Hanging wet clothes (right from the electric washer) on hangers inside works just fine. Jeans and towels, take at most, about two days. Towels and jeans need not be any different in terms of softness though. Just throw the air-dried clothes into the dryer for 10 minutes with no heat on. They come out identical to machine-dried clothes, and with less wear on the clothes.

That said, supporting legislation to make hanging clothes outside a basic right of conservation is important. They dry faster in the wind. (But the sun wears them and bleaches dark items.)

Live free (but don't hang your clothes outside to dry) or die. I don't think that will fit on a license plate.

Bought a retractable clothline at home depot for $15 last week, very convenient. I highly recommend it. Also good excercise in fresh air.

I never even knew that hanging laundry outside is a sign of poverty or that it could bring down property values. I grew up in a house with a clothesline in the back, and I'm way under 85.

I never even knew that hanging laundry outside is a sign of poverty or that it could bring down property values.

It is if your definition of poverty is "not being able to afford hiring someone to wash your clothes". As for property values, anything that distracts from the oh-so-dangerous terrain between the SUV and the condo is a Blight on Humanity. NIMBYism = death of culture.

This reminds me that a few years ago if I saw someone riding a bicycle and they weren't wearing fancy biking clothes, I would feel sorry for that poor guy who couldn't afford a car. Now I could see that same person riding that same bike and think - good for him, he's getting excercise and not pumping toxins into the air. This feels like the same thing. What we need to do is make anything to do with saving energy or not polluting, eco-chic. I work at an office and dry my dishes with a hand towel. I wonder what everyone thinks when I bring a towel into the ladies room. Do they think, Wow, she is saving a tree by not using papertowels?

Clean clothes of many colors hanging on a line purified by the sun, ironed and scented by the wind, have always been beautiful to me. You can see the little items for children and the sheets that show the family has a home and a safe place to sleep.

I can remember our Aunt Opal at age of 101 hanging out her clothes. I think it is good for the body as well as the environment.

We are so obsessed with staged communities and with green lawns watered even in the desert. Property values? Protect the environment or else no property on earth will have value.

Here in Vietnam, hardly anyone owns a dryer. Despite the humid weather, most anything will dry if you hang it in the morning and take it in at night.

And since the sun does whiten colors, all you need do is turn them inside out. And of course, the whites end up drying even whiter.

Because of the way most homes are built here, it is common to have a very wide door - almost as wide as a garage door -somewhere on the ground floor. These wide doors also have a metal door, which you slide down at night to protect the house from any potential burglers.

Since I don't have a good area outside to hang my hand-washed laundry, I have put a bungee cord across the wide sheet metal door. During the day, the metal door gets quite hot and my clothes dry in a matter of hours.

My parents never owned a dryer. My Mother, as well as all the neighbors used clothslines.

When I bought my first house I put up a clothsline in the garage and it was fine. Dungarees and heavy towels take the longest to dry but the line did the job and took no energy from the utility company.
Boy have Americans become jaded.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah, yes, the U.S. Where appearances are more important than individual freedoms!

I use a drying rack on my back porch. It is great for towels to dry outside. In the summertime towels dry in about an hour. I quit getting large heavey towels, the light one dry very well. It is against the rules to do it where I live so I made a private area. I do think it is really irrational that homeowner associations can fine you for not living a corporate lifestyle.

I suggest to anyone in a neighborhood with these ridiculous covenents, to do the retractable clothesline (it doesn't count as permanent) or a collapsable rack on their deck. Also, please do not buy a home in communities that are that regimented. It's ridiculous.

Dryers wear out clothing more than clotheslines/sun does (where do these people think lint comes from?)

Clothes drying on the line- LOVE it- even have a series of awesome clothes-on-line photos, taken over the years.

Hung out to dry.
American values,
shriveled in the relentless non-light of ignorance.
No sun-shiny fresh scent in which to bury our noses.

