Autumn Splendour and a Draught Excluder

In an attempt to banish the autumn blues and seeing the sun shining outside my bedroom window this morning, I grabbed my camera, wrapped up warm and headed off to take some lovely photos. The leaves have been falling off the trees for a few weeks here in Cornwall and are crisp and crunchy underfoot and in the valley where I live, the colour are amazing.

In an earlier post, Time to Start Knitting a Scarf, I mentioned that I thought that this Winter was going to be a bad one and yesterday, the UK had it's first taste of what might be to come. It snowed in Northumberland and more snow and sleet has been forecast for the North of England over the next day or so and although it hasn't snowed here in Cornwall so far as the climate is a bit milder, I decided that it was time to start sorting out the house for winter. 

I live in an old house. It was originally workers cottages which were knocked into one many many years ago and as such, it can be quite draughty. The thing is, I don't mind this so much. I find houses that have been stuffed to the rafters with insulation and turned into hermetically sealed boxes quite stifling and I always seem to get sick if I'm in such a stale environment for too long. I sleep with my bedroom window open even in the depths of winter when there is snow on the ground and I feel all the better for it and I hardly ever get sick. 

Now I know there are people out there who will be horrified by this but this and bemoan my flagrant waste of energy but, despite all this, my heating bills are not huge. I am careful about how I heat the rest of my house. I don't have the radiator on in my bedroom so I don't waste money by heating a room with the window open, I don't heat bedrooms or rooms that aren't used and I am very fortunate in that the walls in my house are over a foot thick which keeps things cosy in winter and cool in the summer. 

My hallway though is quite another matter! It's always cold, even in summer and in winter, it's very very cold, mostly because of a very poorly fitting front door which, at the moment, I can't afford to replace. There is a big gap at the bottom of the door and even though I have fitted a bristle draught excluder to the door, it still blows a gale into the hall and when it rains I end up with a puddle there too. The fact that my downstairs loo is just off the hall and in there is my washing machine and tumble dryer, making it unpleasant to do laundry, I decided, this year, to make myself a draught excluder to stop the outside getting in!!

I rifled through my fabric box and pulled out a lovely piece of pink paisley Cath Kidston fabric and was on my way to grab my sewing machine when I realised that lovely though a draught excluder would be in this pretty pink fabric, when it rained, or when it was dragged across the floor by muddy dog feet, it would just end up a soggy mess so it was on to plan B.

Oil cloth! I turned an old oil cloth table cloth into a fantastic waterproof, mud-proof, dog footprint-proof draught excluder, which will hopefully make things a little warmer in my hallway this winter.