Adjustable shower curtain rods. You can find these to fit spaces between about 40” and 72”. So what I could have done would have been to have either put grommets into the top of the shades and then used shower curtain rings (and goodness knows there are a zillion different types of those; I could have found some to match the pergola, even). OR, I could have gotten those humongous curtain grommets (JoAnne Fabrics has them, as do other curtain supply houses), put those into the top of the shades and strung the adjustable shower curtain rod through those. The upside of that would have been that the shades would have been like curtains and could be opened or closed at will. Neato.

Cable. My dear friend down at the beach in Delaware uses this method to string her shades between the uprights. They pleat and fold back very neatly with this method (the tops of the curtains have grommets in them). She got her vinyl-covered cable at one of those ‘big box home center’ stores.

But since, in my head, I did not envision the shades ever being anything but either there or taken off for the winter… and since I am much more of a hardware store sorta gal than I am Bed, Bath and Barn, we went the hardware route using the very very nifty EasyKlip™, eye-hooks, and nylon cord.

Why EasyKlip™ rather than grommets? Well, since I only have one usable hand, and grommets require either a totally separate tool to put in (which takes the tool and a hammer) or, if you use ‘self-tapping’ grommets, again, a hammer(and I’ve actually had poor results with them), I was instantly attracted to the clips when I found them at this site: Rockywoods Fabrics . Another aspect that is advantageous in using these is that you can take them off. Let’s say that at the end of the season, the shades are grimy – they are white and red striped after all – and I want to wash them. If I want to, I can just take off the clips, throw the shades into a big washer at the laundromat and then put the clips back – or not. They are some sort of heavy duty plastic or nylon so they would not scratch or damage the washer. Unlike grommets, which are metal and which would damage the drum on the washer. The other thing is that I have seen some outdoor curtains which used grommets and they must have had some steel in them because there was rust stains on the fabric from them.

This is a two-piece item which uses the wedge principle to grip and hold the fabric. Put the fabric on top of the bottom piece. Shove the top piece into place (if you need a little bit of force, you can use a pair of pliers – I actually just hit mine into place with the handle of a knife. Easy as pie).

We installed the eye hooks into the cross-beams and the deck floor (you’ll need an electric drill for that). Then, we strung the EasyKlips™ with the piece of nylon cord and the DH and our won ran the cords through the eye hooks and voila! We did the same thing to the shade for the roof.

What would I have done differently on this project?
Well, the biggest thing probably would have been to have consulted with the DH BEFORE I measured, to discuss where we’d put the eye hooks. I measured from end to end, rather than between the uprights, so I ended up, even after hemming and so on, with shades that were actually a bit wider than we needed. The EasyKlips™, however were very handy in dealing with this, in that we could just fold over the excess at the ends and use the EasyKlip™ to not only hold the shade in place, but hold the fold in place too. Very handy feature, that.

There are numerous ways to gain shade:
Vegetative:
Plant a tree next to your house. The only down side to this is that unless you have a whole lot of money to get a 20′ tree installed, you will be waiting about 15 years for your shade to hit higher up than your knees.

Plant a vine with big leaves. If you live in Zone 5 or warmer, this is definitely an option, though again, you will be waiting for a couple of years for the wisteria, etc. to climb up to the top of the structure to cover it.
There are annual vines that you can grow but coverage might be spotty and of course, once you have a big frost, there is the slimy leftovers to contend with. Chez Siberia is in Zone 3 (zone 2 in spots), so vegetative was out.

Movable:
If you have a deck with no overhangs such as a pergola, there are several movable, temporary shading methods:
Umbrellas. Some of these are quite large and would certainly shade one or two people in chairs but not the whole deck.

Solar Sails: This neat trick from the land where no kid goes to school without a hat (the skin cancer rate in Australia is a national obsession; their rate of skin cancer is the highest in the world and skin cancer is the number one cancer in Australia) consists of artfully stretched pieces of shade cloth such as can be found here: Coolaroo

Actual Shade Cloth material: You can get shade cloth from greenhouse suppliers and some of them even finish them off with binding and grommets. Measure your space, choose your shade tarp and off you go. Not the most artistically aesthetic answer, but you can get percentages of shade up to 90% and sometimes in colors other than black.

Curtains or shades. You can find these made from shade cloth, acrylic-based fabrics such as Sun-Tex, Sunbrella, and PhiferTex (the fabrics themselves can be found for the do-it-yourselfer in places such as this: Seattle Fabrics). They can be found in conformations such as a shower curtain on a rod or wire, roller/Roman shades with installation hardware and so on or you can make them yourself. Another option for the do-it-yourself project here is (an embarrassment to me because I should have thought of this immediately when I started thinking about this) is hemp canvas, which comes in many different weights and which is, pound for pound, more durable, more resistant to UV and water damage (even salt water). This is the original fiber used in marine canvas and sails, sailors’ clothing and so on. It is also mold and mildew resistant and antibacterial. And not petroleum based like acrylic.

I shoulda thought of that first. Hemp canvas can be found in places such as Hemp Traders and Harts Fabric and Dharma Trading. Just do a search on ‘hemp canvas fabrics’.

More to come…
(photo courtesy of Big Nosed Ugly Guy)

It got built on the South side of the house.

