Laundry Day

I have been wanting to line dry our laundry for several months.  The first hurdle was that the clothesline posts that came with the house were being used to hang a hammock, and the kids pulled one of them out of the ground (again) after having a ridiculous number of kids sitting on it at the same time.

So last week, we dug a new hole about 4 feet deep, filled it with concrete, and then added some boulders on top.

A few days ago I discovered that after the oldest had used the washer, it suddenly didn't work anymore.  I didn't notice this problem until after I had loaded it myself and then came back and hour later to find soaking wet, but still dirty clothes.  I couldn't just leave them, so I had to hand wash the entire load, squeeze them dry, and then put them in the dryer.

Today I bought and tied up the rope lines on the clothesline posts, and then cleaned and filled the two plastic pools we have.  I decided to try out hand washing and drying, for the heck of it.

This was the wash cycle

Okay, really, this was the washing cycle

And the rinse cycle

And the line dry

We did cheat, because we had so much to wash and dry, I ended up putting a lot of things in the drier once they only felt slightly damp.

It was a fun experience but I kept wishing I had that crank machine that would squeeze the water out of the clothes.  :)  Now I need to find time to sit down with the washer machine and figure out what is wrong and actually fix it.