Mission Accomplished!

Well I made my deadline! The sunporch has been sealed, the insulation replaced, and the vapour barrier installed. There is furniture – including the all important cat tree and I am ready for the first game at noon my time. I swore last night that I would not be moving again for at least a month but, of course, I did have to bring in firewood this morning and chores still have to be done. But – no major projects will be undertaken for a long time. 🙂

In fact I haven’t had time to take any photos so these are recycled and updated from a year ago.

I realized as I was oh so slowly getting the sunporch completed that one of my winter priorities was going to require some kind of re-think. The back door to the house opens onto an addition to the building – the laundry/pantry/mud room. From there the original door to the kitchen connects to that space. The problem is that this new back door might just as well be an open window in the winter. I can keep the cold out of the rest of the house by closing the kitchen door and keep the hoses to the washing machine from freezing by running a space heater. However, that costs more than I want to spend. So one of my projects was going to be fixing this problem. I ran out of time.

I block the basement door (which has the same problem) every winter with a sleeping bag to keep out the wind and considered doing that here. Then I thought about a space blanket – this kind of thing. Science nerds might start shouting at this point but it occurred to me that in this situation I wasn’t trying to keep the heat in – I was hoping to keep the cold out (in my mind it made a difference). I did some research and the results I found backed me up – of course I did pick the ones that agreed with me.

This means that when I shut down the house for the night I hang up this (extremely light weight) fabric over the inside of the door with the silver side facing the outdoors. We’ve had strong winds with below freezing temperatures and so far it’s working brilliantly. I can leave the kitchen door open, the stove keeps the house warm all night, and the space blanket stops the cold from getting in. We haven’t had a major storm or -30 windchills yet but I’m hopeful I won’t have to spend $100/mon running a space heater. 🙂

I’ll try not to disappear completely over the next month. There will be gaps between games and I should be able to get out and take a few photos. In the meantime take care – I’m going to enjoy the Beautiful Game. 🙂