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| Tuesday, July 15, 2008 |
| Just ask for the rope aisle at Home Depot |
I am moving ahead with my clothes line project at Boston Gal's HQ. I visited a local Home Depot this weekend to pick up the needed supplies, but was having trouble locating the correct aisle. Silly me asked a couple of orange vested employees where the clothes lines could be found and got lots of blank stares and shrugged shoulders. One young employee insisted that the store did not sell clothes lines.
Finally I was able to find the aisle by changing what I was asking for: "Do you have rope, pulleys, eyelets, and hooks?" To that question the reply from the Home Depot employee was an immediate "Oh yes, all of those items are here, in fact there is a display area with all of those items grouped together in aisle 16."
When I visited aisle 16 sure enough I found everything I needed, along with clothes pins and various retractable clothes lines... |
| posted by Boston Gal @ 1:52 PM *
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| 7 Comments: |
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You know, a lot of younger people probably have never seen a clothesline. We didn't get a dryer until I was in my late teens so I'm all too familar with them.
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I have fond memories of playing in the yard while my mother hung clothes on the line. She wore a big floppy hat and a loose cotton dress. There really is nothing like the smell of sheets dried outside.
I also remember her running out to bring the clothes in when those summer thunder storms would come through.
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I didn't know that dryers were so uncommon outside the U.S. until I read:
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2008/07/12/frugality-in-practice-air-dry-your-clothes-even-indoors/
Meanwhile, even though I've known a lot of pretty poor people, I haven't known a lot of people here in the states who line dry.
However, I dry almost all my clothes indoors on clothing hangers on a bar that my husband hung above our dryer. Works great, saves time putting away clothes, and I don't have to worry about nosy neighbors.
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You definitely won't regret it Boston Gal. I've been using one ever since moving to Australia (everyone has a clothesline here!). I had never used one before but it didn't take too long to adjust.
Last year we replaced our fold down one with a retractable one and it looks great. We should have done that years ago.
There are so many benefits: your clothes will last longer, it saves money and it's great for the environment :-)
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My Home Depot strategy: Find the oldest (male) employee, smile and ask your question. It never fails and I always get what I need. While I don't usually like playing the dumb girl, sometimes I just don't have the time to wander around the store.
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I grew up in the UK, where we always used a clothes line, but it was a simple length of rope stretched tight between two metal poles. One small refinement my mother made was a long forked stick to prop up the center of the rope if the wash was too heavy.
How do you make one with pulleys?
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You use the pulley so you can stand in one place while hanging the cloths - you pull the line through the pulley to move it - moving the just hung clothes away from you and giving yourself a fresh area of rope to hang.
Pulley lines are particularly important if you are stringing out your line from a porch - that way you can stand steps from the door and hang out the clothes (which than hang high) instead of having to go down to ground level to use the line.
Around Boston the norm is clothes lines on pulley's - most hanging off second and third story porches in triple decker neighborhoods. Basically you share the line with the neighbor across the way - each having access to it by pulling on the pulley.
Hope that makes sense! In my case I ended up using two retractable lines. I will have to do a post about my clothes lines in the next couple of days. I am just trying them out today.
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You know, a lot of younger people probably have never seen a clothesline. We didn't get a dryer until I was in my late teens so I'm all too familar with them.