Some Like It Hot

Originally posted on 2018-11-23

Or at least not freezing cold.

As I mentioned in the last blog post, we have been finding many areas where our house allows cold air to be blown in and warm air to escape. Specifically we mentioned the access to the crawlspace for our daughter’s room. We have now covered and sealed (temporarily) all the venting for the crawlspaces.

We have also been chasing down anywhere that cold air has been blowing in, assisted by a very windy day. This is another area that our daughter is showing her calling in quality control, as she is excited to point out where she can feel cold air. We are starting to understand why the previous owner had three different heat sources for only the east room.

One of those heat sources has now been removed and moved to the west garage that will be our workshop. A lot of heat was escaping through there, but now that it’s sealed the east part of the cottage is heated almost exclusively by the fireplace, with the boiler heaters as a backup.

The downside of heating the east room with the fireplace is that it is kept warm enough that the heat in the downstairs bedrooms doesn’t turn on. We have already had a few chilly mornings due to the fireplace keeping the east room just warm enough overnight, as if getting out of bed in the morning isn’t already hard enough.

Since we were not about to stop using the fireplace, we decided that it was time to move our bedrooms to the rooms upstairs that are on an independent thermostat. In order to do that, we had to remove the awful carpet that was in those rooms, but we left the carpet on the stairs for now.

Even though just removing the carpet was a huge improvement on these rooms, we decided to use the laminate flooring we had on hand. We didn’t finish the rooms as we plan to extend the upstairs down the road and add a bathroom up there, and would like to still use this laminate for the rooms then, but putting down what we have has made it feel a little more like an actual bedroom.

As mentioned above, we moved the propane heater from the east room out to the west garage in order to heat the workshop. Unfortunately, the garage still needs quite a bit of work before it’s worth turning on the heater. Right now, we would just lose all that heat through the ceiling and the walls which would not be the most ideal condition to try to work in.

We need to finish insulating the walls with Roxul insulation and we had arranged for the contractors to spray foam the ceiling when they were here last week, but we discovered that since they built the garage out of a carport, there is no header. We will be fixing that, then calling the contractor back to insulate it. After that, the shop will be used to build cupboards for the kitchen that we’re eventually going to get back to moving.

The last big thing that happened this week, is our window delivery came in (all except 3 large sliding doors). Some of these windows will be waiting to be installed, as others (namely the ones we’ve already removed on the north wall) will be installed in the very near future. With temperatures starting to plummet and snow continuing to fly, we will be doing everything we can to turn this year-round cottage into the cozy, warm place it should be, as we watch winter rage outside.