Clothes Horse Advice

My personal findings on where to hang what

Do you hang your wet clothes on a clothes horse? If so, I have some advice for you. You might already know it, you might not care, but here it is anyway.

Hang the biggest stuff first, and the smallest stuff last.

That’s it, that’s the advice. You can go now. But if you want to know how I arrived at that, read on. Here comes the science bit. Concentrate.

Imagine you’ve got a clothes horse with only two bars. Just for talking sake. Two bars, each a metre wide. I know that clothes horses don’t have bars a metre wide, and I know that clothes horses don’t have just two bars, but it’s just for talking sake.

Now, imagine you’ve got clothes that just so happen to add up to exactly two metres wide. Clothes that are a variety of widths. Well, that shouldn’t be a problem, should it? You’ve got two bars, each a metre wide, that’s two metres, all hunky dory.

Maybe.

Or maybe not!

Imagine the clothes consist of two t-shirts, each 75cm wide (just for talking sake), and the socks are… whatever. The socks are narrow and can sort of fit anywhere. And it all adds up to two metres wide. Right?

So you go and put all the socks on first. What’s the total width of those socks again? Let’s work it out.

Well, there’s the two t-shirts at 75cm each, so that’s 150cm total, and I said the total width of the clothes are two metres, i.e. 200cm, and 200 - 150 = 50cm. The total width of the socks is 50cm.

You hang up 50cm of socks, on one of the bars. That leaves you with 50cm left on that one 100cm bar, and another whole bar by itself.

Good stuff. Plenty of room for everything.

Or is it?

Or is it?

No, it isn’t.

You go to hang one of the t-shirts on the space remaining on that bar with the socks on it, that 50cm space.

But the t-shirt is 75cm wide!

You’re fucked!

You can hang it on the other bar, plenty of room there, you’ve got the whole bar. But then that leaves you with 25cm of space on that bar. Which is even worse than the one with the socks on it!

Game over.

You’re done, baybee.

Lights out.

But wait!

And here it is. Here is my solution. It’s what I said at the very start. When you’re hanging stuff up, start with the biggest stuff, and end with the smallest.

So let’s rewind.

In fact, let’s imagine it was just a dream.

You wake up, sweating. But it was all just a dream. A horrible dream.

So you go to hang up your clothes, this time for real, and you do it right. And you hang up the t-shirts first.

Let’s see how you get on with that.

You hang up a 75cm t-shirt on one bar, leaving you with 25cm on that. Then you hang up the other 75cm t-shirt on the other bar, leaving you with 25cm on that. And you just fill in the space with the socks.

That’s it.

That’s that.

Put simply: it works.

And that same science can be applied to an actual clothes horse, one that doesn’t have just two bars that are each a metre wide.

You give it a shot, and let me know how you get on.

It should make things far easier, freeing up more of your time to get out there and enjoy life to the fullest.