Many people are living in small spaces, apartments, rentals and places where zoning laws prevent them from hang drying laundry. Worry and fret no more! There are solutions to this.

In my 30 years of being a homemaker I have done some pretty hard things for the lack of something or another. You hear those stories about women and mothers doing laundry in the bathtubs and wringing them out by hand. I have done that in my years as a housewife, in this century no less. What I say in this article, I have done myself. I do know what I am talking about.

While living in an unfinished house when my daughters were small, we didn't have conventional things yet. Our well was dug but we didn't have running water to the house for a number of months. We also didn't have any electric throughout the house except for the stove. Of course it was in the winter and cold as you can get. We didn't have our furniture yet either and slept in sleeping bags on the floor. Yes we did take baths and were clean people all through those rough times. I used to have to go to the well and lower a pail on a rope down to the water line and bring up water that way. I would heat the water up- on the stove and pour it into a big metal tub. The round kind that one could only stand in. So I would get one kid in it and I would pour the warmed water over them and then they could soap up and then I would rinse them off. They would hurry and get in their PJ's and get into their sleeping bags. We lived like this for many months until the water pump started to work.

Doing laundry was tough. I washed all the clothes in the bathtub. All of them! Jeans, bedsheets, towels and anything else that needed washed. I would first sort the laundry by colors and then wash each load at a time. Then I would ring them all out and this hurt the most and made my hands very red and sore. I would then do it all over again with fresh clean water to rinse them. Then ring them all out. It was almost an all day thing!

I learned a way to hang clothes without clothes pins or even outdoors. You can do this yourself if you have zoning laws that prevent you from having a clothesline or you live in an apartment or rental. You can even do this all year.

Take a rope, it doesn't have to be clothes line but does need to hold up to 200 pounds of weight. Screw in the wall a hook and make sure it goes into a stud. If you are renting you can patch this up fairly easy before you move. A dab of White toothpaste does the trick.

On the other wall do the same thing. You can have more than one line across a room. Make sure there isn't anything under the line that will be damaged by a small bit of water that will drip from the clothes. This is minimal if your washer rings out your clothes really well.

Now take the rope and fold it in half. You will need about 2 1/2 times the size of the lenght you need across the room. Now twist it tight and put that end on the other hook on the other side of the room. Spread the rope apart where you are going to hang the corner of the clothes in. It will hold them. You may only have to iron out the corner if the wrinkle is unsightly to you.

Another place that you can dry your clothes is on your shower rod. Hang your dresses or shirts on a hanger and hang them about 4 inches apart on the shower rod. Leave the bathroom door open and turn on the exhaust fan.

You can also buy a tension rod type shower curtain rod and put them in doorways and dry clothes that way on hangers.

Hanging clothes int he house serves another purpose.  In the winter, when it is so dry, hanging wet clothes will add moisture to the air.