Hanging out at home: Laundry as a thread and texture of everyday life

The significance of laundry

Existing literatures make powerful statements about the relevance of laundry in the everyday. Laundry is inseparable from the ways homes are constituted and reconstituted on an everyday basis (Pink, 2012). It is part of how the texture and experience of home is made and remade and of everyday household negotiations (Kaufmann, 1998), deceptions and moralities (Pink, 2005). It is a historically rooted everyday practice through which resources – including water and energy – are consumed, and which changes over time (Shove, 2003). There is a small but growing existing qualitative literature, which reflects on laundry in relation to social and environmental dimensions of the living of everyday life in modern cultures and societies (Gram-Hanssen, 2007; Kaufmann, 1998; Pink, 2005, 2007b, 2012; Shove, 2003; Strengers, 2011a). There is moreover a history of qualitative research about laundering in laundry product development research (see Pink, 2004), and in ergonomics design research for laundry appliances (e.g. Nyberg and Kempic, 2006). However, given the extent to which laundry is part of the environments and routines of the home and beyond, it is perhaps surprising that it has not received more attention in the works of cultural studies scholars of everyday life or in disciplines which take everyday life as their subject matter, such as anthropology and human geography.

Most recently, with the growth of concerns about, and thus academic research funding for, energy consumption and demand reduction, environmental health, and water use, laundry has become of increasing interest to researchers in applied and policy fields (e.g. Menon and Porteous, 2011; Shove, 2003; Strengers, 2011a). This interest in the ways that laundry and the activities that surround it come to bear on wider environmental issues (climate change, water and energy demand), and in how humans actually experience their environments affectively, physiologically and healthily, demonstrates a need to connect research that seeks to understand laundry because it has wider impacts in the world, with theoretical understandings of that environment and human activity in it. In responding to this, we call for an opening out of the study of everyday life in the home to further interdisciplinary encounters. While there have been connections made in particular between the study of laundry practices and energy consumption and demand, such work has often been undertaken in the context of developing a critical sociological approach to energy studies, advanced through social practice theory. We would not underemphasize the value of such exercises. Yet we wish to incorporate into this debate arguments and approaches from disciplines that intersect in their interest in the everyday, including anthropology, human geography and cultural studies to develop an analytical focus that examines laundry as part of the inevitably changing materiality of everyday life.

Our wider proposal is to extend the scope of the social sciences and humanities to make critical and influential interventions in fields beyond their own. In this particular example we suggest how we might re-set the scene for understanding the contexts of home in which energy consumption and demand and the environmental and health issues related to indoor laundry drying are lived. In the next section, we explore how and why opening up to other disciplines can inform such an exercise in novel ways.

Hanging out in other disciplines

In a recently published design guide, based on UK research into the environmental and health implications of indoor laundry drying, Rosalie Menon and Colin Porteous report on a sample of respondents, living in high-rise flats in Glasgow. Based on their survey of 100 respondents, and case studies of 22 (Menon and Porteous, 2011: 15), they found that ‘95% of respondents used some form of passive drying and 50% perceived internal drying as a problem or issue’ (2011: 6) and:

Of those surveyed during the heating season from September to May, 87% dried passively indoors and, of those, 64% dried on or near heat sources. 23% also admitted to turning up heat to speed up the drying process; and 37% to always opening a window while drying. (2011: 6)

They note that to some extent these issues are particular to their sample, while pointing out that: ‘The issue of drying domestic washing is a common problem in all housing types across private and social housing sectors’ (2011: 6).

