I wanted to post a picture of the new attic drying rack but I think Mark has the camera. It’s made of four or five wooden slats, about six feet long, hung on cords that run through the ends (think a wooden-runged rope ladder, only much wider than it is long). The cords are attached by hooks to the the ceiling and to a wall; the rack can be collapsed and hung out of the way. If I can, I’ll add a picture later.
Laundry and I have a dysfunctional relationship. Throughout our marriage, Mark has done most of the laundry. I keep telling him I’m going to do it and I keep not doing it. In our old house I said it was because the laundry room was in the gross basement that was dangerous for the kids. In this house I have a shiny, uber-functional laundry room and no excuses. Still, clean dry laundry piled up till the weekend, when Mark would spend hours folding it all and putting it all away. I tried setting a goal of “one basket per day;” until a couple of weeks ago, I never even managed that. Meanwhile, I always got annoyed at the way Mark did it (followed by guilt over my ingratitude) because he mixed up the baskets, and he got annoyed at me because I didn’t. (When he looks at four baskets — mine, his, kids’, and linens — that are each 25% full, he sees one load of laundry that has to be done now. I look at the same thing and see laundry that I don’t have to do yet.)
Why couldn’t I just do one load of laundry a day? I think I hate laundry because it’s never finished. I like going to bed with everything done for the day, but laundry never gets “done” — there’s always more. Even if I spent all day washing and drying and putting away EVERYTHING, at the end of the day there’d still be (at least) five dirty outfits and a pile of kitchen rags. Mark thinks this is nuts, and he’s got a point, but clearly this issue of mine was not going away and I needed to change something about the way I do things.
Anyway, I need some time to see if it keeps working, but I seem to have found a way around it. Here is how I fool myself every day into thinking that my laundry can be “done:” Instead of thinking of laundry as a process that gets rid of dirty things, I am thinking of laundry as a process that produces clean, folded, put-away things.
No, it’s NOT the same. The old way, the goal about laundry was always “Catch up on laundry,” which meant “Wash and dry as much as I can and put away all of it,” which never happened. This way I can set a meaningful, reasonable goal, such as: Today I will fill my kitchen drawers with a week’s supply of clean dishcloths, towels, napkins, and tablecloths.
I can never “wash all of it.” But in a day I can produce a week’s supply of linens, or a week’s supply of kids’ clothes, or a week’s supply of my clothes, or a week’s supply of Mark’s clothes.
So I made a little schedule (Monday my clothes, Wednesday kid’s clothes, etc.) and two weeks later it’s still working pretty well. I got it all done, two weeks in a row.
Enter the air drying rack. Now I have to plan ahead because it takes hours to dry stuff. I think I’ll start by promising myself that if the load doesn’t air-dry in time for me to put it away on schedule, I will finish it in the dryer. It’s still an improvement.
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