Why IS that? Why isn’t the back door on the North, West, or East Side? Because I can tell you that I figure at least 50% of all decks put on homes in the US of A are on the South side and none of them are usable by anything except for a monitor lizard from the months of June through mid-September. We never could. The only time I’d be out there would be to water (and water and water) the flower boxes because it was HOT. And it made that side of the house hot and the waves of hot air used to rise up the siding and roll in the windows of the bedrooms and the bathroom because of it. Awful.

So, when we decided to do “The Second Big Dig” on Chez Siberia (which started out as “just a little work on the kitchen and bathrooms” but you know how that ended up), we decided to rip off the deck and put on…ANOTHER deck only with a pergola (a shade structure) which would, I read, solve everything.

Except..it didn’t. Two days ago, it was 86 degrees in the open air at Chez Siberia, but it felt much hotter on the deck under the pergola, so I hauled out my handy-dandy alarm clock cum thermometer and put it out there, in the center of the deck under the damned pergola and shazaam! It was 98 degrees F. Even with the shade structure on it, it was still hotter than Hades. And hotter than the open air surrounding the house. I had not cured my problem with heating up the house. We needed to slap some shade on that area and fast.

But Aunt Toby is nothing if not pragmatic. I have a lovely friend from college days who is amazingly creative and crafty. She also lives at the beach on the Delmarva Peninsula, where is is hot. All the damn time. And she had sent me photographs of curtains that she had made for her pergola. They looked lovely. They put things that I’d seen in those slick ‘livestyle furniture’ catalogs to shame. The engineering was amazing and clever but the way the cross-bracing was installed on my pergola, I was not going to be able to do anything even close to that to get a bit of shade so, I sat down and thought about what the whole goal was and worked from there.

This is a small series about sewing – but this is sewing ’stuff’ rather than sewing clothing. I made some basic shades for the pergola and we will be installing them. Nothing could be simpler than this, though it took me quite a bit of time because I only had one arm to work with and the big pieces of fabric can be heavy, but if Aunt Toby can do this with one arm, then you can too.

As you can see from the photo above, the pergola does not cover the entire deck, so what I’m going to do will not either. I really only need to block the sun in two places: The south side between the cross pieces there and the roof area. In the later afternoon, the west part can get pretty hot too, and there are cross pieces there that I can put a shade in, so I’ll make a shade for that area also and we’ll see how we do.

Just for basics:
Tools: metal measuring tape, sewing machine and a heavy duty needle (like for canvas), polyester thread, and outdoor acrylic or poly-based fabric such as Sunbrella(tm).
Measurements:
Distance between the uprights plus 4 inches.
Distance between the bottom of the cross piece of the pergola and the deck floor (or however long you want the shade to be) plus 4 inches.

To Do:
Measure the area you want to cover plus 4 inches on both horizontal and vertical sides.
Cut out your fabric to match those measurements.
Take a coolish iron (this can be easier done on a rug) and iron over 1 inch on all sides and iron down. Then fold over (this is the other inch) and iron that down also.
Sew all the way around using your sewing machine (this is easier if you put the sewing machine at the right edge of something big like a kitchen or diningroom table so that the fabric is supported). Then, just for ‘belt and suspenders’ sake, sew it all around again.

That’s enough for today. In our next episode, I’ll show you how we are installing these. Other people use grommets; we are NOT.

Until then…

I hate to tell you this but with the best will in the world, sometimes power outages can last for days. In some cases (like, during an ice storm such as the North East had in 1996), we’re talking WEEKS. And I realize that right now is not perhaps the most auspicious time to talk about this…but never let it be said that Aunt Toby would not take the opportunity to put something out there, especially since Accuweather is predicting another major snow storm (this time for the Northeast) as of this coming Wednesday.

I’ve talked about ‘being prepared’ here.

Let’s talk about some real down on the ground issues:
1) Stay Put. If you live in an area where the climate has heretofore not been exactly snowy, the whole issue of having road crews and equipment might now becomes extremely important. Because if nothing is moving, that means services such as ambulance, fire and police are also not moving too quickly either. Aunt Toby cannot be too enthusiastic in making this statement: Don’t do anything stupid.
And stupid includes things such as: shoveling snow when you have high blood pressure or other medical issues. Stupid also includes things such as worrying that your roof has too much snow load and climbing up ladders to go check…or climbing up on your roof to shovel it off (if you live in Watertown, Oswego or on the Tug Hill Plateau, however, you can sort of ignore this message because so much snow comes down there that if you do shovel your roof and fall off, you will be falling only about 5 feet and can then crawl into a second story window). Stupid also includes doing things like dragging your gas or charcoal grill into the house and cooking with it in the house – can we all say ‘carbon monoxide poisoning’? Knew you could.