Menon and Porteous’s work demonstrates a series of negative health and environmental issues (e.g. through excess moisture in the home) and energy demand implications, related to indoor drying. In terms of energy demand, on the basis of one case study, their calculation suggested ‘the increased energy for gas central heating in cold winter months more than doubles from a base situation’. Thus they write that:

The energy impact from passive drying is intensive given that the moisture laden air needs more energy to heat than air with a lower moisture level. While comfortable average room temperatures may lie between 18–20ºC, with the presence of damp clothes this often needs to be boosted to 21–23ºC to offset the cooling effect of evaporation and thus to maintain comfort. (2011: 20–1)

While Menon and Porteous’s analysis and findings are particular to their sample, their wider relevance is, in part, that they reveal a gap in knowledge. The empirical evidence implies that even beyond their sample, across the UK population there is a considerable amount of indoor laundry drying. Yet in social science and humanities studies of the materiality of everyday life, the home is infrequently analysed through the material or sensory qualities of its laundry (but see Pink, 2012) or humidity. When we consider that based on ‘on a typical laundry day based on a family with two children assuming two laundry loads are dried on one day’, Menon and Porteous calculate that ‘30% of moisture in homes is attributable to clothes drying’ (2011: 11), it would seem that conventional research overlooks an important element of the actual physical composition of home; if we do not account for moisture as part of the materiality of home we miss something significant. However, while this existing literature raises important points, it tells us relatively little about what indoor drying actually means to people as it becomes part of the home, how it is embedded in the routines, rhythms and routes through which people move through and make their homes, and how it responds to the contingencies of everyday life.

We do, however, know more about the relationship between energy consumption, demand and laundry. Indeed, the ethnography we report on was developed in the context of an energy demand reduction project. Existing social science research into energy consumption, guided by social practice theory (e.g. Gram-Hanssen, 2007; Shove, 2003; Strengers, 2011a, 2011b), has focused on laundry ‘practices’. Practices are normally defined as ‘arrays of activities’ (Schatzki, 2001: 2) and, following the social practice theorist Theodore Schatzki, the sociologist of consumption Alan Warde (2005: 20) has suggested we understand them according to Schatzki’s conceptualization of practices as both ‘entity’ and ‘performance’. Following this route social practice analysts are interested in the everyday practices through which laundry is performed because they understand the achievement of these practices as requiring the consumption of energy. This practice-focused analytical framework more broadly offers a critical alternative to ‘attitude, behavior, choice’ frameworks that inform behavior change theories (see especially Shove, 2009). Such sociological analyses offer useful insights and we concur with them to some extent below. However, to pursue our objective to understand how laundry is experienced and constitutive of the home as an environment, and the relationship of this to the activity of laundering, theoretical approaches that already account for how everyday places are constituted in relation to the material, intangible and practical activity are more suited (see also Pink, 2012; Pink et al., 2013).

A theoretical hanger

The study of both practice and place has already figured strongly in the theoretical influences of cultural studies of everyday life, not least through the work of the French theorists Pierre Bourdieu (e.g. Bourdieu and Waquant, 1992) and Michel de Certeau (e.g. 1984) as debated and interpreted by everyday life scholars (e.g. Gardiner, 2000; Sheringham, 2006). Much of this debate has reflected on tensions between the resistant and normative in the everyday, which indeed raises important questions relating to laundry in the home (see Pink, 2005). These debates form part of a trajectory to which the literature we discuss below is critically related (see Pink, 2012). Yet we depart from this traditional everyday life studies approach to focus on the home as a material-sensory environment by drawing on two literatures: material culture studies of home and theories of place as developed in human geography and anthropology. In doing so, we acknowledge the value of a practice focus; however, different from social practice theory advocates, we investigate how practices are situated as part of wider configurations of things and processes, rather than placing them at the centre of the analysis.

The home is a context where some of the most important things that happen are lived (see Miller, 2001). For our purposes the emergence of the home as a site for ethnographic analysis within anthropological approaches to material culture studies offers an influential trajectory. The earlier work of Daniel Miller showed how the making and decoration of the home was central to the making of identities and forms of resistance (Miller, 1988). More recent work shows how the home as a material (Miller, 2001, 2008) and sensory (Pink, 2004) context is an affective and practical environment for the living out of everyday life. This early 2000s literature also emphasized how issues of human and material agency, identity and empowerment were articulated through everyday domestic activities, materialities and the intangible textures of home (e.g. Miller, 2001; Pink, 2004) and often involved a focus on gender (e.g. Casey and Martens, 2007; Clarke, 2001; Pink, 2004, 2005, 2007a, 2007b). This earlier research urges us to continue to study the home with attention to these issues. Yet more recent theoretical ‘turns’ invite us to re-think some of these points in the context of contemporary theoretical moves towards spatial theory (e.g. Ingold, 2010; Massey, 2005; Pink, 2012) and non- or beyond-representational accounts (e.g. Ingold, 2010; Lorimer, 2005; Thrift, 2008) that direct our attention to the affective, unspoken, sensory and political elements of the everyday.

