My dryer is on its last legs . . . literally.

 My dryer is on its last legs . . . literally.

By "dryer", I mean "drying rack", a beautiful behemoth made of wooden dowels and struts, that I bought for my husband two or more decades ago.  It's gotten a lot of use -- and abuse -- over the years, so it's not surprising that it's started to deteriorate a bit.  

Two years ago, I painted the previously-bare wood with some extra green paint, to try to help keep the thing together.  I also worked on reattaching the dowels along the bottom (the ones that had been most stressed and kept falling apart) with screws.

Here's a dog's-eye view of the drying rack, 
as seen from the balcony where Prewash and I like to hang out.

It might seem surprising that it's the bottom -- not the top -- dowels that were the most prone to breaking, but that's because it's those ones that keep the rack from stretching two wide.   When we fold it up, the rack is like this:

|||||||||

As it opens, it's kind of like this:

WWWW

And we don't want it to pancake flat, like this:

=

It's those bottom three bars, and the ties between them, that keep the drying rack from collapsing.  Or rather, that kept the rack from collapsing, because earlier this month they finally handed in their pink slips and quit.  And so the drying rack would go from "||||" to " = " without staying in the "WWWW" position.

Man, oh man, I figured I would have to get a new drying rack.  And someday, this spring, I probably will get a new one, because I love that my husband has a drying rack he likes using almost as much as the electric dryer.  But the place to get a new one is a bit of a drive away, and right now time is precious to me, so I wasn't ready to get in the car and go shopping just yet. 

As I was doing the exit interviews with the dowel rods and the ties between them, I realized, however, I could hire a temp:  a lovely piece of rope.   I pulled out my handy dandy cordless drill to make rope-sized holes in the legs, right where the previous dowel rods and struts had been, and created a perfectly serviceable connector that keeps the legs from doing the splits. 

The rope that keeps it all together
(there's another one on the opposite side, naturally).

The missing dowel rods were at the bottom,
so this fix hardly affect the drying space we have, fortunately!

And now my drying rack is opened like WWWW, and full of dry clothes that my husband hung on it before he left for places far away, and I'm very happy to have a drying rack on its own legs, even if those legs are the last legs.