We all know that the dryer is terrible for your delicates, but hanging them all up to air dry is maddening, especially if you live in an apartment without a clothesline.
For years, my attitude was “clothes wear out, we’ll buy new clothes, life’s too short for air drying.” But then, I came across this silly-looking Whitmor hanging rack on Amazon and bought it on the spot. It looks like some sort of parody product that SNL would have come up with in its heyday, it makes a delightful click-clacky sound when you pick it up, and I love it like a pet.
It’s designed to clamp to your shower rod, and lets you go from having zero clothespins set up for air drying to having 26 clothespins set up for air drying in about two and a half seconds. It’s basically an old-timey backyard clothesline, but for millennials living in 700-square-foot apartments.
Is hanging clothes on this thing still more work than putting a giant ball of wet clothes into the dryer? Sure. But it’s easy enough that even I, a profoundly lazy individual, am willing to use it. I couldn’t honestly say the same about digging a bunch of vacant clothes hangers out of the closet and setting them up one by one.
Clearly, a hanging rack like this is designed for small things like socks and underwear, but I’ve used it to hang wet bathing suits, dress shirts, and even sweaters in a pinch, though the latter required hanging a few other heavy things on the opposite side to keep the whole apparatus relatively balanced. I even stuck a little command hook onto the side of our dryer to hold the thing when I’m not using it, so it effectively doesn’t take up any space in my cramped apartment until I need it.
Now, I just need to get a laundry folding board to go with it.