Pink has argued for an approach to everyday life that accounts for both the sensory aesthetic of home as a lived and continually changing environment, and the ways that people’s practical activity in the home is attuned to sensory ways of knowing and making this environment (Pink, 2012). She has suggested understanding laundry as part of what the geographer Doreen Massey has referred to as the event of place, as applied to the home. Massey’s understanding of place is as ‘collections of … stories, articulations of the wider power-geometries of space’ (2005: 130), and ‘a constellation of processes’ (2005: 141). Places are thus, she suggests, ‘spatio-temporal events’ (2005: 130, original italics) (as discussed in Pink, 2012: 25). Pink proposes that through the notion of the place-event of home:

The sensory home can therefore be understood as an ecology of interrelated practices, discourses, materiality and energies through which homes and self-identities are continually co-constituted as part of the home.

And:

Doing the laundry is one of the skilled multisensory practices of everyday domestic life. It involves embodied knowing, sensing, ways of doing that are rarely articulated verbally but that are essential to the successful accomplishment of its various stages … and to the constitution of the home as place. (Pink, 2012: 70–1)

The home thus becomes comprehensible as precisely this ‘constellation of processes’ (Massey, 2005: 141), making laundry processes part of the place-event of home. To conceptualize how laundry moves through the home, changes in its qualities, affordances and meanings as it becomes interwoven in changing and emergent ways with other constituents of home, Pink has borrowed Ingold’s concept of the line (Ingold, 2007) to write of what she calls ‘laundry lines’ (Pink, 2012: 75). Ingold’s work suggests we consider place as made through a ‘meshwork’ of lines that become entangled with differing and changing degrees of intensity (see Ingold, 2007, 2010). This enables us to consider how laundry is moved and flows around the home making a series of lines, which intersect with those of other things and persons, with consequences for how the environment of home is made and experienced. This, combined with the notion of the home as a continually changing event of place, enables us to offer new understandings of how laundry is implicated in the making and materiality of home.

Through a theory of place, here we build on this earlier work to focus on how indoor laundry drying, with other processes of home, co-constitutes the materiality and temporalities through which home is experienced. We also explain how laundry is implicated in how people sense the home and therefore in how people tacitly and performatively know (about) and in the home, as well as in how they verbalize knowledge about home. Laundry forms part of the rooms people inhabit, it is embedded in the everyday routines through which they make a sense of home, it is understood through embodied and unspoken ways of knowing. It is part of being at home, and people live with laundry in ways that they do not usually discuss with others. To understand such experiences of the domestic environment we have developed research methods which probe under the surface of the explicit routines and obvious materialities of home, to access the home when laundry is in view, to focus on the tacit ways of knowing and unspoken textures of home that laundry creates.

Methodology

Our research was based on a visual and sensory ethnography methodology (Pink, 2009, 2007a) using video to explore the environments and activities of everyday life in the home, in collaboration with participants. This methodology has been used in Pink’s (2005, 2007b) research about laundry and was developed further for this project. During video tours of the home, led by each participant, we explored how they (and to some extent their families) went about creating a sensory aesthetic of home. One objective was to understand how they needed to use energy and other resources to make their homes ‘feel right’. We were also concerned with identifying how everyday activities, including laundry, were woven into the making and remaking of home through the routines and temporalities of everyday life, and the materiality and sensoriality of the home. Therefore, following the theoretical framework outlined above, we were interested in researching how laundry was part of the environment, practical activity and the experience of home.

