I held off putting on my heating until a week ago and even now it only goes on for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening just to lift the chill. I have a very modern energy efficient boiler and still struggle to pay the costs of using the heating so I know there are going to be far too many people without this luxury in so much trouble this year especially as the winter is supposed to be the coldest in nearly 50 years. Let's hope they get that as wrong as when they tell us we are going to have a record breaking summer!
The central heating is our only source of warmth so I try to 'catch' as much of the heat as I can when I do switch it on. I only have it set to heat the rooms to 19C as this is warm enough when wearing a jumper/layers. We wear layers, vests, t shirts, jumpers. Socks and slippers. In the evening when we wear pj's I put the summer weight ones underneath the flannelette winter ones I love to wear, and a dressing gown. Stephanie swears by her onesies. Dylan is always cold- mostly because he refuses to wear lots of layers- he is coming round slowly and instead of moaning about the cold last night went and got the fleecy blanket off his bed to snuggle under while we watched a film.
The other thing I find helps is to move! As tempting as it is to sit and shiver under a blanket and think if I move I'll get cold. I find getting up and doing a job warms me up. So I have started to spread out the housework rather than doing it all in one hit. I get up and do the dishes- the warm water helps. Then I might sit and do a sedentary job. Then I'll fold the washing, then another sedentary paperwork job before hovering and so on. This really helped yesterday, Stephanie is off school with a stomach bug, we are not usually home during the day so don't notice the house get cold but it did yesterday. Stephanie was fine as she was hot due to the bug! I was trying to do some paperwork from home and found that interspersing housework with paperwork meant the cold didn't get tp me too much. Also helped I guess that I kept my night time layers on! Lazy moo's we stayed in our pj's all day, well we weren't gong anywhere and were having no visitors why make washing!
It did get very chilly overnight last night I dreamt that we woke up to a huge bank of snow, and Dylan came to tell me this morning that he was cold. He will learn and accept he needs to wear long sleeved pj's before the winter is over. It was still chilly this morning when we got up even with the hour of heating on. So I got busy- I washed all of the condensation off of the windows, I sorted the washing, I have done the ironing, washed up and hovered downstairs. I am toasty warm now. So shall do some paperwork. When I start to feel cold I shall head upstairs to clean to warm myself back up.
The other thing I find difficult is drying my washing, in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house, it can take 2-3 days to dry a load of washing. I was given a new ( to me) 5ft upright freezer last week an have found the heat that come from the back of it is perfect for drying washing. It has taken 1-2 days now to dry washing if I put the clothes horse next to the freezer.
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