2) Shoveling. The Inuit supposedly have a zillion words for different sorts for snow. Aunt Toby’s words for this snow are: Damn Heavy.
People who are not used to shoveling snow do not understand just how much sheer physical labor is involved. We had a next door neighbor who had heart attacks two years in a row doing snow removal in his driveway. With a snow-blower. That’s right – pushing a snow blower through heavy wet snow is damned hard work too. So, if you have issues, call for help. If you don’t but are not used to heavy physical labor (and that is 98% of us since we are all chained to desks with computers now), take it easy. Take it easy means ’shovel in short 10-minute sections, moving slowly, and wait for the snow to stop first.” It does you absolutely no good to shovel snow (unless you have a doggy that has to go out to do his business) while the storm is still going on. If there is wind, it is even worse. While you are waiting, check your yellow pages for people who plow and call for an appointment when the storm is done. If you pop a disk in your spine shoveling snow, with emergency services either extremely slow or not able to reach you at all, you will have an extremely painful and upsetting time until someone can help you. The snow will still be there when the storm ends. Trust me; it’s not going anyplace and neither are you.

3) Power outages. When there are widespread power outages from trees falling on lines (rather than just having one substation have an issue) and the weather is still bad, the major issue for the utilities is getting the crews out there to restore power SAFELY. Sometimes that means waiting for the entire storm to stop. it is not safe for line crew members up at the end of the bucket when the wind is gusting. The truck might be secured down but the bucket is at the end of an articulated arm. And there are only so many crews, so people in one part of the area might get their power restored a long time before you do.If the weather is still bad, trying to restore power might be a bad idea – more trees may come down. Depending on your utility, they may be waiting this out. Which means that you may be sitting in the dark and the cold for a while. Why is that? Well, although furnaces are actually quite simple in terms of what they really are (a metal box with fire bricks inside that burns some sort of fuel to make either hot air or hot water), the system of getting the hot air to where you want it requires either a blower (for forced hot air) or a pump (to send the hot water to radiators, baseboard, etc.). And blowers and pumps run on…right. Electricity. So, even if you could get the furnace to kick on (and they usually have an electric start of some sort), there is no way to get the blower or pump to work. If you find your family in that situation, do this:
Close off all the rooms that you can and gather everyone in one room and live there. Make sure you close the curtains as soon as the sun starts to go down and open them in the morning to get as much solar gain as you can. Bring down extra clothing, blankets, pillows, bedding and set up there. Cuddle up. If you have a fireplace with a wood stove or insert or natural gas that doesn’t depend on power, so much the better.

4) Food: Food in the freezer will stay frozen for several days; the food in the fridge part will not last that long. Eat that up first. If you have a grill – bring it as close to the house as you can (on the deck is fine) but do not bring it into the house. You can use the grill to cook with as long as your fuel lasts. Anything you can cook on a stove you can cook on a grill. If the power outage lasts longer than 3-4 days, the food in the freezer will start to defrost. Cook that up, store in a cooler outside (as long as the temperatures remain cold), and eat that up. You don’t want to leave meat in the freezer to defrost completely and go bad. If the weather improves and the power outage is still in effect, then you should check with your utility to see if and where they handing out dry ice to put into refrigerators. Pick up supplies of that and follow their directions in terms of use. Eat the food in the fridge and the freezer before you go to canned foods – those will not go bad.

5) Water: For those folks who either live in the country or live in areas where you have your own private sewer and water (read: septic system and a well), here is a hint for the future (and the future might be this coming week because supposedly we are going to get another one of these storms). Go to your local grocery store and ask if they have five gallon buckets that you can buy. If they don’t, try whatever big box home/lumber yard place you have and ask them. Get several. If you have kids and dogs, you might want to put away 6-10. Before the storm hits, clean and rinse them well. Fill with water, close up and store someplace where it will not freeze. If you lose your power, you will also lose your water, not only for drinking and cooking but also for such activities as flushing toilets. You don’t need a whole 5 gal. bucket of water to flush a toilet, but you will need a good gallon to do it with. The other thing is to tell family members NOT to flush with every toilet use. Yes, I know that has a very high ‘yuck’ factor, but only using two gallons on one flush in the morning and one flush at night is much more efficient than using one every single time. And if the power outage lasts for more than a couple of days, you will wish you still had that water to use to flush the toilets or cook with instead of having used it all up on Day One with toilet flushing.

6) Fire. If you are using candles for light or the fireplace for heat, do it safely. Keep flammable materials such as curtains and bedding away from both. Again – you don’t want to burn the house down and you don’t want anyone to get burned – emergency services are not going to be able to get to you quickly.

Stay warm, stay inside, stay safe.
(snow photo courtesy of Sage)

It’s still winter. It’s the beginning of February and climate change notwithstanding, in Upstate New York, it’s still in the ‘damn cold’ range. Versus last weekend, when it was in the single digits during the day (without wind chill factor) and in the minus numbers at night and was in the ‘miserably cold’ range. We still have at least 6 weeks of cold weather to get through before it even starts to approach the ‘getting warmer’ stage.

Spring is going to arrive, on it’s own timetable. But not now. Not next week. And maybe not even next month. Aunt Toby does have a vivid memory of 6″ of wet sloppy snow on May 11, 1973, which arrived after all the trees had leafed out. The snow pulled the trees down all over town. So much for spring.

But I digress. Winter is still with us. And Aunt Toby wants to ask you something really personal.

Are you feeling cold?

Something I want you to do is to go to a window and put your hand on the glass. Right, you had to open the curtains first, right? (oh, no? You say you don’t have curtains on your windows? Oh, my dear, we HAVE to talk) And how does that glass feel?

