We were looking in a recent Lehman's catalog and saw this swell laundry rack. The cool thing about it is that it hangs from the ceiling from ropes that run through pulleys. You lower the rack to put clothes on it, then you raise it up to let everything dry while it's up and out of the way. At about the same time, I saw this story from Ode Magazine about people around the world line-drying their clothes instead of using dryers. In the summer time we use the clothesline but for roughly nine months out of the year it's too cold and damp to use a line.

Putting these ideas together, we got excited. We've got this high ceiling in the main room and when it's cold, the furnace or the wood stove is going, heating up all the air in that room. "Rad!" we thought. "If we put a drying rack up there, we could be using the heat to dry the laundry, we'd be humidifying our air, and if we could stop using the dryer all year, we could get rid of the dryer and get some space back!" A new project has been born.

Phase One: Building the rack

We talked about what we wanted the rack to look like. Our criteria: it should be all wood, the dowels should be sturdy enough not to bow under the weight of damp jeans, and the dowels should be far enough apart to allow for decent air flow around the doubled-over clothes. When we hang laundry on the clothesline, it hangs in a single layer suspended by clothespins. When we hang laundry on the rack, it's going to have to be folded over the dowels so we wanted there to be enough space. We figured that eight inches ought to be enough.

With the dowels spaced eight inches apart, center to center, and a one inch margin on the outside of the dowels, we calculated four dowels would use twenty six inches across.

We went to OSH and got two three foot pieces of 1 x 6. We also bought four three-quarter inch dowels. The dowels came in four foot lengths so that's how long our rack is going to be. We bought a 3/4 inch spade bit and some pulleys and some cord, and a can of spar varnish.

I cut the 1 x 6 boards down to 26 inches long, then I drilled holes in the boards for the dowels. I peeled the price stickers off the dowels and then sanded them so there wasn't any glue left on them (let me just say that this practice of putting stickers on the wood may make it easier on the cashiers but it makes life more difficult for the maker).

I tried a dry assembly and everything went together easily, so I took the wood bits apart again and put wood glue in the holes and then reassembled the rack. It is now curing.

Next, I'll be applying three coats of spar varnish. Between the drying time and the sanding between coats, this is likely to take a few days. After that, we'll screw eye bolts into the four corners of the rack. We'll screw eye bolts into the ceiling and use S-hooks to suspend pulleys from the bolts and then suspend the rack from the pulleys using cord. Stay tuned, the next post will be about the mounting.