I talked yesterday of my plan to put our picnic quilts (since we don't need them until spring) up over the two windows in my bedroom between the shades and the heavy duty drapes to help fight against the cold, since my room is the coldest one in the house. And it worked. I didn't have to turn on the space heater and my room was still pleasant when I woke up in the morning.

And there were still hot coals in the woodstove, too so I didn't have to make a fire from scratch. I love when that happens. Most of the time the wood is burned to ash by morning, but every once in a while I luck out. It takes away about 20 minutes of prep time to get a roaring fire going again.

I have to go to the craft store today. I'm dreading it. I have a list though and if it's not on there I'm not buying it.

My room gets colder than the rest of the house for some reason during the winter. It also gets hotter than the rest of the house in the summer. The second part makes sense because the sun sets on my end of the house in the evenings and it's over there a good portion of the day, from about 1:00 or so on. Which to me means it should also be warmer in the evenings during the winter, but it's not. It never is.

We use a woodstove as our primary heatsource with the propane as back up. The propane furnace is set to 60 degrees so that if for some reason the woodstove doesn't make it through the night or burns out, the house won't drop below 60. The nights are already below freezing, have been since about mid-September and if the crawlspace under the house gets too cold the pipes will freeze. It's usually not a problem, I haven't had the furnace kick on in years.

Not that that matters at the moment. What matters is how cold my room is. I have to sleep with my door shut because I can't handle the light from the skylight in the living room coming in and keeping me awake, which means my room doesn't get the nice woodstove heat. I do have a little space heater that I use if it gets depserately cold, but mostly I survive with several blankets on the bed, sleep in sweats and wear slipper socks. This week I've had to use the space heater the past two nights to be warm enough to fall asleep. It has a timer on it so it doesn't run more than an hour before shutting off.

I've decided to put blankets up over my windows to see if that will help. I already have shades and very thick, heavy night curtains over the windows, but I can still feel cold coming in there, so I am going to put our two thick picnic quilts up over the window frames with thumbtacks and see if that doesn't help keep the room warmer. I really don't like using the space heater because it's electric and my electric bill is running just under $160 a month.

I wish I could just fall asleep when I was cold, but I can't. And losing sleep right now is not an option, as I'm fighting a cold and need to be alert enough in the mornings to homeschool the kids.