So I recently moved house and I had to store a load of stuff in my garage for a few months after moving, due to lots of renovation work being done in the house itself. A fair bit of this stuff I didn’t really want to keep in there due to the fact that it might get damp, but as the garage was watertight and it wasn’t going to be for too long I figured it might be OK.

Unfortunately when I brought the spare pillows back into the house they had a bit of a musty smell about them. As they were not that old I didn’t really want to throw them away so went hunting online for a solution to freshen them up. Most posts that I found (in fact pretty much all of them) said to put the pillows into the tumble dryer with a new tennis ball (sure of the significance of that!) but the problem was that I don’t actually have a tumble dryer!

Also I think that if the pillows had been filled with foam or other similar material I could have put them in the washing machine, but of course the ones I had were feather down.

I think most of the issue is that they just need airing. If it had been summer then I would have tried to hang them out on the washing line for a few days to see if that would do the trick. I might still do that again once summer is here. But in the end I just decided to lean them against a radiator. I kept turning them round so that both sides would get an airing and after a few days I did find that the pillows had lost that musty smell. I might also try spraying some fabric freshener on them but at the moment the radiator seems to be doing the trick.