With summer here, drying your clothes outside is the way to go in terms of energy saving, stain fighting, and adding lovely outdoor fragrance to your laundry.
But what do you do when your property is .12 acres total -- like ours? ;)
Well, when I realized that the backyard was far too tiny for one of those permanent hexagonal (?) clothesline fixtures I'd always dreamed of, I knew it was time for some creative problem-solving.
Hence the trip to the hardware store that racked up a total bill of $6 or so.
Below is a little run-down on how it came to be and what it looks like.
Supplies:
- 3 eye hooks
- 1 cleat hook
- 1 double-headed carabiner
- long rope
- two permanent poles/walls
Step 1:
Locate two sturdy poles/walls that you will give you adequate space to hang a load of laundry. And ideally in a location that gets lots of sunlight.
Step 2:
Screw an eye hook to one of the posts, high up but not so high that you can't reach a line hung from that height.
Step 3:
Attach one end of the carabiner to that same eye hook.
Tie rope to other end of the carabiner.
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| You'll have something like this so far (sans the bag of clothing pins) |
Step 4:
Screw the second eye hook into the pole opposite the first, at the same height as the eye hook.
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| This is what it looks like with the rope fed through it |
Step 5:
Screw the third and last eye hook into that same pole as above, approximately 3 feet below the first. Pretty much so that it is high enough off the ground to not let clothing hung from the line touch the ground, but low enough as to give the clothing hung from the line above adequate room. Like this:
Step 6:
Screw the cleat hook into the first pole (opposite it), at the same height off the ground as that last eye hook.
You get the picture? Pretty much, the three eye hooks and cleat hook, are creating a square shape, and the rope fed through them all create a sideways "U" (sorta).
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| Wrap that rope around tight! |
When the rope has been fed through the two eye hooks, and then wound tight around the cleat, you have your two-tier clothesline!
What's is nice, is that when you are not using that space for drying your laundry, simply feeding the rope back through the eye hooks, and hanging it around that first one with the carabiner frees it back up again with only some non-obtrusive hooks giving the whole thing away. ;)
So far it's been working very well, though we are considering utilizing another set of poles under our carport to double or drying load.
Well, we'll see~!
Until then, enjoy this lovely sunshine and Happy Laundering!