Somebody has been hanging up their brain to dry. I never knew there were people against clotheslines.

There is a control mentality in upscale communities that fits in well with consumerism and obedient conformity. The rules require that you oppose and overlay nature rather than working with it.

You must have a watered green lawn mowed to a specified height, even in the desert. [Buy sod trucked in from afar, use scarce water, use artificial fertilizer, mow noisily on every tranquil weekend morning] No native plants or grasses. No dandelions. They would rather have the ground water polluted by weed killers than allow those bright golden buttons to cheer up the bland corporate look.

I have always hung my clothes out to dry, weather permitting. If you are worried about the sun fading the colors, turn them inside out to dry. That is what I do. I also use bluing for my white sheets and pillowcases and get the most brilliant, non-polluting whites you can imagine. I am now 70, but even in my 30's & 40's when I was making good money, I still hung the clothes outside. I use an umbrella clothesline that I can take down and store in the shed.

Hanging wet laundry outside helps to clean Peabody's coal dust from the air. Ask for a 'carbon' tax credit.

I grew up in the '40s, and we didn't have electricity or running water. With a family of seven, it took the whole day to get the clothes washed in a gas washer with the pipe stuck through a hole in the wall for venting. We had four clothes lines about forty feet long. In eastern Washington's snowy, cold climate, the clothes were stiff almost before we got them hung. Sometimes those lines didn't get emptied until mid-week. We had clothes lines strung up in the kitchen, where our only source of heat came from the wood burning cook stove. We dried a few pieces at a time on those.

I loved drying clothes in Texas. There was always a strong breeze around Fort Worth, and the clothes dried almost immediately.

I've always thought this thing about clothes lines not being allowed was stupid. But then in a nation that has turned a woman breast feeding her baby into indecent exposure....

I have dandelions, wild carrots, wild geraniums, wild camomile, milk weed, and a host of other wild plants that have beautiful little flowers in the spring. I use no chemicals (never have). A lot of people are zero scaping around there...they kill everything with pesticides, cut down the old fruit trees, and cover the ground with plastic and put rock or cement on top of it.

You can dry clothes indoors, but watch you don't get the humidity too high over long periods of time -- you could give mold a chance to take hold.

Here in Denmark it used to be common to hang the bed quilts out the window -- it freshened them up. You don't see that much any more. When there is snow on the ground and frost (don't see much of that here either any more!) my wife insists on putting the carpets out on the lawn.

In any case I'm sure both sunshine and frost kills house mites.

I think I'll ask my condo association if we can put clothelines on the roof!!!!

I'll also ask my city council rep to propose ordinance making any HA regs forbidding same obsolete.

REF: # militantliberal March 13th, 2008 11:38 am

I never even knew that hanging laundry outside is a sign of poverty or that it could bring down property values. I grew up in a house with a clothesline in the back, and I'm way under 85.

Me, too!! I grew up in a relatively prosperous neighborhood in the fifties and sixties and if I was at home (not in school or at piano lessons, etc.) my job was hanging the wet clothes on the clothesline to dry. Later when they were dry, my job was to take them off of the clothesline, fold them and put them away - unless, of course, they needed to be sprinkled with water, rolled up, and set aside in a plastic bag in preparation for ironing. Remember, back then almost everything other than towels and underwear had to be ironed.

I defend the the wild plants in my yard, the bees and butterflies use them for food and reproduction. If I lose that right, I will move because all around me is a dirty city, it means I have been here too long.

In regards to the NH license plate comment, how about:
"Hang free or Die"

In my gentrifying neighborhood in Chicago, one of my neighbors moved into a new gated townhouse from a suburb. They were outraged that another neighbor parked his old rusty camper/pick-up on the public street in front of their home -- they thought it made the area look like a ghetto. They made a point of saying that the suburb where they used to live had laws about parking old cars and pick-up trucks on the street or even in your driveway. The subuirb also had rules governing how may people could gather on your front lawn, and how many people could live in your home. I asked them if they had lived in Stalingrad, but they didn't get the joke. I'd bet that their class-conscious suburb probably also had laws against hanging the laundry outdoors to dry.

