Plans for keeping house warm?

[EweSheep]

Hardwood floors on first floor and second floor, we ripped it out because of allergies. There are no insulation underneath the boards but that is expected to be done hopefully soon when we get enough money for home improvement.

I will get some of those thermal curtains, it would be nice to line the walls with it LOL!

 

[WriterofWords]

Brrrrrrr!! I know how you feel,, it's down into the teens here tonight and I've got every blanket out!! Blown in sounds good, using the daughter's sounds good too!

 

[biddyboo]

Warning! Warning! Some good friends of ours who were renting an uninsulated rural house placed a sofa on an outside uninsulated wall and found it frozen to the wall. Really! Maybe rethink furniture arrangement Moving the "family sitting room" to daughter's warmest room sounds like a terrific idea. Good luck in solving the puzzle. ~G

 

[onthespot]

someone should develop some kind of heat reflective wallpaper for houses like that, which can be applied, or hung during winter, and taken down in the summer. It should be attractive, economical, durable, and extremely efficient in keeping heat inside the room, just in case anyone here is listening and wants to get right to work on my idea.

 

[EweSheep]

The problem with DD;s room is that it is SMALL, enough for a twin bed, a dresser and a toy box. No way it will fit a couch, two recliner and TV LOL! I can not imagine anything frozen to the wall like you mentioned earlier LOL! If the walls sweat, that is a problem but mine does not sweat. It just feels very cold and sitting next to a wall feels colder. I am comfortable with two throws and a warm lap top computer.

Yes it would be nice to have some kind of insulated walls. If we had extra money we can get a few pieces of that blue foam boards and brace the furniture on it to shield it from the cold walls.

When DD get old enough, we will move her bedroom upstairs which it would be extremely cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. We will plan on getting it insulated before she ever moves up there. Since the duct heat upstairs does not blow much hot air, we will install baseboard heaters or some space oil heaters that does a great job heating one room.

Onthespot, if there is something like that, someone would be making millions LOL! Great idea!

 

[michickenwrangler]

Thick rugs for floors or learn how to make rag rugs (not difficult, just time consuming). We have hardwood floors and even though our walls are heavily insulated (2 x 6 construction, all insulated) the floors are very cold in the winter. We wear slippers and I bought a few rugs. Our house is only 600 sq feet~ so it doesn't takea lot of rugs.

Do a lot of baking or roasting. This is why fried chicken was a southern thing and roasted chicken and pot pies midwest and northeast respectively.

 

[Beekissed]

Blown in insulation and a wood stove....can't get any warmer than wood heat!

The house I live in now has blown in straw insulation. It is an old farm house but it stays warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

 

[Rosalind]

Ripping off the brick is probably a bad idea. Most likely it is not merely decorative siding, but in fact is structural and holding the house up. The "studs" you see may very well be put in there as furring strips to hold up the plaster, not real structural studs. If you're going to rip walls down to insulate, you're better off ripping down the plaster and putting in new drywall. Cheaper and faster. Also, bear in mind that brick is saving you some money on your homeowners' insurance--it's quite fire-resistant. It may even be helping keep your home warm more than you know, as bricks, mortar, concrete, rock are all heat sinks. That is, they absorb heat (including sunlight heat) during the day and re-emit it at night, helping to modulate the air temperature from extremes. I'd be real happy to have a brick or fieldstone house here in New England!

The mold & condensation issue someone else mentioned is likewise a very real problem. If you rip out the plaster and put in a series of vapor barriers before insulating, that might help with the condensation issue, but then you need to consider what sort of structural timbers are in the house's interior--wouldn't want trapped water vapor to condense onto structural timbers over the spring and summer evenings.

In our very elderly house, to avoid the water vapor issue, we ripped out plaster and installed boric acid-treated cotton insulation made of recycled denim scraps. Maintains water vapor permeability and insulates quite well. It was not cheap though.

