Freezing living room - best practices to fix it
We recently moved into an Eichler home in Palo Alto. It is an older home. I need help handling this winter and am looking for both short-term fixes and long-term areas to investigate. Highest priority is short-term - I have two young children and the house feels frigid.
A couple of updates that were made by previous owners:
(1) the floor to ceiling windows from the living room to back yard were updated to be double pane
(2) Radiant heating replaced with heating that hangs from the ceiling
The living area and a converted garage room is extremely cold. What are some best practices to handle this during the winter? Here is what I have brainstormed:
- Get fireplace/chimney checked to make sure it is closed
- Under door pillow/stop for front door (you can feel the draft)
- Considering window insulation wrap, such as 3M's product (hair dryer approach) that I used when living in
- Space heater
Need more ideas. What can I do about sliding doors and sunlights?
We just installed Hunter Douglas Architella Duette, double cell honeycomb shades. We have single pane windows and last winter, and already this year, it was so cold in the living room it was unusable. The shades have changed that completely: The living room now holds heat and can be used all day. We don't have to close doors to keep drafts from the living room out of other rooms.
If you go this route: We wish we had known in advance how much we'd like the top down-bottom up shades. We can keep the open feel of the house while retaining much of the insulation by partially lowering the shades from the top. We wish we had done them all that way.
