I had to do a ton of laundry yesterday. Much of the time right now I’ve been having to do a load a day. Pretty standard routine when you have a child who isn’t quite perfect about not wetting the bed. It’s easy to make up a full load when you have bed sheets to start it off and young children who love to play with dirt.

We had been just drying the sheets and mattress protector outside, but I’ve found that if I try I can fit a whole load on there, even with the sheets taking a lot of room, so that’s what we’re doing now.

It’s really not that hard to do, even if the weather out is 90+ degrees still. A little time consuming, but I’ve already warned my husband that I probably want a second line hung soon.

But eventually the time comes that you have to do ALL the laundry. The bed stays dry for several nights and things just pile up.

When you have just one clothesline and the day is warm and windy but not hot, you can’t count on clothes drying fast enough for each load. So what I did was to put on the clothesline what would fit of each load, let it dry in the sun and wind as the next load washed, then move it to the dryer.

This worked pretty well.

You really don’t want to fully dry denim or towels on a clothesline; they tend to end up really crunchy feeling. But a half hour on the line cut their time in the dryer about in half, and they came out quite nicely.

The challenge is that this is a full extra step in the laundry. I’ve been trying to cut our power bill, so I really don’t mind that much, but I could definitely see that it was adding to the time the task took.

On the plus side, it’s a bit of exercise for the arms.