Thus, when we encountered laundry and washing machines we explored with participants how, where and when tasks related to them were performed and how they linked to other activities and material and sensory elements of the home. Elsewhere we outline an example (Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012), where Sarah learned on discussing the washing machine with our participant, how the timing of using the machine and indoor laundry drying were contingent on other sensory and material elements of home. In that case the participant timed the machine use and dried laundry indoors in relation to her need to create a quiet bedtime environment for her son, and the drying opportunities afforded by the under-floor heating and sunlight flowing through a window. Following these video tours we developed longer-term engagements with participants as they performed their laundry processes, visiting their homes for a day, or a few hours over more days, to be with them as they actually did the laundry and other tasks and activities interwoven with it. Thus, by exploring the home as an environment, as well as what participants actually do at home, ethnographically and collaboratively using the video camera, we developed a strong and often empathetic sense of what it was like to inhabit and engage in practical activity in these homes in relation to laundry, and the related socialities, routines, materialities and sensoriality.

The video tours were undertaken by Kerstin, Roxana and Sarah with our sample of 20 participants. The focused laundry studies were undertaken by Kerstin and Roxana with 11 of these households. Below we discuss two further examples, while drawing on findings from the full sample. In all of these cases women chose to be the participants who showed us how the laundry was done, even in two households where both parents shared the laundry. While gender was not central to our research focus, we consider this gender balance, whereby in most households women had primary responsibility for laundry, to be an outcome of the demographic of our sample, of family homeowner households living in a small UK town. The participants whose laundry we discuss in detail tended at the time of the research not to use a tumble dryer (or to use one infrequently). They preferred indoor drying to tumble drying and were selected for discussion for this reason, although they did not necessarily exclusively dry laundry indoors.

The textures of ubiquitous laundry in the sensory home: thinking about the home through place and practical activity

We began this article with Denise, who dries much of her laundry indoors. We suggested that in such cases laundry becomes part of the environment of home. It is not only drying laundry that fills the home, but also items that are potentially or actually becoming dirty laundry, within the ongoing process of laundry, as they move through the home in differing states. As Denise stripped down the beds, inserted items in the machine and retrieved them later as clean, they moved through, becoming sensorially and materially transformed and emerging in new states. Laundry contributes to the making, maintenance and experience of the sensory aesthetic of home. Doing the laundry, for most participants, was ongoing. Although we could identify broad patterns in laundry practices – for instance, daily washing versus washdays or more opportunistic washing – there was little or no relief from the demand to continually launder clothing, towels, bed linen and more. Laundering thus meant (at least) collecting, sorting, organizing, washing, drying, possibly ironing and putting away these items. It involved sensing – touching, smelling, looking at – laundry to determine cleanliness and dirt, dealing with machines and products, checking, folding, and navigating moralities, norms and expectations. All 11 participants in our research who were involved in the in-depth laundry video ethnography studies used indoor drying. They engaged a variety of techniques, including using airers in strategic or opportunistic areas of the home, and radiators upon which items might be put directly, on a radiator attachment hanger, or nearby. We now discuss two households, focusing on indoor drying before commenting on the implications.

Laura (mid-30s) lives in a large 1920s mid-terrace building with her husband, 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. Laura is responsible for most of the laundry, which only includes some of her husband’s clothes as Ben is away from home during the working week and does his own washing. Laura prefers not to use the tumble dryer because, she explained:

I just think they feel nicer, and you don’t have to use like the tumble drier sheets to stop everything getting static-y.… And because it’s airy [gestures at open staircase] and quite warm in this space, things dry really quickly, even like bedding and towels and things.

She dries laundry in various areas around her home, as she put it: ‘It’s just one of those things, isn’t it, when you’ve got lots of stuff to get dry, you just find anywhere to put the washing on.’ To achieve this she uses tacit knowledge about the items she launders and the affordances of different rooms and radiators to organize a process by which laundry continually, in different states of dryness, moves through the home. She explained how when it was wet or cold outside then clothes were dried indoors on the first or second floor banisters, the airer in the guest room, or if they had guests, in Ben’s study, and on radiators when they are off (as otherwise it gets too steamy). If the heating is on and the guest room gets too humid, Laura might briefly open the window to get some fresh air through, but this was not usually necessary.

