I love the way a clothesline-dried bath towel feels, all stiff and rough and super-absorbent. We have a washing machine! But we don't have a dryer. There isn't any outside ventilation for a dryer, but that's okay, we're saving money, and apparently saving our clothes, too, according to a friend I lived with in Nashville. He was a laundry-nazi (if that isn't too un-PC to say; if it is: oops!). He had a washer and a dryer, but he only put clothes and other laundry items in the dryer for five or ten minutes, "just long enough to get the wrinkles out," he said.He brought me a pair of brand new overalls from his work one time, 36" long. But they were way long on me. I told him that they must make their overalls long and he said, "Or you're just used to your clothes getting shrunk in the dryer."
I liked the way the overalls felt, too, thick and stiff, but there seemed to be so much extra fabric that I didn't wear them a lot. Also, denim is pretty warm as a fabric when it's all new and thick, not worn down by tumbling to complete dryness. My friend was annoyingly right about a lot of things.
We don't have a dryer, but we have a clothesline. Actually, we have two, one outside and another inside. It's in the middle room, the living room, some would call it, but now I call it the living/laundry room! I put three hooks in the frames of two doors and one window, high up so we don't decapitate ourselves going through the house. It's kind of eccentric, I guess, but I guess I like that. Our whole living situation is pretty eccentric, truth be told.
The front room, which was most likely the original living room, is my bedroom. I hung a bamboo curtain inside the front door to create a sort of foyer, or at least to create the effect of not entering into a bedroom. But it's still a bedroom. Now it's kind of a bedroom/office with a bamboo curtain partition.
My front window curtain is an old sheet, but it's a groovy sheet, with big orange and red flowers on it, and I hung it up in a way that it doesn't looking like just a sheet. The other windows have a bedspread, I think, hung across them with clippy-rings. I think it's a bedspread. I got it at a resale shop. It has a backing, hand-sewn, and a forest scene with a deep red background, a close match to the wall color.
The middle room, besides being a living/laundry room, has a colorful shower curtain on the windows. Plus, it has a pillow case-sized hole in the ceiling from a plumber who came and couldn't fix the plumbing and didn't fix the hole. Another plumber fixed the plumbing but not the hole in the ceiling. I covered it with a pillow case; that's how I know how big it is. A standard pillow case.
The kitchen has the washing machine in it, so I guess it's an eat-in kitchen/laundry room.
Steven's bedroom/office is in the back of the house. He has no curtains on two windows, but a grove of bamboo outside gives him plenty of privacy. On the other two windows, he has actual curtains hanging on actual curtain hooks and an actual curtain rod. I got the curtains at the same resale shop before he moved here, didn't know where to put them so I kept them in a trunk. They're old and pretty groovy, cream-colored with greenish and brownish designs on them that sort of mimic the bamboo outside.
The bathroom is just a bathroom (sigh!), but the landing between the kitchen, Steven's room and the bathroom has the door to a junk closet, which I hung a curtain in front of. I asked Steven if he liked it when I hung it up. He said, "It's kind of eccentric," but he didn't say he didn't like it. I took that as a compliment, by the way.
I like our eccentric little pad. That's just the way a couple of ex-partner/best friends/once and occasional co-creators should live. It's a comfortable existence -- anything but stiff -- even with all of the slashes!
