Making Laundry Easier

Laundry is never really difficult, but it's definitely one of my more tedious tasks.  Wash it, dry it, fold it, put it away and it starts again before I can even blink.  In the summer I take it one step further and hang clothes out on the line to dry.  It really only take a few minutes of my day and it save a little on the natural gas bill.  I think I once calculated it to be about $1 saved per load which is somewhere around $20-$30 per month.  It would be more if we were running an electric dryer, but probably less if our dryer was more efficient.

Anyway, I hung a clothesline last year and wanted it to run high enough so the boys wouldn't get hung up on it.  Once I had it up, though, I discovered I had to be on tippie toes to reach it myself.  So I have been standing on an upside down crate on of the steps below it for quite some time.   The steps were in need of repair, so I thought I might try to make a special step stool that could be hidden under the steps and pulled out when I need to hang clothes up, since I was going to be ripping up the old boards anyway.

The first step was pulling the boards off.  These particular ones had been screwed on, but you'll find some are nailed in place.  And when they're as coated with paint as these were it can be hard to tell without scraping the coating off with your utility knife.  Best tool I've found for getting out buried nails is definitely a cat's paw, sometimes called a claw bar, or nail puller.

  

The stair risers looked to be in good enough condition so I didn't have to replace that.  So it was on to the construction of the step stool.  Notice that their is a center rise, which is exactly in the place where I needed the step stool to stand as that's where I stand when I hang the laundry.  Not really a big deal, but it is something I had to work around in my design plans.

As a little tangent, I nailed the 3 frame pieces together.  At one point my neighbor was over checking out the project and I naturally managed to misfire when I was nailing in one of the nails.  It was going in a bit crooked, so I decided to pull it out and try again.  A 9 year old girl from down the street was also up playing with my boys while I worked.  She saw what had happened and commented that "it's okay, girls can't really build things anyway".  Naturally I looked at her in disbelief.  While I should have held my tongue, I preferred to give her a good talking to.  "Are you kidding me?" I said.  "Who do you think did all the building projects in that house in front of you?  Who do you think all these tools belong to?  And who on earth told you that girls can't build anything?!!?".  Having no sense, she responded to my rhetorical question, "My Dad said it, because my mom can't cut things with a saw."  Ugh.  "Well, (I sighed) sounds like a problem for you mom, not every other female."   Grrrrrrr.  Back to the project at hand.  I sure hope I can manage to put it together since I am equipped with that construction-limiting vagina   ;)

The next step was to cut the frame pieces for the base that I will stand on.  For this I picked up some of these pieces that sort of look like framing studs (2x4's) but in fact are more like studs cut in half, about 2x2.  They were cheaper, and I also wasn't going to need all the strength of a 2x4.  The finished base is 20"x24" for each of them.  So I cut 4 pieces that were 20 inches long and 2 pieces that were 17 inches.  After that I needed to cut the legs.  For the pieces that would sit on the deck itself, those were about 6.5 inches (cut 4 of those) and the 2 longer ones that stand on the step below the deck were about 12 inches long (cut 2 of those.  I then drilled a large hole through each of the legs near the end and centered.  For the platform pieces, I drilled matching holes that were closer to the bottom of the wood and far enough from the 17 inch top piece so that they could rotate from a parallel to a perpendicular position depending on whether the platform was being stored or used.

 You can also see that on the bottom corner of the side that rotates next to the top piece of the platform, I cut a 45-degree notch so that the piece could rotate easily and still be close enough to stop against the platform for stability.  The pieces were then attached using large bolts, washers and nuts.  You'll want each of the leg pieces to be nice and tight.  Not so tight that you cannot move them from one position to another, but not so loose that they fall into positions easily, as this makes it more difficult to get it out of it's hiding space under the step.  The front (longer) legs get attached in a similar fashion, though you will notice there isn't presently a front piece to run them into, so position so that when they are in a perpendicular position, they are flush with the end of the 20-inch piece of the frame.

Before finishing up the step, I added some blocking supports on the inside of the stair risers.  This was just scrap wood I had from cutting the decking pieces for the stairs and for the step stool.  This is what the step stool will slide into it's hiding spot on and will rest on.

The next step was to add the pieces of decking to the top of the frame.  For me this took 6 pieces of standard cedar decking, cut to 20 inch lengths and then screwed to the platform frame.  I then slid each of the platform pieces into their hiding spots so that I could secure this piece of decking to the front of the frame.  While you probably could add this piece without them in place, this was a lot easier as it kept the platforms stable and it also took any guess work out of figuring out where the front piece should go.  With the front secured I could now put the cedar on the step and test it out.

The first test didn't go so well.  One of the shorter legs (that rests on the deck) didn't stay in the stored position, and when it shifted down it kept the whole piece from being extracted from the hidden spot.  This is why I went back and changed the instructions to be sure you tighten them a little more than you think necessary just to be sure this doesn't happen to you.  It's a serious pain the button to get your body under there to get it free.  Once that kink was worked out, though it worked beautifully.

Used it to hang out a load of laundry.  It felt nice and stable even with my 5 year old standing on it next to me.  And it stored away super quick and easy.  It's a bit on the heavy side, but this will change over the next few days as the cedar dries out.