Laura dries large items on the banisters, while small things go on the airer, the radiator in the main bedroom, a rack hanging over the radiator, or a peg for socks, bras and similar which hangs from the window. On the top floor where her bedroom is she noted how ‘Things dry really quickly up here, cos it’s just hot up here all the time. So again, this is another good spot to put things’, and ‘before I go to bed I might flip everything over onto the other side, so just to turn it over.’ Laura senses if these items are dry through touching them, she noted how they may feel damp if her hands or the fabric are cold, so she touches them on her face, to tell if they are dry. From experience, she knows that most cotton items dry quickly while things like jeans take longer because the material is more gathered. Because she knows things dry at different rates and in different ways this impacts on how laundry is implicated in the shifting materiality of home. Laura explained how as they are drying, items might be moved around, in that:

So, yes, I do tend to sort of circulate things, so once there’s nothing on the banister I take big things off the clothes airer and put those on the banister, and then spread out the things a bit more on the clothes airer.

This might involve moving items from outside to inside to finish drying.

Laura’s laundry processes interweave with how she lives in and uses her home. Although Laura also dries outdoors when possible, laundry is part of the constantly changing texture and feel of the home, and she pointed out that while she doesn’t mind doing laundry, it can become problematic depending on how much there is to do. She described this in terms of how the laundry impacted on the sensory environment of home, since

It’s worse when you’ve got loads to do, and you’ve got like all the bedding and stuff to do, and it’s cold and wet, and you have to have it all around the house, and the house feels cold because you’ve got damp washing everywhere. But no, it’s fine, I don’t mind it.

To mitigate this Laura also had the option, if there was too much to dry, of her mother taking some as she has a covered driveway and can hang out clothes.

Likewise, in Kath’s home laundry is ongoing, and she spoke about this in terms of a regular routine. Kath lives with her husband, Stuart, and two daughters, aged 7 and 10, in a detached, three-bedroom village property. Unlike Laura’s house where there does not seem to be a set time for laundry, Kath reported that normally the washing machine goes on overnight, and ironing happens that evening or a couple of days later. She doesn’t ‘mind ironing’ which she does in the living room with the TV on or just inside the dining room while her children play by the table. Ironing is rare in Laura’s house – once in a while she might iron some bedding, for important guests, or all of her clothes at once. Kath’s approach to ironing is significant because it influences how laundry becomes part of the home. She irons most things (shirts, t-shirts, jeans, trousers, table cloths), except underwear, duvets and tea towels. She believes some summer dresses don’t need ironing if they are put to dry straight from the machine onto the hanger, however, conversely, while one of her daughter’s school blouses are ‘non-iron’, she irons them anyway, as she does her partner’s shirts. Laundry is a regular event in this household, with one white items wash a week (blouses and socks), one pink wash (lighter colour shirts), one dark colour items wash (dark trousers, leggings), and a sports wash – usually on weekends (cycle kit, running stuff). Towels are usually washed on their own, or added to a load if it needs making up. Bedcovers are changed every other week, in turns between girls’ and parents’, perhaps more often in the summer.

The waiting washing is also part of the home and is incrementally stored in the two washing baskets in the two bathrooms. Kath has the washing machine ready on a timer to come on automatically at 5 a.m. (to use cheaper Economy 7 energy). This means that laundry needs to be prepared every night or she has to remember to turn it on/off. Normally, this is embedded in a routine whereby she feeds the cat, then presses the button, needing to make sure the door is properly pushed closed so that it will work properly. In the mornings laundry forms part of the aesthetic of home through its sound as she can sometimes hear it spinning around the time she gets up. The laundry is usually then hung out – first thing. She was trying to dry most things that she would iron outside when Kerstin visited in April, and in colder weather would do this on the airer in the utility room. In contrast pyjamas and underwear, which would not be ironed, would go straight on the radiators. Kath thus appropriates various localities and technologies of the home for laundry drying and uses her knowledge of the heating system as part of this. She pointed out that there was a powerful radiator in the hallway, on which items do not take too long to dry. There are shirts on hangers on doorways or hooks in utility room, and an ironing ‘pile’ in the utility room.

