Doing Laundry

Today is laundry day. Last summer, I remodelled our bathroom, which also doubles as the laundry room. The fact that we're still not using said bathroom for it's original purposes is another story, but we are doing laundry in there!

As a matter of fact, our old washer/dryer was a one-piece stack unit like you might see in an apartment. Now, houses go through trasformations over the years as different owners change things around. For instance our family room was once the garage. It's seriously like somebody decided one day to say, "Hey hon, pull out the car, I'm gonna throw up a wall and turn the garage into a family room." In the process, they went to the expense of adding on another attached garage, complete with Bedfordstone siding tied into the original house.

That said, our bathroom in question (we have another, by the way) was once just the laundry room. I'm sure that it had cabinets, a counter, a wash tub or basin, maybe a 'new fangled' washing machine, etc. But somewhere along the way, it was decided that the space would be more useful as a bathroom. So the appropriate ceramics were installed and the washer/dryer was chosen and put in for its compactness for the space. This one-piece unit finally bit the dust as we were about to remodel. So for several weeks, as I'm tearing up the bathroom, we had to take our laundry (and kids) to the local laundry-mat. That was an experience in itself. I worked frantically for several weeks to get the room back to a point where we could reinstall a washer and dryer. Finally the time arrived and a trip to our local Lowe's produced a new Whirlpool stackable front end loader whashe and a dryer to go on top. Both are supposed to be energy efficient. However....

I say all of that to say that I've been thinking some about this. I wanna save some money. I wanna work toward true homesteading (not washing clothes in a cauldron of boiling water or beating them on a rock). I'm thinking an easy way to do both would be to put up a clothesline in the back yard. We live on a half an acre. Most of the backyard is fenced in for our dog and kids. My wife frets about putting the clothesline there because she envisions the dog pulling on the clothes and dragging them all over creation. I envision the kids doing that. So deciding where to put it is certainly the biggest obstacle right now. I can't see how actually installing it will be that big of a deal. Just where do I put it?

This is a bigger deal than it may seem at first. I have a lot of neighbors. And though there are none behind me (a corn field lies that-a-way), I still have plenty of folks around to consider. Some people could be clothesline intollerant (wow, I hate this kind of 'pc' nonesense). In other words, they might not appreciate the fact that my clothes are hanging outside for them to look at all the time. Now, it's a free country and I can install the clothesline if I want to, but I do want to keep good relations with my neighbors. Chances are, it'll end up in the back yard somewhere. Maybe I'll fenagle some sort of fencing or something around it to keep the dog away.... we'll see. Got any ideas?