When I first moved into this house it was summer. The days were very hot (as they normally are down here) but the house was cool – and in so many ways!

Now normally it takes about five days of 35+ degree heat (95+ degrees fahrenheit) for this house to become uncomfortable. Being made of stone, and coupled with the very high roof, all of the heat rises up far above the hight of any average sized person. Go upstairs mind you and you simply melt. It’s stifling and oppressive! Thankfully there’s no real need to go upstairs that often.

So, in my first summer here, we decided to open up the place a bit. That meant removing a couple of the “rustic” doors that were helping to close off the place. After removing the screws we dragged the doors out to the barn and chucked them on top of all of the other crap that was there. I figured that if we ever needed them again we could just grab them from the barn and screw them back up – No drama!

We soon found out though that winters here were a very different beast! They were cold and drafty as you would guess. When it came around to deciding to put the doors back up they were nowhere to be found? They’d just disappeared! We had absolutely no idea where they’d gone but boy did we miss them!

View from the office/computer room.

Now fast forward to this past summer. While furkeling around for something else in the barn I noticed that the horse people (as in the various people who keep their horses here) were fairly low on their supply of hay. Now normally the hay bales are stacked up along the inside edge of the barn but now there were plenty of empty spaces. Out of the corner of my eye, covered in loose bits of straw and hay were the doors. All of this time they had been used as decking to store the hay bales on and keep them off the dirt floor. Amy and I quickly and stealthily grabbed them and dragged them to the side of the house, under the veranda. We were determined that we weren’t going to freeze quite as much this winter!

But basically they stayed there over the months – neglected, but at least in our care and not under a couple of dozen hay bales. Yesterday however, being the first official day of winter down here in Oz, I’d decided that enough was enough! The drafts were just too much and something needed to be done about them! Even though it was dark by the time I got around to it I dragged one of the doors – the door between the office and the library – inside, much to the worried excitement of the pups.

Now it’s a pretty heavy door for one person to handle but I managed to get one or two screws through the hinge and back into the wall. After a bit of further adjustment everything lined up OK. I still need to find a few more screws for it though – or maybe even buy some new ones? For the time being though I’ll just leave it closed and it should be fine. I cleaned the door up with a dustpan brush but I’ve yet to find a handle for it. There was a doorknob attached when we took it out there but it now appears to have gone AWOL. Not to worry though. There’s bound to be something useful around here?

View from the library.

So did it work out OK? Well, it’s still a little drafty but nowhere near as bad – nothing that can’t be fixed up with a “door snake” and a bit of plugging. With both doors closed off in the office the room tends to heat up and retain that heat longer, which is a very much desired effect!

So, as it turns out, I should be much warmer sitting at my computer this winter!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.