Because Kath usually hangs out the laundry first thing in the morning the heating would be on and the radiators hot. The heating goes off later in the morning, and she then finishes off drying at night when radiators come back on, thus using the heating routine to order the laundry drying process. She uses her knowledge of how the heating system works and the differences in the qualities of the radiators to determine how this will be organized in relation to the required sensory outcomes. For instance, when she uses the radiator in the dining room for drying the room starts smelling damp, she said that: ‘It’s all right on this radiator but that one I think because of the new walls – if you leave something damp on there all day, then it starts … you can smell it through the whole room … I don’t know whether it’s the plaster or ….’. In contrast the utility room was a warm room for drying on the radiator, where Kath had turned the radiator temperature up to dry items. In this home, laundry is distributed in other ways too. Kath dries socks on the radiator in the room of the relevant person who owns them, thus personalizing indoor laundry drying in a way that is both practical and that embeds it in the context of family identities and relationships.

Therefore we can see how home and family relationships can be acknowledged, made and remade through an ongoing laundry process. Kath, who is the director and key practitioner in this process, uses her sensory and experience-based knowledge of the home, the qualities and affordances of different laundry items, radiators, the identities of family members, and temporalities of the day in order to make judgments about where to place different items and their states of dryness.

Foregrounding the background

When, as in the above examples, a background activity like laundry is placed at the centre of the analysis we can start to uncover some of the specialized tacit, embodied and sensory ways of knowing that inform both how it is performed and people’s understandings of the environments it is part of. The example of indoor drying is pertinent because, although it is not a topic our participants frequently discussed with other people, it was central to how the visual, material and textural elements of the laundry process are evident in the home, and indeed part of the home.

The literature reviewed above has shown how laundry is embedded in domestic socialities. Here we have also seen how doing the laundry is about resourcing family members. For instance, Kath had developed a system whereby socks were delivered straight to be dried on the bedroom radiators of their owners. Significantly, she also supplied her daughter with ironed blouses, which did not need to be ironed, thus playing the role of the good mother (see Pink, 2004 for a discussion of this) in performing the resourcing of her child’s needs. In several households in our sample, likewise laundry could be organized around family sporting activities, again making the needs of each family member in terms of sports kit interdependent with laundry processes. Each of these social elements of laundry had relevance for the making of the materiality of home through laundry – the socks impacted on the sensory and visual arrangement of the bedrooms, and the blouses would be indoor dried in a particular way because they were destined to be ironed.

These findings about how indoor drying creates a ‘known’ texture of home moreover have implications for the literatures relating to humidity, health and energy consumption discussed earlier in this article. In this context, while UK indoor drying has been shown by these literatures to be environmentally problematic, unhealthy and to consume energy unnecessarily through radiator use, there is another set of stories to be told around indoor drying that show us why and how it has come to matter as part of the way everyday life is performed, sensed and practised, and as part of the materiality and flows of home. The implications of our research are that indoor drying is not simply practised because other options do not exist, and that, moreover, it is not a practice that could be easily ‘corrected’ by design interventions which seek to enable people to consume less energy or live in less humid homes. Rather, if we take the place-event of home as our starting point and seek to understand how a series of processes and things (of different genres, qualities or statuses) come together – persons, laundry, washing machines, open windows, radiators, moralities and much more – we can begin to see how indoor drying is part of a wider configuration through which the materiality and experience of home is ongoingly made, learned about, known and transformed. Although we might understand the home as continually changing, for our participants indoor drying was sufficiently routine and regular, predictable and manageable to make it familiar, habitual, comforting even. On the one hand several participants preferred its sensory affordances to those associated with tumble dryers, one even commented that she felt nauseous at the smell of tumble-dried items. We have also seen how indoor drying, undertaken by the experienced expert domestic practitioner in their own home, has a predictability that enables it to fit in with other routines, processes and objects as they progress or move through the home. For example, the laundry might be part of getting up in the morning, or of a process which involves feeding the cat. It might be associated with the experience of hearing the last spin of the machine while still in bed, when the heating is just coming on, and then hanging out laundry indoors ‘first thing’ to benefit from that heat, thus making its material and sensory presence part of the morning time home. Indoor laundry drying is not an isolated practice that wastes energy or causes humidity, rather, as these examples show it is interwoven with how people experience, know and make the material and sensory textures of home in complex ways. In the households discussed above, and across our sample, indoor drying had come to fit in with the rhythms and routines of home, it was part of the way the home was lived, and part of the home itself. The detail with which indoor drying was organized cannot be over-emphasized. For example, since moving into her house with her partner and two children just over a year before, Laura had developed a complex system guided by the heating qualities of different areas of her home, the textures, thickness, size and fabrics of the laundry items. Each radiator and each item of laundry was known by the participants for its affordances, qualities and potentialities. They ‘know’ how the laundry and other materialities and technologies of home ‘fit’. Together, these configurations of things and processes interweave to create a sensory aesthetic of home that ‘feels right’ for each participant.

