Roughing It in the Cold

Well, winter weather is starting to set in for sure.  When I climbed out of bed this morning, there was a bit of snow on the ground (not as much as they got in Western New York - have you seen the pictures?!), and my little weather station told me it was 13° outside...and only 56° in my bedroom.  Oy.

At time of writing...

 We've been keeping our thermostat set to 62° to save money on natural gas.  But in an old house with literally no insulation in the walls (I did not realize this until Tom informed me of it the other day.  Apparently, in the 1920s, there was little need for insulation in houses, since coal was so cheap - and probably especially so here, as we live in coal country - and you could always just throw another shovel in to the furnace to make it warmer...), the upper floors never even get that high.  

There's a Facebook group I'm part of, and one of the women recently asked what temperature everyone kept their thermostats set to in the winter.  There were dozens of responses, ranging as high as 72°.  The average seemed to be between 65° and 68°.  Only one person I saw kept theirs lower than us: at 60°, and she said she lived in Vermont so maybe she's just used to the cold...? 

Here, we spend the days wrapped in several sweaters, thick socks with down-filled slippers on top, and scarves and hoods as needed.  Sometimes I even sleep wearing a hat.  My body maintains a low level of constant shivering.

Anyways, if I thought my room was cold this morning, it felt like a veritable sauna compared to the attic.  I went up there to wake Sly, and could hardly stand how cold it was.  You can see your breath up there!  Poor kid. The ducting just has no warm air left to give by the time it reaches the one tiny floor vent that's supposed to service the whole third floor - and that's after we've selectively closed off several of the vents in "unnecessary" rooms below, such as the bathroom....brrrr!

Tom and I have been brainstorming about measures we can take to help keep it a bit warmer in the house/cheaper to heat.  He's partially through with covering the windows with plastic, and using spray foam insulation along the drafty bits in the foundation in the basement.  Hopefully that helps a bit.  And he found a tutorial for how to strategically add insulation to the specific type of attic shape we have.

As much as I want to complain about how cold it is here - and I think I pretty much spent a whole blog post doing just that! - I keep reminding myself that in terms of human history, we are so lucky to be enjoying a house that's as warm as it is during the winter.  Even into the Victorian period, many people had to close up the majority of their houses during the winter, living in just a room or two, huddled around a common hearth.  And insulation or no, I know our house is much toastier than the little loft where the Ingalls girls slept in the Little House books!