Wrapping my house in plastic

Last year's winter was rough

Winter is coming.  We have had an absolutely glorious fall with warm weather that continued into this week, but now we can tell from the forecast that all of that will soon be gone and the cold weather will be upon us.

This year I am making a more concerted effort to winterize our old house.  I meant to do it last year, but I got lazy.  Three of the windows in the downstairs of our house are newer with the rest being original windows to the house.  Remember, our house was built in 1892.  The old windows are covered with storm windows in the winter time, but they can still be drafty.  This year we are putting up plastic on our drafty windows.  I bought the shrink wrap window kits that you install on the inside as I really didn't think that I wanted to have plastic covering the windows on the outside of the house.

The key to putting up these plastic window kits, is the timing.  You don't want to put them up too early as once you do, you can't open the windows for any fresh air.  Hence, I have been waiting for cooler weather to install them.  Well, this weekend looks like the time to get the job done.  I had to buy patio window size kits as our windows are very tall - around 80 inches in height and I will be cutting them in two and I will then be able to fit them on two windows.

In the front of our house we have a curved window and though it is beautiful, it tends to be a drafty window in the winter time as there isn't a storm window that can cover it. In fact, frost will cover it from the inside sometimes.

I have some old towels that I roll up inbetween the storm windows and the interior windows to also help keep the drafts out in the winter time and it is my hope that the plastic will help keep the drafts out even more.

In the past year I have been saving all kinds of t-shirts, underwear and old socks that are no longer wearable and I will be using them as "stuffing" in my own homemade draft dodgers.  I couldn't bring myself to pay $20 for two of these store bought versions so I am making my own.

All of the windows on our second floor are newer but it can still get drafty upstairs so we will be installing plastic upstairs too.  In the end we have a total of 7 windows to cover downstairs and 6 windows to cover upstairs. 

The total cost of purchasing the plastic, extra tape and a cover for our Air Conditioner was $47.00 and I know we will easily save that and more by being more diligent with winterizing the house.  As for the draft dodgers, I will be using fabric that I found in the bottom of my fabric bin.  I think I purchased it close to 10 years ago and since I am using old socks and things for the stuffing, I am counting these as next to nothing in price.

At the end of winter we will compare our fuel usage and cost to last year's and will see how much we have actually saved.