Drying Clothes the Slow Way

Over the past few weeks I thought something was going on with my dryer. It would take me a few cycles to get the clothes completely dry. I just thought that since there was a Hugh pile of laundry to be ironed I was not setting the dial the right way. My husband was finishing up his laundry last week for work and it took him 3 cycles to attempt to dry them. In the end He had to hang his gear out to dry.
Needless to day I have been drying clothes outside ever since.
I am not too good at drying clothes outside. Things fall off and onto the ground, bugs get on my clothes and then I just cant bear to wear anything. I went out and bought a clothes drying shelf. Its great. No more clothes will fall to the ground. It will be much better I thought to myself. I bought 4 bottles of fabric softener so I could keep the clothes soft. Well sad to say it was not helping. All the clothes were still hard as cardboard when they dried. I just could not figure out what was going on. All I knew was that I was darn sure the Whirlpool guys had better get out here quick and fix my dryer.
Today being as fed up as I was I decided to look on the back of the bottle of the fabric softener and see if there was any tricks to get my clothes softer. Well low and behold right in the first set of directions it says. DO NOT ADD TO THE CLOTHES. ADD THE FABRIC SOFTENER IN THE FINAL RINSE. Well I'll be dog gone. I was adding the fabric softener into the washer at the beginning. I would first put the clothes in, add the laundry detergent, add the water, then add the detergent.
Finally I put the fabric softener into the the rinse cycle and what do you know, I have soft clothes again :) GO ME.