Clothes lines

[Hmmmmm]

American in the humid south.  No clothes line and haven't lived in a home that had one since the early 70's. We do have items I don't put in the dryer, but I'll hang those on the shower rod or lay sweaters on the ironing board to dry. 

I lived in Oz for a few months for work in a upscale corporate apartment.  Tis was my face when I realized it only had a washer. .  Since I was the first in a long line of American's who'd be living there, they ended up putting in a dryer for me to use. 

[Hillia]

American...we have both a clothes line and a dryer in Denver.  I love the clothesline but it's not practical in the winter.  We always had a clothesline when I was growing up and it was the primary means of drying clothes - the dryer was used only in bad weather or if you were in hurry.

Many HOAs (Home Owner's Associations) in the US ban outdoor clotheslines, which I think is ridiculous, but then my experiences with HOAs have been uniformly negative.

[Sophia]

An outdoor clothes line is illegal by city ordinance where I live.  They are seen to be an ugly eyesore that poor people own.  On par with having a non-function car on cinderblocks in your yard.   
In the next city over, my MIL has a large multi-row one and she uses it regularly.  She lives in an older neighborhood that has become posh.
My house came with a large laundry room.  I have a large closet rod going across the room.  I can put clothes on hangers and then stretch to put the hanger on the rod.  Our dryer died a year-ago and we actually didn't have any trouble except DH had to string twine in the backyard for the cloth diapers.  It looked amusing. 

[Xandraea]

USA, and washer/dryer here.  Tumble dryers are hard on clothes though, so I try not to use it unless I need something done in a hurry or to get something big like a comforter started.  HOA forbids ANYTHING in our tiny yards (detached townhomes but super-close to neighbors, so no clothes lines, swing sets) but I wouldn't want my underthings outside for neighbors to see anyway.  I had a short closet rod installed in my laundry room over the little sink, between the wall and the cabinet, and keep a few hangers there. Sometimes I just hang things over the rod itself, or my shower rod, or the double towel bar in my bathroom.

[Judah]

I think dryers are pretty much the norm in the US.  I have a line, but we only use it to hang the towels we use at the hot tub. I do hang delicates in the laundry room, though.  There are too many drawback to clothes lines to make them worthwhile.

[SPuck]

For me it depends on the type of clothing and situation. Nice shirts and bras are always hung on the indoor rack and everything goes out side when the weather is nice. I always try to dry my dress pants in the dryer because that is the best way to get rid of the link.

On the banning of clothes lines because of property values  I've read news articles where cities or towns ban the use of them also.

[Outdoor Girl]

In Ontario, there were a lot of subdivisions that banned outdoor clotheslines as they were being built because they were considered unsightly.  But with green energy and environmental issues being brought to the forefront, those agreements have been declared null and void and if you want a clothesline, you are free to put one up as long as it is totally on your own property (not attached to a shared fence, for example).

I don't use an outdoor line, mainly because it would be a lot of work to get from my laundry room to the back yard unless I took the screen out of the window and somehow balanced the laundry basket there.  I do have a rack that I use indoors, in my bedroom, for delicates and things I'm worried about shrinking.  I do 4 loads of laundry at a time and usually only have 3 dryer loads, max.

I remember reading a story about clotheslines.  One younger lady used hers all the time and was given grief that she put her 'unmentionables' on the line, especially in light of her older, bachelor neighbour.  (He wasn't the one complaining.)  She had a good relationship with him so for his 50th birthday, she made sure to hang out 50 pieces of lingerie, just for him.  He thought it was hysterical.

[Xandraea]

*Snip*
I remember reading a story about clotheslines.  One younger lady used hers all the time and was given grief that she put her 'unmentionables' on the line, especially in light of her older, bachelor neighbour.  (He wasn't the one complaining.)  She had a good relationship with him so for his 50th birthday, she made sure to hang out 50 pieces of lingerie, just for him.  He thought it was hysterical.

I agree, that's hysterical!!  Why do people complain "on behalf" of others all the time? He's a grown man, if he had a problem with it he could have spoken up for himself.  I wish I had neighbors that I could call friends, or even friendly.

[Jones]

Just remembered some extra benefits to our indoor line!
Ours is hung in the family area. Dh uses it to dry herbs, I use it to hang party decorations. No pins in the wall from holidays past.We've also hung quilts on it for indoor "tents". Not just for the children, either. 

And I've noticed that on especially hot days, hanging wet towels out to dry seems to help the house cool off a bit faster (we have a swamp cooler that blows through the wet stuff).

[camlan]

Growing up in New Hampshire, we had both a clothesline and a dryer. The clothesline was shielded from the view of the street and the neighbors with a trellis and a lot of lilac bushes.

But with nine people in the family, laundry pretty much had to be done daily, and couldn't wait for sunny days. So the dryer was used on rainy days and in the winter, when the clothes would have frozen before they dried. We lived in an old Victorian house, built in the 1880s, and you could see in the basement where they  had had strung clotheslines for use in the winter. But the basement was too damp to dry clothes quickly--when we tried it, they mildewed before they dried.

Older parts of Boston and the surrounding towns still have houses with clotheslines. The Boston three-decker houses typically had clotheslines either on the back porch or running from the house to poles in the back yard, with pulleys to move the clothes along. I used to live in a neighborhood that was built up between 1920-1930--pretty much all the houses had had clotheslines, and a good many were still in operation. I'd wake at 6:30 on summer mornings to the sound of the pulley squeaking as my elderly neighbor put her laundry out on the line. She had a screened-in back porch on the second floor, with a special little screen window to allow her to access the line.

[Harriet Jones]

I tend to hang stuff inside rather than outside, but we *do* have a clothesline and so do many of the neighbors.  Our next-door neighbor uses theirs all of the time.

[kethria]

I want one, but in the meantime I got a drying rack from Ikea I leave on the deck. In the townhome I would use it to dry sweaters and stuff. Here it's mostly bathing suits and wet clothes from the pool. I mostly do laundry at night and it's kind of a hike all the way up the basement stairs to the deck to hang clothes. I might start doing more washing on Saturday though and let it dry, assuming that the maryland humidity actually lets it dry.

[MariaE]

Just wanted to add that about half of our clothes lines are indoors. Denmark's too wet for it to be logical to have only outdoors ones.

Thus eliminating the problem of sun bleaching, pollen, pollution and neighbours complaining about unmentionables

[MrsJWine]

I would love to have a clothesline, but there isn't really a place to put one indoors, and putting them outdoors freaks me out (spiders, ooooh, the spiders). Also it's extremely dusty here, so they'd need to go straight back in the wash, I think. I was hang-drying most of our clothes indoors when we had a house and extra space to hang clothes, but now there's just too much laundry and too little space. I cannot find any drying racks online that are made for small spaces and would work in our apartment, and our bathtub won't work (gets used too much, and the ventilation is lousy in there even with the fan on, so things would take forever to dry). So I think it's mostly that living spaces in the US aren't really set up for line or rack drying. I wish they were; it would save gobs of money.

[Thipu1]

When I was a child, everyone had lines for drying laundry.  I also remember helping my mother set up the curtain stretcher in the back yard.  Does anyone remember those instruments of torture? 

Where we live now, an outside clothes line isn't possible.  We have a dryer in our apartment and, when clothes can't go into the dryer, we hang them in the little room that holds our furnace and hot water heater.