Friday 8 July 2011

Laundry lines

When I read a blog post about laundry lines in Italy by Small Notebook a few days back I desided it's finally time to put together again the laundry lines we removed because of the painting of the pergola. The previous laundry lines we had there had seen better days. The metallic holder that holds the piece of wood holding the lines was all rusty and ugly and the wood on the ends of the lines were worn and other one had broke from the middle and we had just used a cable tie to hold it together.


The lines themselves were cracked and dirty looking and they were hard to wipe clean. So all in all it was not a pretty sight.

I bought new laundry line and two pieces of wood. I also bought paint for the metallic holders. I tried to find a new metallic holder to replace the rusty one, but there wasn't any in stores. I could have bought an angle iron and then bend it to form, but I thought it would be easier just to clean the old one and then paint it.


A and I got a Dremel as a Christmas present few years back, first I thought it to be totally useless but it's proven guite handy in many situations. Only it's not stored in a very convenient place and it allways takes me a year to get it out of the cabinet and then put it together. We would really need more storage space for our tools. Anyway... I sanded the rust out from the holders with the Dremel and then cleaned the metallic holders with purified gasoline.


Then I painted everything. I used some grill sticks so I could paint all sides of the metallic holders. The drying time of the metal paint was three hours and I did not feel like waiting all that time to only paint the other side. 


I painted the wood where the laundry lines would be attacthed to too. After those had dried I drilled holes in them where the line can run through. I think I should have drilled the holes there before painting, that way the paint would have covered some of the egdes of the holes too and maybe the wood would be more weather tolerant, but this is how I did it this time.


I prewired the laundry lines and then attached the pieces of wood to the wall and pergola. Then I tightened the lines.


The other end of the lines can be removed from the holders. If I do need to remove the other end it ofcourse falls to the ground, I've been thinking that I can roll the lines over the wood beam and then attach it somehow to the other beam. I have an idea how I'm going to realize this, I think I'll post something about it on wednesday.




2 comments:

  1. I'm always so impressed with your projects! And I can just about smell the fresh clean outdoorsy scent of the dried clothes!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks scb. I do love that smell too.

    ReplyDelete

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