Keeping a House Warm in Winter

If I had my choice I would have an old fashioned iron stove in my kitchen and a wood-burning fireplace in my livingroom. Even here in the mountains east of San Diego, it gets cold enough for several months in winter to appreciate the coziness of a real fire to toast your fingers and toes. When the winds rise and the temperature drops below freezing, the little electric heaters, such as the heated oil type we use, just can't do the job against all the drafts that find ways to come in under doors and around windows. Still a person can stay warm enough here just by wearing more clothes. In fact, I was surprised when I first visited Santa Monica near Los Angeles in 1945 that most rental units did not come with built-in heaters.

I grew up on a farm in Bethel, Connecticut, and I well remember the long wet and cold winters. There were no school buses in Bethel then, and most children had to walk to school no matter what the weather. I can remember that sometimes thawing out frozen hands in a flow of warm water from the kitchen faucet hurt so much it made me cry. Warming feet was better. We would take off our wet galoshes and put them behind the wood-burning kitchen stove to dry, and then pull up a chair, open the oven door and poke our stockinged feet in to warm up. What bliss! We also had a stone fireplace. I have a picture in my mind of a blazing fire in the fireplace, one of my mother's beautiful hand braided rugs (she won first prize at the state fair once) in front of it, and our white hound, Betsy, sleeping contentedly on the rug in front of the fire. We spent lots of cozy evenings in front of that fireplace.

Cold weather in Connecticut was nothing to what I experienced in Grand Forks ND after I married a sailor from there. During winters you had to keep a healthy respect for the weather. When it gets down in the minus forty temperatures you can die if you don't take care. Cars freeze and strand you in remote places. Blowing snow on the roads caused whiteouts that sometimes caused people to drive off the two lane roads and across the prairie to be so lost that they might not be found until warm weather came again.

My in-laws lived in a house in Grand Forks that started out as a basement house. The kitchen, furnace room, bedroom and a cold-room for storing frozen carcasses of animals for meat, were all below ground with only a few windows high up the wall that looked out close to the surface of the ground. When it snowed the windows were covered up quickly. The two upper stories of the house were kept reasonably warm by the basement furnace that forced heat up through grates, but not much heat reached the bedrooms on the top floor. I can remember sleeping under so many blankets it was hard to turn over.

But the kitchen was always kept warm and cozy by my mother-in-law's beautiful old iron stove with its shiny chromium trim. It was her most prized possession.  Of course it also made the kitchen too hot in summer, so eventually family members bought her a new gas stove that she did not use very often.

I haven't lived in a cold climate for so long that I really don't know how people keep their houses warm these days. I think that wood has become so expensive in some places it is almost a luxury, and probably natural gas is the fuel most readily available. Electricity is used for heating for the most part around here, but a lot of people have fireplaces too and good-sized woodpiles near their back doors to keep them going.

It is almost 2 o'clock in the morning and I wish I had a pot-bellied iron stove with a glowing fire in it in this living room  right now to warm my chilly legs. I guess it's time to go back to bed and cuddle up with my furry friends, my cats, who are only too happy to help keep me warm by taking their half of the bed out of the middle.

How do you keep warm in the area where you live?