It’s cold, right? And in the back of your head, there is a small whiny voice saying, “But, these are double paned/thermo-paned/storms and screens/ windows. Why am I feeling cold here?”

You are feeling cold because –Aunt Toby does not give a fig (or an orange or an apple or any other fruit) about how much money gets paid for socalled ‘high efficiency windows” – glass transmits the cold. Now, with an airspace between the panes, it transmits a whole lot less than one pane alone. And if it’s a nice tight seal all around the panes and a nice tight seal all around the frame, etc., it’s better still. But it still is transmitting cold into that room, lowering the temperature, making your heating system work harder and making you feel cold. Now that may make YOUR personal heating system work harder and induce you to do things like have hot drinks and soup etc.

But it’s still cold. Aunt Toby has one thing to say to you: Make sure that when the sun goes down, those windows are covered. Here are a few ideas:

– Make another air space between the inside pane of glass and you. Aunt Toby LOVES the hardware store ’shrink the plastic film onto the window frame’ kits. Want to understand just how much air exchange you are getting? Put those babies on your windows. If the plastic bows into the room like a sail, let us say that you are sharing a whole lot of heat with the great outdoors. Put these shrink films on the windows and even if you already have thermo-paned, or double paned windows, you will increase their efficiency hugely. And again, you have put another dead air space between the air in the room and that extremely chilly glass. They will pay back what they cost in one winter, so they are worth it.

– Let’s say you do that and you still feel cold. Well, if you check around the edge of the frame (carefully put a lit candle alongside (but not touching) the frame – all around and in front (right where, if it’s a double hung, the two halves come together and the lock is). If the flame dances around, you’ve got a leak – you can cut that off with rope caulk and if the room is warm enough, you can use silicone caulk around the frame where it meets the wall. If you are renting, then go with the rope caulk – you can rip that up and throw it out in the spring. No harm done and it works.

– Let’s say you don’t have curtains. This is a topic that Aunt Toby would perhaps like to sit down with you and a nice hot cup of tea at some time in the future and discuss the issue of personal privacy. Curtains perform all sorts of functions, but in this case, we’re going to talk about, again, keeping that cold glass from transmitting the cold into the room. Even if you have put those shrink the film things on the windows, closing the curtains creates another dead air layer. If the curtains are lined, so much the better. But let’s say you are (as Manolo of shoe blogging fame would say) ‘the poverty-stricken student’ renting. You do not have the nice lined curtains. If the windows have some sort of curtain rod at the top, you can use this to drape old sheets, blankets, bed spreads (what ever happened to all of those old Indian print bedspreads?), etc. over the rods and create the same effect. Scrounge whatever you can find to seal off those windows at night. During the day, however, if the windows are on sides where you get sun, then let the sun come in and warm the windows and warm the room (the greenhouse effect). But once the sun goes down, then it’s time to cover up those windows. Actually, the same technique can be used to keep a room cool during the summer – cover up the windows during the hottest part of the day.
But again…keep ‘em covered.
And let’s stop elevating Eastern marmots (the official name of the humble Marmota monax) to the level of the Oracle at Delphi. It annoys the little buggers tremendously.

(photo courtesy of tcd123usa)

BUT – the coat came through like a trooper. Even with the high winds and cold, I was toasty warm outside on the sections where we had to walk for blocks and blocks (and there were several of those) – I was wearing a cotton knit turtleneck and a lightweight long sleeved wool sweater, heavy tights and slacks. I could not wear that coat inside of course (and the coat check room at the museum was overflowing out the hall) and had to carry it around (which made things sort of onerous because that coat weighs a LOT). So, I feel thoroughly justified in 1) making the coat longer than knee length, 2) interlining it with the shrunken wool flannel and 3) using the heavy-duty flannelized coat lining.
(image at the top courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

I recall once doing a trade show in January in Anaheim, California. It rained for several days and hovered in the high 30s. We were all extremely miserable (and I thanked myself numerous times for hauling around my wool-lined raincoat). A cotton sweater at that time and in that place would have been useless.

Why IS that? Why are plant based fibers such as cotton, flax (linen), rayon, etc. actually worthless in the cold? And why are animal based fibers such as mohair, wool, angora, etc. so useful?

The secret is at the top of the page. That is a photomicrograph of a fiber from a sheep. Those ‘plates’ along the outside are referred to as scales and they are the secret to the warmth of animal fibers because they trap and hold warm air.

We used to raise sheep and I can assure you that with even only a ½ inch of a fleece on, there is no such thing as a cold sheep. As a matter of fact, we often used to go out in the winter, locate the sheep in the snow drifts by their black noses, call them in to dinner and they would rise up, encrusted with snow and ice, leaving a completely melted spot underneath them. If we put our hands into the fleece, parting it, steam would actually escape. On the one hand, the fleece would trap the warm moist body heat of the sheep – but on the other hand, it would insulate at the outer edges, allowing the snow to remain frozen at the top – providing them with a sort of weather-proof roof.

All those scales provide lots and lots of little pockets to trap warm air and that’s what keeps you warm. That’s why the common wisdom is to dress in layers. The more layers you have, the more pockets to trap warm air.

