This thread is strangely fascinating.
At the risk of looking like a doofus, I'll be honest and tell you all that I have never, ever used a clothesline in my entire life. I don't even really know how. So I have some possibly naive questions for those who use a clothesline almost exclusively.
-How long do clothes typically take to dry indoors? What about outdoors? I know weather plays a huge factor in this, but I'm just looking for an approximation.
It varies a lot, as you say - jeans take a lot longer than this t-shirts, then there is the weather factor. I would say anything from 15 minutes to 2 hours,
-I noticed a few posters mention that they have clotheslines in their apartments. So, when you do laundry, do you have, say, ten shirts, seven pairs of socks, and nine underpants hanging in your living space? Or do you not wait until all your clothes are dirty to finally do a few loads of laundry (like me)?
If I can't put mine outside, I have some freestanding airers - I usually put mine in my spare bedroom or in my (glassed in) back porch, so they are not in the areas I am actually using. At my parent's old house we had retratable lines which were above the tub in the bathroom. My gradma had a wooden airer on a pulley which hung in the kitchen ceiling, but it was high enough up that it didn't really impinge on the living space unless she had something like double sheets on it.
-Does your wet laundry drip water onto your floors?
No, by the time the washing has been through the spin cyle in the machine it's not dripping. If I have stuff which I've hand washed or which is too delicate for the spin cycle, so it's lkely to drip, I will stand the airer in or over the bath so it doesn't drip on the floor.
-Do you have to iron all of your air-dried clothing? Or do the wrinkles caused by the spin cycle magically disappear like they do when I use my dryer?
It depends. I you're efficient at taking the washing out of the machine as soon as it finishes, so it dosn't sit too long, and if you hang it carefully and thre's a breeze, you get rid of a lot of the wrinkles. I tend to find that I can get away without ironing much, but there are some things such as cotton or linen shirts which need ironing whatever you do. I often put things on coathangers and hang the hanger from the washing line, as this helps reduce wrinkles for shirts and dresses.
That said, I hate ironing so I try to buy low-maintenance clothes, most of the time.
I have more questions, but I'll stop there. It'd be super nice to be able to dry things in my apartment, so I'm really curious about anyone's answers.