Sophia1729 (March 13th, 2008 12:05 pm), if you are out jogging in certain neighborhoods in Chicago without expensive exercise clothes, the police will stop you on suspicion. Consequently, I have heard that muggers are now safely plying their trade in mathcing jogging outfits.

I have always hung clothes outside to dry. An RN neighbor told me it is a very beneficial form of exercise, but I do it because I enjoy it.
When I was working and raising a family, it was the only time I was ever alone - our sons would only take the trouble to come out to the clothesline in dire emergencies!
Best of all, it's a great opportunity for bird watching. The only black collared hummingbird I ever saw was sitting on the fence right in front of me one day while I was hanging up wet clothes.
Fresh air, exercise, bird watching, and energy saving - what more could anyone want?

Lawns are the cemeteries of nature to me, and I don't understand why some neighborhoods insist on them. It's about time we looked hard at the places we live and honor them in planting our gardens with truly compatible plants. I live in California, and the object of developers here seems to have been to make it look as much unlike the chaparral around us as possible, and as much like some wetter, greener land as possible (without having to put up with actual RAIN!) What's the point?

I haven't had a clothesline for a long time, but I just might put one in - our back yard is very private and no one would object. Reading this I remembered putting up sheets in a mild breeze. It must have been work - as we were all happy to get dryers - but from here it smells and feels good...................

Hardheadedwoman (10:54am) LOL!!!

This discussion makes me homesick for tucking myself in at night between sheets that smelled like sunshine (and not fabric softener).
How silly, of course people should be able to hang their wash out to dry in the fresh air!

I used to work in a hospital lab. I can remember one of the techs coming in every Monday, announcing that she had done "two fences of clothes" before coming to work. She lived in the country and used sections of the fence wire (between the posts) as clothes line. Two fences of clothes was a pretty big wash!

Life is too short for such nonsense.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, no one had clothes dryers, so every house had a clothesline. After dryers became popular, it wasn't long before petrochemically-scented laundry products were being sold to emulate the smell of clothes dried in the fresh air. It was a futile exercise, but there are many people who have never smelled naturally dried clothes, so they don't know better.

In Japan, every apartment has a balcony for drying clothes. As far as I know, it's primarily for the purpose of energy conservation, but it also seems to be based on common sense that using the sun is simply a better way. Because of the population density in the cities, I can't even imagine the dismal air quality if everyone there used dryers and scented laundry additives.

I've never been able to use scented laundry products myself. In fact, when my neighbors run their dryer, I have to close my windows and stay indoors unless I want to have a serious headache and constricted breathing. I welcome the move toward clotheslines, but I'm sure the makers of dryer sheets do not.

Oh I've lived in neighborhoods where everybody has at least one abandoned car in their yard and that is usually because of some mental inability to deal with or make a decision about something that is of negligible value and sits as an emblem to all the things they plan to do one day.

Laundry otoh, the clothesline variety, is the opposite- given that they are removed in a timely fashion (not left out in storms and such or like christmaslights that stay up all year round.) Today's fashions are tomorrows laundry as the saying goes. This washing and hanging out to dry is a productive side of humans. Windmills and clotheslines people, c'mon!

I grew up in the country with a phenomenal amount of freedom as a child. Got out of college and moved to various cities, where I chaffed under the rules, regulations, and volume of humanity. When I couldn't stand it any longer, I moved back to the country where I can grow my own food, make a living at my PC, and hang my laundry out to dry or anything else I want to do on my time and my land. I can't see my neighbors from here, and we all mind our own business unless someone calls for help. Even though my neighbors worship the perfect lawn and lots of it, nobody gives a damn that I'm returning several acres (that the previous owner mowed 2-3 times a week) to meadow and native forest. I don't have much conventional grass now, but nobody trys to tell me that I have to because people around here figure it's none of their business. There's a lot to be said for that, people.