However our findings also have wider implications for how we understand laundry as a mundane but highly significant element of the materiality of home and everyday life in the home. We turn to this in the final section.

Laundry and everyday life studies

We began by suggesting that laundry has untapped potential as an analytical starting point for everyday life research in cultural studies. Its value lies beyond studying laundry as an everyday practice through which energy and water are consumed, humidity is generated and social relationships are manifested or articulated. Rather laundry is an ongoing process through which the textures of home are continually renegotiated and renewed. The practical activities it involves create a line or thread through the home that interweaves with, and makes a series of social, technical, material, intangible constituents of home. Thus the activities, technologies, socialities and ways of knowing that laundry involves constitute everyday environments, inform how these environments are experienced, and their affective and sensory meanings. Our focus has specifically been on how this is played out in relation to indoor laundry drying as having a fundamental and constitutive role in the constitution of both home and everyday life routines and rhythms in the home.

Laundry is not only undertaken in routine and ongoing ways. There is also emergency or contingent laundry, with consequences for social relationships, the materiality and sensoriality of home, and for increases in energy consumption and humidity production. However, as our examples show, laundry is a sufficiently routine activity to be attached to how life in the home has a sense of predictability, and creates a feeling of certainty and familiarity. If, as the literature we commented on above shows, studying laundry leads to understandings of sociological topics as diverse as relationships between couples (Kaufmann, 1998), between generations (Pink, 2005), gender relations and domestic consumption (Pink, 2007a, 2007b), energy and water consumption (Gram-Hanssen, 2007; Pink, 2012; Shove, 2003), and humidity and environmental health issues (e.g. Menon and Porteous, 2011), then we might ask what else it could lead us to. In this article we have approached this question by taking a step back, away from specific empirical issues driven by sociological research agendas or applied research questions relating to laundry. Instead we focused on the more fundamental question of how laundry is part of the environment of home and, in conjunction with this, part of ways of knowing in the home. This involved conceptualizing the home as a place-event and focusing on the question of how, through the movement of laundry and ongoing practical human activity, laundry items and the processes through which they are transformed are constitutive of the home as a material, sensory and meaningful environment. However, in undertaking this analysis we have also been able to contextualize some of the issues raised by existing applied studies that problematize indoor drying, and laundry practices more widely, in terms of their relationship to energy consumption and humidity in homes.

While the extent to which, and the ways in which, indoor drying is significant vary across national and cultural contexts, the UK case invites us to ask how studying something as fundamental as laundry can inform us more widely about the material and sensory cultures of home and routines of everyday life in the home. The way home is constituted in different climates and infrastructural framings, through laundry drying across patios or on balconies in other cultural contexts, likewise creates equally important questions about how home and routine are made. We argue that an ethnographic focus on such mundane themes has an important role to play on an increasingly interdisciplinary research stage, where new understandings of everyday life are urgently needed in the struggle to confront questions of climate change, and health and housing design challenges. The mundane, studied ethnographically through a material and sensory culture focus, offers a new lens on everyday life research. It creates an opportunity to develop a key role for cultural studies scholarship around everyday life as a (potentially critical) commentator in applied research fields of national and global significance.