Friday, January 15, 2016

Weatherproofing in January (better late than never?)

Yesterday morning I found myself a bit chilly while playing kitchen with my daughter in her playroom. So I made an effort to sit close to the air vent where I knew hot air would be blasting out. As you can imagine I was quite confused when I felt cold air instead. The vent in that room is placed right below a window and there was a freezing-cold wintery breeze coming right into my daughter’s play room. Well, crap. That would explain why our December energy bill is more than DOUBLED the previous month.

This is our first winter in this house (which is around 25 years old) and during our extremely busy autumn months we neglected to check if the doors and windows were weatherproofed. What a mistake. Looking back now, I can recollect conversations between my husband and me about how chilly it was by the couch (which sits in front of 3 giant windows). Duh. How in the heck did we not make the connection?

I showed the problem to my husband and (of course) his solution was to buy new windows. Calmly, I told him to slow his roll and that surely we could find a cheaper and easier solution. So during nap time yesterday, I YouTubed several videos on how to weatherproof old windows and this is my favorite video: https://youtu.be/mQ74FVB9JSI.


Rose and I took a fun field trip to Home Depot today and bought some foam weatherproofing strips and some removable weather stripping (it comes in a caulking tube). Once we got home, we got busy cleaning windows and applying the foam strips. Unfortunately, during the move we misplaced my caulking gun so it looks like that’ll have to wait a couple more days until we find ourselves back at Home Depot. 

But so far we can see and feel a considerable difference in the living room temperature. I don't have to wear a jacket inside anymore! And another plus, the husband was pleasantly surprised when he came home to find it all done and he could remove it from his Honey-Do List. Count that as a couple brownie points for the wife. 

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