Another factor in terms of wool is its uncanny ability to absorb moisture and still keep you warm. Sheep’s wool can absorb up to 40% of its weight in moisture. That makes wool garments warm..but also very very heavy if they get wet.

Now, back to plant based fibers. The reason that plant based fibers won’t keep you as warm as animal based ones is that the fibers themselves are totally smooth. There are no scales. On the other hand, this makes them absolutely magical in terms of warm weather garments. They breathe wonderfully, allowing body heat to escape. But if you get wet (sweaty tee shirt, anyone?), unless you are someplace where the air temperature is pretty close to your body temperature, you will feel cold and clammy – your body heat is being wicked away through the wet fabric. That is the major reason why wearing cotton denim jeans to go hiking, climbing or skiing is not a good idea. Hypothermia is NOT fun and is many times fatal.

So, given that most of us are not doing the Sir Edmond Hillary bit and are wondering more along the lines of ‘how do I lower the thermostat inside the house and still feel comfortable?”

Here are a few tips.
Moist air feels invariably warmer than dry air. No matter what your heating system (forced hot air, radiators, electric baseboard, wood stove), the hotter you make the indoor air, the lesser the capacity for that air to carry moisture. So, merely by lowering the temperature, the air will have more capacity to carry moisture and will feel a little warmer. But you have to have moisture to put into the air. Here are a few ideas:

If you have clothes drying or airing racks, do your laundry and put it out on the racks around the house, preferably where people are actually doing their activities. If you have forced hot air, putting them over or next to the grates will perform two functions: The clothing dries faster and it will put moisture in the air. If you are short on laundry, soak towels, wring out and hang those.

Put shallow pans or non-melting containers right next to hot air grates, on top of radiators or on wood stoves. Just make sure they are full of water at all times.

Cooking puts a lot of moisture into the air. Pull out a fan, put it into a doorway and use that to pull moisture into another room.

Dressing correctly always helps. There are certain clothing items that definitely give you warmth bang for the buck.
Non-cotton socks and tights. This year, Dame Fashion is smiling on women and heavy tights are in stock everywhere and worth investing in. A good base layer – look for tights and socks with acrylic and/or wool. Silk sock liners are a good addition as well and are very thin. You may have to order over the internet.

Lined clothing. A lining in anything ups the warmth factor, especially (ahem) if it’s made with some wool. In items such as dresses and skirts, look for a skirt that is flared, pleated, or gathered and has a lining (again, we are applying more fabric to the job of capturing more warmth. Pencil skirts are foxy but don’t have enough room to trap warm air). In items such as slacks or pants, look for brushed surfaces, wool, and lining. I know in men’s slacks, most of the time the lining only comes down to the knees, which is better than nothing. If you are stuck waiting on an open platform, walking to work etc., investing in some of the high tech knit fabric base layer “long johns” or silk or, ahem, wool is a good idea, as is wearing layers on top and a knee length top coat or lined raincoat. With skirts and dresses, adding a slip or petticoat does marvels.

Undershirts (aka top ‘base layers’). Wearing ANYTHING close to your body underneath the top half of your clothing makes an amazing difference. Sleeveless tanks in something other than cotton are great; silk if you are feeling luxurious. There are also finely knit merino wool base layers around. Polyester and nylon are, frankly, worthless in my opinion.

Multiple thin beats one thick. If it’s really cold, I find that wearing one huge heavy sweater just doesn’t do it. Part of the problem is that invariably, I end up someplace where it is warm enough that I need to take off the sweater but then I freeze. So, my trick is to wear a thin warm sweater (I like wool but I also like snuggly acrylic knits too. The fuzzier the better) and then a slightly heavier sweater on top. That covers everything. The DH has his own version of this – in the winter, he wears a knit vest with his wool suit. If it’s really cold or he has to spend a lot of time out of doors, he wears silk underwear and sock liners under his suit and a vest. If it’s totally brutal, he wears a thin wool pull over under his suit coat.

Shoes and boots. I realize this may sound like a ‘no, duh’ but this is another item that amazes me in terms of people’s negligence of it. I know there are a lot of people out there who do not wear shoes in the house. I also know people who go barefoot in the house. No matter what school of thought you hold, feet need to stay warm. Some people wear sneakers everywhere. Sneakers are not made to keep you warm. As a matter of fact, since they are meant to be worn while performing physical activity, they have built in means to allow warmth and moisture to escape. Even if you are inside the house, if you have cold floors, sneakers and cotton socks will not keep you warm. Better to wear slippers and wool socks than sneakers and cotton socks. (and no, I am not an agent of the Sheep Producers…) No matter where you live, unless you have radiant or copper pipes running through your floors, the floors are cold in the winter. Feet have the least amount of insulation of almost any other place on the body besides the hands. Put a good layered system between your feet and the floor: warm socks and slippers or shoes. The same goes for out of doors: Insulated boots and good warm socks. Looser boots that allow more than one layer of socks are better than tight boots – this helps the circulation in the feet. If your boots have leaks, get creative with keeping your feet warm and dry – putting your feet into plastic bags before you put on the boots does work. Take care of your boots – keep them greased up and polished.