My family didn't have a clothes dryer until the late seventies, and didn't use it regularly until my brother and I were in high school. Today my mother still uses her clothesline. It's bizarre that people will get all bent out of shape over someone's underwear hanging in their backyard but will rush over to the TV to see "news" about some celebrity who forgot to wear hers.

Of all the strange things I've observed in America, nothing has stunned me like that one.

In Europe - well, you never know with the Brits, but in the rest of the continent - hanging clothes out to dry is not an issue at all. The thought that this action might "reduce the value of the property" comes across like straight out of the funny farm. Like "call 911 but make sure you have a straight-jacket on board".

Ever smelled the fragrance of air-dried clothes compared to that of drier-dried clothes??

I mean, how removed from nature can any nation get?

Let alone the inane waste of electricity.

Freedom is on the march! What a person considers to be important tells so much about that person. As another poster stated, enjoy the colors of your neighbors' clothes flowing in the breeze. Has anyone ever been harmed by the sight of underwear? I don't think so. And, bask in the knowledge that you have neighbors whose practices in daily living are saving energy resources, and values that and prolonging the life of their appliances (bad in an economy that thrives on planned obsolescence).

I hang clothes out on every day that practically permits; I hang them in the basement otherwise; I use a fuel-free old-fashioned push mower, do dishes the old-fashioned way, and walk and bicycle wherever and whenever practical. I don't want a medal. It just seems natural; and i am grateful for all of the technology that am fortunate to have.

But, recall our founders, "Waste not, want not;" "a penny saved is a penny earned." I have no sympathy for anyone who values their selfish property rights over the rights of humans and the environment. What needs to be changed is the mind-set that even leads to the possibility of clotheslines devaluing property values.

And, ah yes, to turn in after a busy meaningful day to the smell and feel fresh air dried sheets and pillowcases!

peaceman,

"When I bought my first house I put up a clothsline in the garage and it was fine. Dungarees and heavy towels take the longest to dry but the line did the job and took no energy from the utility company.
Boy have Americans become jaded."

Thanks for the great suggestion. I've always loved the fresh smell of clothes dried outside. But my current home has a backyard so small you could stand with your back against my house and spit on the house next door! But I do have an attached, single-car garage the could easily accomodate one of those retractable clotheslines. Someone else already covered my other objection (stiff, scratchy towels), too.

I, too, was surprised to hear clotheslines equated with poverty or squallor. Like other posters, they remind me of warm days, white sheets baking under a summer sun, colorful socks flapping in the breeze, and burying my face in my pillow and smelling that fresh, outside scent (I have yet to find a laundry soap or dryer sheet that even comes close to duplicating that wonderful smell). "jclientelle" said it beautifully...seeing those items of clothing hung lovingly on the line gives us a little snapshot of the folks that inhabit the homes in our neighborhood. Somewhere along the line, our energy has become more focused on presenting a picture-perfect, value-oriented asthetic, rather than viewing our domiciles as a home where real people live. Many of us rarely even see our neighbors, much less know them by name.

I say, Let the Undies FLY!
I am experiencing a similar thing in Asheville,NC. A battle of the eco-hippies versus money-hungry property value-conscious yuppies!

