Update on last year’s baby steps challenge: air dry laundry

Last June, I wrote this post about my baby steps challenge for the month: air dry the laundry. Two weeks later, when I wrote this update, I was convinced the habit would become part of my daily life.

Things didn’t quite go as planned…

I faithfully hung our laundry out to dry for about three or four months, until the first “exception” sent me back to the dryer. I think it was getting ready for a vacation, or doing several loads of laundry after the vacation. And I never quite got back in the habit of air drying after that.

You see, we had a really rainy winter. But that’s a lame excuse, because my friend Katy at The Non-Consumer Advocate lives in Portland where it rains about a gazillion inches of rain per year, and she’s the Queen of Air Drying.

My husband had bought a really nice new dryer that saves on energy, so I didn’t feel nearly so bad about throwing clothes in there as I did our 1970s relic that could power a medium-sized suburban mall.

When my husband did the laundry, I couldn’t convince him to use the clothesline, and he often does the laundry.

You can see I had an excuse for every occasion. But when I really looked at what was going on, I realized a very simple fact: it actually does not work well with our schedule and house design.

Sometimes I work at home, and sometimes I work away from home. On the days I’m away, I can’t put a load of laundry into the washer because the laundry room is directly below our bedroom and my husband is often still sleeping. And even when I’m home, I can’t necessarily time things perfectly to get a load in early enough. It’s terribly inefficient and expensive to run the washer during the day, so we end up doing laundry at night. And short of my husband suddenly turning into an early bird, I don’t see this pattern changing.

So I give myself a big fat “D” on this baby steps challenge. I hope I was able to inspire someone else to pick up the habit I couldn’t stick with myself. I don’t get an “F” because hey, at least I tried. And I still do a lot of my favorite and delicate items by hand and hang them up or lay them out in the house.

Please leave your thoughts on air drying laundry in the Comments section. And if you need a laugh, click here to watch Stephen Colbert’s “news story” about a woman who scandalized her neighborhood by, you guessed it, air drying her laundry! Gasp.