Hands: mittens beat gloves every time but Bob Cratchet and his gloves with the ends of the fingers cut out had a good idea also. My son found that his hands got chilly when he was working at the computer at school – I made him gloves with shortened fingers. Mittens ARE more effective in terms of keeping hands warm but they are not the most elegant answer. If you want your gloves to be warmer, look for silk glove liners.

Wear a hat. I know this sounds totally Victorian, but people in the old days wore hats to bed for a reason and it was NOT to keep their perms looking nice. We lose a lot of heat through our heads. Wear a hat and not just outdoors. Sometimes, the most effective way to up the warmth and comfort factor is not to load on a sweater, it’s to put on a knit hat.
(photo at the top courtesy of Technology in Australia)

One of the things that we found very unique and intriguing when we bought Chez Siberia, lo these many years ago, was the stucco treatment on the house. It was…sparkly. We found out later that the way this was done was that after the final surface coat of the stucco was put on, the plasterers would take scoops of broken up shells, dishware, glass, etc. and throw it into the surface. It would stick there and provide surface interest, a little color and yes, it was sparkly. It was a popular stucco treatment in our area for about 10 years, from the mid-30s on and it disappeared – it was too labor intensive. But it made the house unique.

So unique as a matter of fact that over the years, the former owners had done some..mmm..shall we say…repair work to it when they had issues. Stucco is an ancient building surface – it has multiple layers and frankly, requires a solid base surface to support all the weight because most of what we’re talking about here is various grades and colors of cement.

It literally weighs a ton. Any movement or settling in the house, any infiltration of moisture that freezes and you are going to get cracks.

Big honkin’ cracks.

The former owners had used various sorts of white caulk, probably butyl, which contrasted mightily with the grey cement background (we won’t even talk about the broken up shells, dishware, glass etc.). The repairs looked awful. With all the work we were doing inside the house and the window replacement and the landscaping and so on, we were still faced with big cracks and horrible filled in cracks. We asked our contractor if he knew of any ancient plaster guys in the area who might know what to do – he reminded us that even if we could find someone who knew how to do the treatment, what is available NOW to do stucco work is totally different. We’d spend a lot of money to get a repair that would end up looking totally different than what we had.

Then we brainstormed. One of the projects in the house was that with all the new beams in the basement and first floor (and the four two-ton jacks and the cement pads, can’t forget those), we’d hoisted the center of the house 4”. And destabilized the southeast corner where the front porch rested on some pretty poor supports. The cracks there had opened up big enough to put your hand inside and we knew that we needed to get under the porch, put down some cement piers and hoist that up also, and hopefully close those cracks. At the same time, the last owner of the house had done some..mm..creative window work which frankly looked like one of those ‘Hey, I got a great deal on some odd sized windows” and we wanted to open up the porch, put in some energy efficient windows, insulate and so on.

The opening up part was the answer to our problem because it required the contractor to use a cement saw (the porch was an outside porch, so there was stucco inside AND out) to square up the holes for the windows. We had all sorts of chunks of the stucco available to us.

The DH took a sledge hammer and broke up the chunks into little chunks and cement dust and we combined that with some pretty aquarium gravel. We figured the ‘fill’ part of the job would be done with clear caulk and then we’d press the combination of cement chunks, dust and pretty colored gravel into it and on top. We knew it would not be a perfect repair, but we hoped it would do two things:

First, we were going to squeeze so much caulk into the cracks that no more moisture could get in there to make the cracks worse.
Second, the surface treatment would be enough and would match enough that to the casual drive or walk-by observer, it would not be glaring.

We could not be happier with the results.

Why not insulation? I just checked the price on that – one roll of R19, 15” wide, is $15.67.

We just did a little project as a final little ‘zip up’ for winter, and it hit me when I went to the ‘large chain building supply place because we don’t have a local hardware any more’ how cheap caulk was in terms of what we were getting versus how much insulation was going to cost if someone were going to try to insulate an attic, for example. I bought a 4-pack of silicone caulk for about $15.00 (a caulking gun was another couple of bucks but we already own those). Now, in the hands of a real pro with non-shaky hands, one tube of caulk will theoretically cover 3-4 standard (not huge floor to ceiling) sized windows. As part of our ‘just a little work in the kitchen and bathrooms that turned into gutting the entire house, putting in beams in the basement and the first floor and basically rebuilding the house while we lived in it nightmare”, we replaced 90% of the windows in the house as part of the energy saving investment. As part of that, they were all caulked on the inside and we recently went around and made sure that they were all caulked up the gazoo on the outside too. We were able to complete 15 windows with that $15 worth of caulk. We knew the doors and upstairs windows had been done, so from that aspect, we are buttoned up.

The trick to energy efficiency and plain old ordinary comfort is keeping the warm air inside and the cold air outside.

Did you know that the word ‘window’ comes from the Middle English word, ‘windeye’ meaning an opening that allowed the wind to come into a dwelling?

No kidding.

One of the first things we did when we moved to Chez Siberia was that we insulated the attic. Hugely. And in the winter, the house always felt drafty, chilly and nasty. We will not discuss the fact that there were times when people could see their breath in the kitchen and would eat meals at an Indianapolis Speedway clip so that they could jump up and run off to the livingroom where a) the sun would come in the south side of the house and b) the thermostat was located so that was always the warmest room in the house. Even with that insulation, we were damn cold.

