Rica-- where the poverty was so bad, you would see laundry hung out to dry.
The last time I lived in a “house” was 1988, and there was wash hung out, summer and winter. Electric washer, but solar dryer. My mother hung out wash until about 2000 when they made her move to senior housing and took her life away.
I use a drying rack for a lot of my clothes, sometimes running them through the dryer for a few minutes at the end to get the wrinkles out. If I had more clothes to deal with, I might use it more.
I grew up in sunny Southern California with suburban clotheslines and rotary racks, and returned to them in all my adult housing except crowded apartment situations. But they’re not suitable here in the Sierra Nevada forest where madrones and conifers drop sap and crap. Not to mention the squirrels, crows, and deer. My only clothes-hanging now is looping hangars of shirts over the bathroom shower curtain rod.
We do carry and use an outdoor clothesline when we’re RV-ing. For mobile laundering, try the auto-agitator: a five-gallon tub with lid, secured in the rig’s shower, near-filled with soap, water, and grimy clothes. Drive bumpy roads for maximum scrubbing. Rinse at a water tap or cascade. Hang in the scented breeze. Have something to wear while drying unless you’re at a skin site.
This is us as well (we live in a northern state but on the opposite side of the US). We also prefer the texture of line-dried materials, in particular towels. A lot of people prefer the soft towels but we like the crunchiness, and they seem more absorbent.
Another benefit is the lack of shrinking by line drying. I’m 6’3" with long limbs, and pants (36" inseam) and long-sleeved shirts always end up too short by using a dryer. Even in cold months, I put my jeans, pants and long-sleeve shirts on an indoor rack to minimize the “high-water pants effect”.
It is just me and my wife so we don’t have a lot of laundry.
Yes! I forgot to mention the rough towels. I love them like that. They are much more absorbent. I have lines in my basement so in the winter, I too, hang all of my jeans, sweats and of course anything else that says to “dry flat”.
When I had a lot of flimsy cotton things and delicate hand-washed sweaters, I would put them on hangars and hook them up to a branch of a tree in the back yard, to air dry in the sun and breeze. Hoping the squirrels and birds would be afraid and not mess with them! Squirrels once dragged a plastic tablecloth off the deck, chewed it up, and incorporated it into their big nest in the tree - that was quite a sight!
Not the banister that goes alongside the stairs but the one in the hallway above that stops you falling into the stairwell 
Not the banister that goes alongside the stairs but the one in the hallway above that stops you falling into the stairwell