Instead of replacement windows, have you considered something like Energy Panels? They are just a couple layers of fancy plastic film stretched into a framework with little clips to hold them into the window frame, and they work a bit like storm windows, but they are cheaper than replacement windows. We aren't allowed to replace our windows due to historical society restrictions, but we were allowed to put Energy Panels on, because they can be installed on the inside part of the window, don't significantly damage the frame, and are not visible from the street. It's helped an awful lot--my house is nice and toasty in freezing weather, and I am burning much less wood than last year.

Edited to add: What type of heating system do you have? Forced air typically feels slightly chilly at 68F to us thin-blooded folks, but radiant floor heating feels toasty warm even at 60F. With new floors, you can probably install radiant floor heating underneath as an add-on, and it will likely feel warmer without actually being warmer. I realize that doesn't seem to make any sense, but it's sort of, if your feet are warm, everything else feels warm. My brother, who has radiant floor heating, keeps his thermostat at the same temp I do, and I have forced air--yet in his house I am warm, and in my house I need a sweater or two.

Oh yeah, your parents never told you "If you're cold put a sweater on"

 

[EweSheep]

If I remember correctly when we gutted the bathroom of its plaster and lathe, the outside part is some kind of fiberboard, got black color with gold print letters on them. That was just on the outside stud walls, then they lathe inside studs and plastered it. No insulation in between the stud and brick wall however this "black" board only went the bottom half, not the top half. Not sure why they did it.

We paid alot of money for these replacement windows from Sears. It did keep out the cold winds blowing thru it but it does not help the facings, trims to leak cold air and along the bottom where they tore off the half circular trims where the baseboard and floor meets, we do feel some cold air and for now, we stuffed newspaper. It helped a bit but not in the long run. The wind is now south and I feel very comfortable. Yes the walls are warm during the day when the sun is on the south and part of west side of our house. You put your hand on it on a cold day, it is very remarkably warm! However the kitchen walls were cold. Bathroom walls were insulated. A big difference.

I can make some rag rugs but the problem is getting a loom.

As for the energy panels, I can use it for our bedroom windows which they have not gotten their replacement windows done. Sears did not offer us this year of interest free rates for one year and one year no pay. We love the deal and used it in the last two years doing that. This year, nope, Sears isnt doing it this time. I am going to look into those panels for our bedroom and hopefully cut down the drafts from those old glass windows. The city does not like renovators changing too much of the house so it may be the way to go. If we were to change something drastic, from a huge window to a bay window, we have to have a permit and approval from the city. We are not in the historical division but they pretty much say what you can have and not have done on your house. They woudl not allow painting of the bricks, must be red clay as it originally was and still is.

As for replacing bricks for siding, it may be soo cost prohibitive and not worth it. What I have seen folks do with their brick houses, put siding on top of the brick which the city does NOT mind but have a say so in what kind of siding you have...no wood barn siding allowed. I dont see how it would make the house look better LOL! Yes it does have something to do with our insurance since our next door neighbor's house is exactly a car wide from house to his door. That close! We did get a discount for having a brick house. So it does have its advantages. Repointing may be the way to go and we have no idea how to go about it.

We will see what we can do by calling up a few contractors and see what they can do for us in insulating the walls. I hate to tear it out but a few certain areas such as the water leak on ceiling by one of the dormers (we are still trying to find it, fixing it and we are getting less and less leak but still leaking). BEfore we ever tear out that wall, we have to find the leak first. We put in a new dormer window, siding and roof, still leaking. UGH! Previous renters and past owners had said it did leak many times before and still can not resolve the problem. If we had known that the first place, we could have tore out the dormers and redo the part of roof and put down new roof shingles. Now having new roof shingles, we might just wait another ten years or so unitl it is time to replace the roof shingles again. We checked under the dormers, around the windows, the flashings, the valleys, nada!!!!!!!!! Where is the water coming in from???????!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[EweSheep]

This is the house, the big window is the problem room and the dormer right above the big window is the source of the leak. We trimmed the limbs back but still there.

The window on the left is the DD;s bedroom, the warmest of all. This house is facing north.