It was the windows. We tried rope caulk. We tried putting plastic over them. It was amazing how like a ship in full sail that plastic used to look shrunk across the window, bowed out into the livingroom, reminding us just how much bone-chilling air was coming into the house. Living conditions were bleak, to say the least. No one wanted to come visit US during the winter. Sitting at a computer or watching the tube in a room like that is as close to self-induced paralysis as I can think of. First the feet start to lose feeling and it moves up from there. Uncomfortable does NOT even begin to describe it. The fights over the setting on the thermostat were amazing. A lot of energy got used. A lot of energy got wasted.

The attic insulation was basically being overwhelmed by the amount of air exchange that was taking place because of the leaks within the windows and around the windows. That’s why I say that your best ‘first dollar’ investment in terms of energy efficiency (if you don’t have enough money to replace the windows themselves) is on caulk to seal up all the leaks. If, once you’ve caulked around the 90-degree angle where the frame meets the wall inside and outside the windows, you still have infiltration (use the candle or blown out match trick to watch the direction of the smoke), THEN use plastic on the inside of the windows (you can use any form you want – the plastic window kits from the hardware store, rolls of plastic and double faced tape – your choice). If you own your residence, start saving your money for replacement windows. Even if you can only do one at a time, every time you replace the old leaky window with a new window (and new caulk!), you will achieve more insulation quality and more comfort.

While you are at it, look for more opportunities to use caulk:
Around the edges of doors
Where the bottom of the walls of your house meet the foundation
Any place where there is a hole made in a wall such as a dryer vent, a kitchen fan, etc.
Here’s a great little .pdf from Dow with a check list. It’s made for their foam based product but these are good locations for caulk as well. caulk checklist

One thing to remember at this point in the year – if you live with daytime temperatures in the 50s NOW, get this done NOW. Caulk does not adhere well or settle in temperatures lower than about 50. Go to whatever store carries silicone caulk, get it and then the next nice sunny day where the temperature gets into the 50s, “get ‘er done”. If you wait too long, it will be too late.
We made this a family project and got out two caulk guns and went at it so that everything got done while it was nice and sunny. A couple of hours work was all it took and was a great load off everyone’s mind.

The other thing to think about is if you do NOT own your residence – you rent. It is not as if you can replace the windows or put insulation in the walls. But with clear silicone caulk, you can seal around the windows on the inside of the living space. The landlord won’t know and it will add a lot of comfort in the winter.

And it’s cheap. It’s your best first investment when you don’t have the capital to do major insulation and window replacement to improve energy efficiency. And with the drafts cut down, the comfort level will go up and there is less incentive to raise the setting on the thermostat.

Works for me.
(photos courtesy of girly sin and neutral existence)

I finally came to the conclusion that no matter how much the DH truly WANTED to do rehab in the house (which needed it desperately – actually more desperately than even WE appreciated), he had ‘fear of screwing up’. So, he was great at starting…and abysmal at…continuing. Finishing was about as within his grasp as performing cold fusion on the kitchen table. The amount of money wasted on started projects was really bad.

When ‘an estate situation’ (ahem) brought me a bit of money, I did not stop, did not hesitate, did not even argue myself out of it (because we’d already decided that we wanted to stay in the house). We sat down with a contractor and talked about the house. We already knew what we were really good at – and we knew we were horrific at almost anything else.

If you want to save money on DIY – watching shows like “This Old House” is really sort of useless unless you grew up in a family where your father was a contractor, one uncle was a plumber and the other one was an electrician and you also had a finish carpenter in the family tree someplace. Unless you have spent your youth actually learning skills, performing tasks and so on, doing DIY consists of a whole lot of frustration. So it behooves you to sit down with yourself and family members (if family members are making themselves available to you) and being honest with one another and yourself. What are you really good at? And what do you suck at?

In our case, we are really good at: demolition, putting in insulation, painting and cleaning up. Even with living in the country (which in our case means that we could do electrical and plumbing if we wanted to and felt competent to), we find that it’s best to use the experts to do the really important stuff. This little video here is a visual tour of the very last room to be rehab’d at Chez Siberia. You see in it – the old leaky wood windows, the plaster work and the saw kerf made by our contractor to help us take out the plaster.

Important stuff includes: Things that will cause flood or fire, blow up the house, cause parts of the house to collapse or kill someone. Also, stuff that people actually SEE, like spackling and taping the seal on wallboard, the installation on the windows and all the trim work.

We’ve learned a couple of tricks from doing all the demolition work at Chez Siberia, which was built in 1939: the plaster work in the corners (see the video) of the walls and where the ceiling meets the walls was done on top of extruded metal lathing, which is really hell to try to pry off. We asked the contractor to run his Saws-all™ in the corners and the seams between the ceiling and the walls (see the video); at that point, we could use pry bars and a truly amazingly nasty tool that can make very short work (see the video). Believe it or not, we were able to take down all the walls in the room, get out all the nails and clean up in about an hour. Now, being that this was built in 1939, the plaster technology had already moved away from the multi-coat/wood lathe system to the first gypsum boards. These were about 18” wide (since buildings were being done with 2×4s 18” on center) and almost an inch thick, and as you can see from the video, once the DH had punched a hole in the wall and gotten his tool in, he could pretty much pull out the gypsum wall boards in rather large chunks. We threw all of that into wheel barrows outside the windows and put that next to the garage – we wanted to get everything done before we ordered the dumpster (a ‘tip’ for any UK readers; sometimes referred to as a ‘roll-off’ in other areas), which will be coming this week.

