Frugal Family Tip #1

My youngest daughter wanted to help make our home blog "better" so she had a suggestion that I thought was pretty cool: Share some of our money saving tips as we go through this process. She explained that we could help other family who are trying to make their budgets work for them. So here we go with our first tip:

Tip #1 Clotheslines drying

Above me you can see towels suspended from our
mega-clothesline. I will try to find better pics to add. 

On 58th street we had the grandaddy of a clothesline. It was from the back of the porch to a pole way out at the back of the property and was on a wheeled pulley system. You could easily dry three large loads of clothes on that thing but shuttling everything in and out could be a real test of stregnth if you were drying a lot of towels.

I never had anything like a real "clothesline" once I moved out of that house (and the line has since been retired due to age and decay) but I still try to dry a lot of my clothes without depending entirely on a dryer. Our solution is a foldable drying rack. (They even had a delux version of these for sale at Costco not too long ago!)

The drying rack doesn't have nearly as much "real estate" as the old clothesline but it has enough room to dry heavy towels and jeans to almost dry before I put them in the dryer to fluff for a few minutes. Instead of using up energy (and heating the house up in the summer) with full drying cycle for heavy items I throw them on the drying rack. (I admit that for many small items I do go ahead and use the dryer, with a toddler running around, time can be crunched and sometimes you can err on the side of frugality COSTING you time and money if you don't balance it with the needs and priorities of your family.)

It may sound like a pain but if you do a load of heavy jeans before you leave for work just set the drying rack up in your garage, back porch or (during winter) in your bathtub. In our hot summer they will suck the moisture right out (to soften very dry jeans I will throw in wet garments from the next load into the dryer and the jeans help them dry faster and they get softened at the same time. In winter they may not dry that much but anything helps with such high energy costs hitting us all.

This is the kind of drying rack I currently use.

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