Before we bought our recently renovated house, it was a rundown mess with no one in it and kudzu all over the yard. This neighborhood is being cleaned up, but is still small, homey and colorful. There are young and old folks here, some with nice yards, some in progress, and some, downright a mess. We picked the neighborhood because it was not a "CC&R's" kind of neighborhood and most of the cars are old-not Hummers.
My neighbor up the hill, from NYC, moved to town and built a brand new huge house on a tiny lot, three years ago, in this neighborhood full of old homes. She muste have looked down at the time on this mess of a place and she bought up the hill anyway. She moved into this old neighborhood, with her sparkly new plastic house,and since then has harassed everyone around her with the help of the city police, about the ugliness of their homes, consistantly telling the city that several of us are "harboring rats", etc.
When we moved in we set up a completely legal chicken coup. Chickens, with license are legal in the city of Asheville. We had yet to get our chickens, and then about 3 weeks ago we met our neighbor.
Her first conversation was to tell us our yard was a mess, and what did we plan to do so she didn't have to see it. The second conversation was to ask us to go in half on a tall fence so that she wouldn't have to look down on our "mess" and after 1 week of no answer she called in the police to inspect our chicken hutch, which we had already begun to dismantle and had decided to give away, due to probability of troublesome neighbors.

Now I ask you, WHY don't all of those kind of folks move into ONE neighborhood and leave the rest of us to air our clean laundry (and our chickens) in PEACE! The officer told me "I am surprised she didn't call about your clothes line!"

I don't understand why all the wealthy yuppies who love A/C and dryers and million dollar homes for two, are moving to a "hippie" town, building 2 million dollar mansions and 2nd and 3rd homes. WHy dont they all move to Texas or Utah? Actually I DO know. It's called making a profit. And it's why there is a housing crisis all over America.

I say let the undies, chickens, goats, old cars, and whatever else we CHOOSE fly and if some don't like it, let them go somewhere with million dollar rules. When the STUFF hits the fan and there's no more power for their dryers, they can call me and I'll charge all those wealthy snobs to show them how to put up a clothes line!

One note about fabric softeners: I used to drive from home to work every day past a factory near Augusta Georgia that made fabric softener. For MILES around the place on 3 different roads, everything everywhere smelled like fabric softener.
I once read that if you can smell something it is actually tiny particles getting into your nose. Can you IMAGINE what those chemicals are doing to the streams, and soils and air and people around that factory?

I really enjoy these comments. We bought a small farm out in the country that is slowly turning into the suburbs. The new people see our clotheslines, so some of them are starting to follow suit. One problem we have, though, is that we have a giant mulberry tree in the back yard, and when the mulberries get ripe, it attracts a million birds. If we were foolish enough to hang out our laundry then, it would get caught in the purple rain!

Oh how utterly ridiculous that a HOA would make such inane rules! Both my sisters live in condos and have given me many outdoor items that they're not able to hang from their balconies due to the need for uniformity! They can't hang clothes outside either. How gross! The argument against outdoor drying is simply arbitrary, what's next, no ugly people can live in the condo!

I'm spoiled by living in the country and EVERYONE can see my laundry hanging in my backyard as they drive up the hill past my house. It's such a sad commentary on our culture that we would judge property values by something as transient as wet laundry!

If I lived in a condo with rules such as these I would find out what gender most of the Board of Directors was comprised of and hang some of the sexiest lingerie I could find and see how much they harass me. Of course, I think this would work better on men than on women. What man is going to complain about my hanging a few sexy bras and thongs?

If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that in 10 years everyone (who isn't obscenely rich or an idiot) will be hanging their clothes outside. Same thing for lawns. Both will be relics of a cheap energy era that will never, ever return.

And I say good riddance. I empathize with folks sensitive to the petrochemical fragrances - I had a neighbor at my last place that used this god-awful stuff that forced me to close all my windows, and what really surprised me was that she actually WORE these clothes next to her body afterwards. Yuck.

Since dryers use a ridiculous amount of energy relative to the function they perform, they will be among the first wasteful appliances to go the way of the dodo. Home owner associations will look pretty stupid in short order, since eliminating the costs of running a dryer is such an obvious way to reduce the costs of energy. And the environmental benefits of reduced coal consumption will be a welcome bonus.

Uniformity = monoculture = centralization = authoritarianism = conservatism = money-power concentration = dictatorship

Now these left-wing crazies want to hang their clothes outside in order to let them "dry in the sun"—what's next!

