Creature Comforts – 6 Wild Ways to Prepare Your Home for Winter Hibernation
Every year, winter descends upon us, dragging us down to the cold depths with it for a few months before spring comes along and lifts us back up. These months are usually spent lamenting our lack of planning for the freezing cold, and resolving to be ready next year. Aside from getting one of the fireplaces by Richard Ellis Design, what ways are there to prepare your home for winter hibernation? To answer that exact question for you, we’ve put together a list of 6 wild ways to do just that.
Fired Up!
First and foremost in your quest for winter domination, we have an answer to cold that is older than human civilization- fire. If you own your own home, installing a fireplace is tricky, but very useful, answer to the chilly winds and laundry days of winter. A fireplace allows you to radiate heat throughout your house for relatively little cost, and entertain yourself with the strangely captivating flames at the same time.
Blind Blockers
Up next on your journey to a warmer winter is the coverings on your windows.
Windows are great for summer days, gazing out onto a blistering hot pavement from your air-conditioned paradise, but in winter they represent a serious loss of heat. If you have large windows throughout your house, they can contribute to up to forty percent of the heat loss from your house, if they aren’t properly covered. Get yourself some good, thick curtains to cover those panes of glass and they’ll retain the heat expertly.
Radiating Heat
A radiator, or a water heater, is nearly essential if you live in a city where the winters require constant heating to be running. A gas heater can rack up quite a sizeable bill when left to run constantly, and a split heating/cooling system can run into many hundreds of dollars in bills when running all day. A radiator uses a relatively small amount of electricity to heat water, or occasionally oil, in a metal framework to a high temperature, which then radiates the heat out from it without using much power at all. These little heaters can keep your house warm throughout the day on next to nothing, letting you come home to a warm house and a smaller electricity bill.
Warmer Wardrobe
Your clothes may need to change in the more heat-deficient months of the year, and that’s ok.
A winter wardrobe can give you a chance to properly go through and dispose of any unwanted summer gear you may have been clinging on to through the hotter months, as well as giving you the chance to wear outfits you haven’t sported in years. Thick socks, gloves, hats, and coats are the main players in a winter wardrobe, so stock up and be ready for the winter winds with your warmer wardrobe.
Bedroom Boiler
Your bedroom can be the source of most frustration when it comes to keeping warm in winter, mainly because you spend up to 8hrs in there every night without the heating on. Keeping yourself warm at night can be tough, as too many blankets can make you feel smothered in bed, and too few won’t be enough. Try getting an electric blanket to make your bed nice and toasty before you turn the lights out for the night, and watch your usual frosty bedtime sleep schedule warm up and work wonders.
Morning Chill Mollifier
For the morning after this snuggly bed ritual, your bedroom will once again be icy, and this time our trick involves waking up early. We’re by no means suggesting you start waking up earlier, but instead that you should momentarily wake up earlier. Getting a heater that is slower to warm up but less costly allows you to wake up an hour or so before you need to be up, turn on the heater and go back to sleep. While you doze for that hour, the heater warms your room and results in a much more comfortable morning ritual.
With all of this winter-proofing, you won’t even know the colder months are upon you until they’re on their way out, and that’s exactly the way it should be in winter.