You’ll notice a couple of things in the videos – I showed the empty walls for a reason. As I mentioned, this house was built in 1939 – when we started this process two years ago, we had a lot of complaints about this house. It was cold; it was dark; it was unpleasant. There were people who did not understand why we did not just sell or use a bulldozer on it. The first room the DH and our son worked on was the kitchen, which was the coldest, darkest, most unpleasant room we had and almost immediately they discovered exactly WHY it was so chilly and unpleasant (the dark part had to do with the lack of windows and the fact that it faces the north side; the dark brown carpet and dark brown cabinets had nothing whatsoever to do with it – oh no, they did not..hehe). The entire rest of the house was built in exactly the same way and the video showing the walls after we got rid of the plaster board show it too: Right – there is nothing there. Zip. Zero. No insulation whatsoever. The entire house’s insulative quality consisted of dead air in the walls and wooden windows which a former owner had tried to improve with aluminum triple track storms and screens. Talk about your ‘triple threat’ in terms of energy savings: no insulation, old leaky windows and storms made with aluminum (which transmits the cold like nobody’s business). No wonder we could practically see our breath in the kitchen during the winter time. It WAS cold. The only thing that saved us was the fact that we had a closed in staircase between the kitchen and everything else in the house; otherwise the entire house would have been that temperature. As it was, the rest of the house was only marginally better; the livingroom on the south side, on sunny days, was a major improvement on every place else in the house.

So, the role for the DH and me, in terms of doing the DIY in this house – so that we really would save as much as we could while at the same time getting the quality appearance that we wanted, was our doing what we do best. We are not against people deciding to ‘learn by doing’ – but we felt that since we only had enough money to do it once, it’s better to invest the money in having people with the skills we did not have do the stuff that we are not competent to do. We’ve done spackling and taping – it never came out looking right. We can’t install windows properly. We didn’t try to do that. We can’t do trim work – a miter box may as well be a nuclear reactor as far as either one of us is concerned – the trim work that the contractor has done for us looks great and fits the rather strange walls that we have in several of the rooms. In an old house, sometimes you have to fiddle around with things a lot.

And that has paid off for us. This room is now ready for the trim work to be put in. It’s been insulated, wallboarded and spackled (and NO bumps or bubbles!!). We finished the painting this morning. It’s a great deal – worked well for us.
It’s great to work with someone who has a lot of experience in old houses. We had a contractor who discovered that the entire center section of the house was not supported the way it was supposed to be so that not only could we not put the ceramic tile on the kitchen floor without it cracking, but we were also in danger of losing said staircase as well (so, needless to say, some of that legacy money went into having an engineer look at the house, the basement, and Rx two beams, some cement slabs and four two-ton jacks for the basement). We also had someone who had the skills on his team to open up the staircase and move the thermostat so that the heating system in the house could be balanced — pretty much all the rooms on the first floor are extremely pleasant now. We also got someone who had the experience with old houses that he could crawl under our front porch and tell us what was absolutely necessary so that it did not fall down either.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t work with your contractor. We saved money by doing the demolition and hauling ourselves. We saved money with painting (and by the way; the major way you can save money on painting is: buy the best quality interior latex you can get and choose…one color. We did and it saved us a boatload of money and we did not end up with cans of odd colors that don’t go with anything else. At the same time, we find that the color doesn’t look the same, depending on what side of the house the light is coming in and what time of the day it is – it’s as if we really did get four different colors of paint). Another way to save money with your contractor is to understand that they are in the business of selling you ideas and the more ideas they can sell you on, the more money they can make. So, it pays to know exactly what you want and unless the contractor can show you a much better technology or idea, you stick with it. Even with discovering all of those ‘problems’, it helps if your eyes don’t get too big for things like lighting, handles for cabinets, special systems inside cabinets, downdraft grills for islands built in the center of your kitchen and so on.

It also helps if you go into it with a budget in mind. Contractors really do understand when you tell them, “We only have xxxxx to work with; what can we get for that in terms of doing yyyyy? They will be able to tell you what they can do and what quality level they can do it at for a certain amount of money. But they do need to know if you have a firm idea of what you want to do. “A kitchen and 1.5 baths” is one thing; “work on the house” is just too amorphous to deal with. But especially if you live in a house built before 1965, however, you will have to expect to find problems, mistakes made by former owners, old technology, or totally missing technology, which may raise your budget considerably. So you might want to take the figure of the money you have, remove 1/3 in your mind and give your contractor THAT reduced figure so that when he comes to you and says, “We found a problem” you will have money set aside to deal with that.

At the same time, though, talk to your contractor about what you and your family can do. Most contractors will be more than happy to let you take care of demolition, hauling, painting, etc. – they can work up their estimate in detail and can, when you sit down with them and the detail, take items off as you divvy up the jobs.

And that way, you can get not only what you want, but also what you’ll be able to afford.