Haven't they heard our crafty, perspicacious and successful weapons and oil executive vice president inform us quite succinctly I believe, that solar energy is not viable, it just does not work:!

Do these people listen?

Why should we Patriotic Americans be paying any attention to wrinkly-faced old woman from Vermont anyway? General Electric makes wonderful energy consuming machines to do the job faster and far more profitably than the obsolete clothesline.

Hello lefties, we are in a recession, stop with the friggin' socialism crap. The next thing you know you will be SHARING the F ' n clothesline with a neighbor.

If I hear one more idiot environmentalist tell me, "the Earth is warming because of human activity", I am going to run them over with my eighteen cylinder Hummer. I will tell you why the Earth is warming, it is from all of their open left-wing mouths yapping trying to take away my freedom.

Go John McSame.

my first summer job was in upstate new york, and my mother wanted me to pack a clothesline. i told her we were the only people that used them. to my surprise, in the catskill mountains where i worked we had a clothes line for the employees. my aunt still hangs out the clothes in the back yard. but now my mother (nearing her 89th birthday) uses a dryer.

I've never had a dryer and never will. And I live in the Pacific Northwest. We just hung our wash inside the house in the winter. It got dry in just a few hours.

The Japanese never have driers, either. Every home, apartment and condo has laundry hanging out on the balconies and yards everyday--it's normal in a sane country!

I've never had a dryer and never will. And I live in the Pacific Northwest. We just hung our wash inside the house in the winter. It got dry in just a few hours.

The Japanese never have dryers, either. Every home, apartment and condo has laundry hanging out on the balconies and yards everyday--it's normal in a sane country!

What a lovely change, such an harmonious long line of comments! Feel like I've found 'my people'. I've had the obsessive compulsion all my life to hang clothes to dry outdoors and have rigged up some kind of line everywhere I've lived for all the reasons above and because it makes me feel content. As for beauty in the eye of the beholder: my current landlord demurred when I asked to put up a line and mentioned "look like a tenament' etc. Meanwhile this apartment house has siding fallen off, mould down the side because gutters and drainpipes are missing, no yard care except the grass mowed within an inch of it's life in drought or deluge, and a garbage man who smashes recycling containers de rigeur and strews them around the dumpster first thing that hits the eye on turning into driveway - for starters.
Anyway, brilliant of CD to give us a reprieve from war, torture, scandal.
miketheham - love that "Hange free, or die!"

I live in a West Virginia trailer park. We've never been allowed to hang clothing outside to dry;it's in the lease. The new owner lives in Missouri and hasn't fixed the potholes since he bought the park four years ago. Since he took over the place has turned into a real dump. Maybe I should sue HIM for lowering the value of my double-wide.

Let's see... oil is $110 a barrell, gas is well over $3 a gallon and rising, the economy and the dollar are going down the drain... and people are actually worried about looking at their neighbors clothes drying outside!!! No wonder that this country is so messed up...

I wear my clothes for five days. Then I take a bath and soak my clothes in the tub while I'm bathing my body. Then I take a quick shower and rince the clothing. After I dry myself, I hang the wet clothes on the curtain rack, pants, shirt, sox and shorts. I have my other set of clothing I wore five day prior, washed dried and ready for another five days. Sometimes durng the hot summer, I just put on the wet ones and go out and sit in the sun until they dry. Works great and the neighbors don't bitch at me. ___ Actually, they don't ever even talk to me.

I use a dryer. The wind is gusty, strong and unpredictable at my house. A gust of wind on a fairly calm day snapped off the top half of an ash tree about 10 feet up about 6 inches in diameter. Had to screw down the porch swing because it kept blowing off the deck. One day a full and very heavy trash can blew away. I found the can about 1/2 mile away. No one ever complained about the trash so who knows how far it went. I have a clothesline we use when we are outside to chase fly aways. Have to use about 3 times as many clothespins to keep clothes on line.

It is a weird micro-climate, the storms always divert and clouds shift heading out either NE or SE seldom directly east.