The Tetris of drying our laundry

Having a clothes dryer in your home is not standard in Spain. In fact, it's quite unusual.

And, the washing machine lives in the kitchen, built in like dishwashers are in the US.

You're supposed to dry your clothes in one of two places: a special fold-up rack that you put up when you're drying laundry; or a rack that hangs out of one of the windows, either over the sidewalk or over the vent area in between the various apartment buildings that are all connected to each other.

This worked pretty well for us in Barcelona, where the air was dry. It even worked ok-ish for us the first few days in Bilbao before it started raining.

In Barcelona, since it rains almost not-at-all, the outside rack has no cover. When we came to Bilbao, we noticed that the outside racks all had umbrella-like coverings over the outdoor hanging racks.

And then, it started raining and the air got wetter.

The clothes that we hung on our indoor racks would begin to mildew before they got dry, even with an open window providing air flow. And, the umbrella-thing over our outdoor rack is broken, and we can't get it to cover it.

What do we do?

I tried hanging some towels & sheets on the outside rack, partially covered by the umbrella-thing. It started raining and soaked the towel.

I hung some clothes around the (tiny) bathroom overnight with the bathroom fan and an additional fan attached to the wall running all night. Everything was still damp in the morning.

I turned on a heater attached to the wall in the bathroom and kept the door mostly closed for several hours. Maybe about half of what I had hung up in the bathroom was dry when I checked on them several hours later.

Things keep feeling dry-ish, but still being damp. And sometimes also having a slight mildewy scent. Ugh.

We're in a tiny, two bedroom apartment with three large suitcases, two mobility devices, four humans, a cat, and two folding bicycles. I've been trying to make it as easy as possible to reach the things we need to reach and have the space we need to do what we need, but where in all of that do you put a 2'x5' drying rack? Especially if you're trying to help the clothes get dry with more than just ambient air and time?

Our queer Bilbao immigrant/expat buddies who we've connected with here recommended heat, fans, etc. We don't have any fans, but we do have wall heaters. So, I moved the wheelchair into the back corner of the kitchen next to the garbage bins where the drying rack had been, moved the folding bicycles into Tui's bedroom, moved the chest of drawers into the spot where the folding bicycles had been in order to be able to place the indoor drying rack next to the heater in the room that Pippin and I have been sleeping in.

I have a load of laundry in now which I'll need to pull out to dry in the morning. Please, send all of your well wishes that this set up will dry our laundry and allow us to get our laundry clean and dry before we need to move to our next city in three days!