Most satisfying household chore

I'm been meaning to say this out loud for some time:  I reckon clothes washing and outdoor drying of same is the most satisfying household chore.

Many years ago, a flatmate made a confession that she said she knew she should keep to herself -  she actually enjoyed cleaning the bathroom.  The restoration of cleanliness and whiteness in sinks and toilets did it for her.

I understand the sentiment, but I think I find that job too chemical intensive and therefore artificial to be completely pleasing.  (Not only that, but if you live in an older house where the shower screen glass has become impossible to restore to perfect see through transparency - it's the micro erosion of the surface, apparently, not soap scum or scale - you don't get the feeling that you've restored the whole room to "as new" condition.)

But for some time now, I find myself always thinking about how unusually satisfying I find hanging out washing to dry, and how putting on a load of washing is so simple, especially compared to my childhood, when my mother had to wrestle washing through this type of machine:

The whole washing and drying process now combines something like the best of technological convenience (the front load washer that has come from some far away land - possibly Germany?) with the ancient practice going back to the invention of clothes of hanging them out to dry in the sun and/or breeze.   When you think about it, the clothes drying part is actually nuclear powered, but at a very safe distance.   :)

I posted many years ago about the weird American aversion to using outdoor clotheslines.   I see that the struggle for them to get sensible about this continues.  Here's a recently updated post at Treehugger:

The New York Times Green Inc. blog ran an insightful post on an increasingly love it or hate it practice earlier today: using outdoor clotheslines in lieu of or in addition to conventional energy guzzling drying machines.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never used an outdoor clothesline. In fact, aside from movies and television and a trip to Spain several years ago I rarely see clotheslines being used. I, like much of young urban North America, consider clotheslines to be domestic relics; household staples that have either been banished to the "countryside" or disappeared decades ago along with egg timers, rotary phones, and washing buckets.

According to Project Laundry List, an advocacy group that’s pushing to give all citizens the legal right to hang dry their dirty knickers while raising awareness about alternatives to nuclear power, state-backed initiatives to lift bans on the use of clotheslines are increasingly common.

Clothesline bans, usually enacted by homeowner and condo associations, operate under the guise that they these simple energy-savers are unsightly blemishes on urban and suburban landscapes. States including Florida, Colorado, Utah, and most recently, Maine, have right-to-dry laws intact while other states such as Maine and Hawaii have similar bills in the works.

Imagine never knowing the nice feeling of bringing in naturally dried clothes?  They don't know what they're missing out on.