The weather has turned cooler in most states. Winter is approaching. How are you prepared for it?
Me, I’ve added more blankets to our store. Blankets are exceedingly useful to have. In winter, I use them to cover the north windows because even with the winterized plastic window coverings on them, the north wind still finds its way into the house. I also use blankets to build bed tents because it’s warmer inside a small cozy tent than a large open room. I use blankets to hang over doorways to trap heat into smaller spaces. I use blankets as wraps for wearing around the house – artfully draped and pinned with a diaper pin or tied with a length of cord, they can keep you very warm. I use blankets as sofa snugglers for reading or doing quiet winter crafts. I use blankets as blankets to sleep under. I use blankets to hang on cold exterior walls to add another layer of insulation in the house. And I keep plenty of blankets in the cars, at the office, and in my large Go Bags.
Carpet scraps are another useful thing to have. They can be used as extra floor warmth, but for me, their best use is outdoors – in icy weather, a layer of carpet gives you traction better and faster than salt or chemical de-icer – and it doesn’t hurt your gardens or cause problems in your water supply or storm drains. A couple of carpet scraps can help a car get out of a mud hole better than anything else we’ve ever tried because it will not only give the car traction, it will prevent the car from slipping back into the mud even deeper. Carpet scraps help insulate and keep dog houses warm – especially if you pack the dog house with hay. Carpet scraps help you move heavy objects from place to place across grass without leaving track marks.
Indoors, I also like using carpet to line the exterior doors with a slight overhang all around – this helps block those drafts that make it through the door gaskets. Extra carpet scraps can also be used to block vents without completely blocking air exchange – it just slows it down enough to allow it time to warm up. Carpet rolls can also be used as draft dodgers in windows.
I live in the south, so our winters are mild compared to many places. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get cold. We get a few ice storms and sometimes we get snow. Being prepared for them means less wasted time, less worry, less panic, and time to enjoy the frigid weather. I don’t have any heating in my house except for a small ceramic space heater that I turn on only when it gets truly cold. I’d hoped to build a rocket mass heater, but I’ve been temporarily stymied by a lack of ability to read the plans. I wanted to build one outdoors last spring and flat didn't have time. I'm shooting for next spring instead.
If you’ve never heard of the rocket mass heater, I suggest you look it up and see if it’s something you’d like. There’s also a video from a couple of people who built them. I know there are people who aren't fans of these heaters. Most of them also disparage fireplaces as a source of heat. I understand some of the reasons - burning wood adds to the pollution, fire bad, and so forth. But the smoke generated by a rocket mass heater is substantially less than that of a grill or a full sized fire place and the heat generated is much more efficient. It's cheaper. My Zombie Maple generates enough wood each year all by itself to power a rocket mass heater for the whole year.
Why am I diddling on building one inside my house? Mostly it's because my house is built in such a way that I haven't found a suitable place to put one that isn't already in use by something I consider essential.
Since I've now decided to sell this house and move elsewhere, I can look for a place that does have suitable space and claim it for a rocket mass heater before I fill the space with something else.
At least, that's my plan.
So, moving on.
Some things that need to be done for winter:
Cars: Make sure your antifreeze is fresh and sufficient in your car(s). Get a tune up, check your oil and brakes, make sure the door gaskets are all in good condition, check your tires for baldness and weak spots. If you live in a place with lots of ice and snow, make sure you have snow tires put on, or put snow chains in your car for need. Where I live, they are so rarely needed that most people don’t have them. Me – I do indeed have snow chains because the rare times that we need them, we really need them. I also really like Tyre-Grip, I used it last winter and I could feel the extra traction it provided when I had to drive on slippery roads. It worked well in black ice conditions, slush, and light ice and snow. I also keep carpet scraps for those times when I get caught in deep slush, snow, or even mud. Be sure to have both an ice scraper and a squeegee in the car to clear your windows. Make sure your wiper blades are in good condition and your windshield washer fluid is full.
A word about ice storms in places that rarely get them – if there’s more than a 1/4 inch of ice around your tires locking them to the ground – don’t try to power your car through the ice, especially if your tires are worn but not too worn to replace. I speak from experience when I tell you doing this is a sure fire way to tear the tread off your car and rip the tire apart, leaving you stranded with anywhere from 1 to 4 flats. If your car gets iced to the ground, don’t try to move it, call someone to give you a ride, or call in to work and tell them you can’t make it. Around here, our ice storms rarely last more than 2 days. Even though I am considered “essential personnel” and have to go to work regardless of the weather condition, I will not hesitate to use a vacation day in seriously inclement weather, usually if it’s bad enough to ice my car to the ground. If it's that bad, it’s bad enough to stay home.
Home Heat: Make sure you have alternate means of heat in case the power goes out. The blankets mentioned above are a help, but they don’t make heat, only trap what’s present. If your house is all electric, make sure you have a woodburning fireplace, a cast iron woodburning franklin stove, a rocket mass heater, a gas stove (use cautiously and don't leave on overnight!), or some other source of heat that doesn’t rely on electricity. Do not use a grill or any of those patio fireplaces as indoor heating – they aren’t vented, and you’re more likely to suffocate or cause a fire. A plus to having a woodburning cast iron franklin stove is that you can cook on it if you have to.
If you have a woodburning stove, you need to make sure you have a store of wood to burn. Hard woods are best – oak, pecan, cherry, maple… If you have trees of this sort on your suburban/urban property, decent pruning will give you a good supply of wood for emergency situations, but not enough if you plan to use a woodburning heat source for the whole winter. If you have a rocket mass heater, you might have enough wood for winter, but other types of woodburning stoves need more wood. You could also use pelleted wood in most woodburning stoves - expensive but readily available and easy to store.
If you’ve had your fireplace for a while, make sure your chimney is cleaned before winter sets in. Creosote buildup can cause the house to catch fire.
Recycle newspapers to make starter logs – you can buy log rollers in most hardware stores, but an easy way to make them is to dampen the newspaper and roll tightly by hand, then tie the ends with twine to hold it together. Let it dry thoroughly. These newspaper logs will only burn for about an hour, so they aren’t a good source of long term heat, but they are marvelous for getting a fire started. Other types of good firestarters are paraffin soaked pine cones and paraffin-filled paper egg cartons – break them apart and use each individual egg cup as a fire starter. Make sure you have plenty of firestarters as well as wood if you’re not a natural born pyromaniac.
If you use propane heat – make sure you have an entire winter’s supply on hand. It’s cheaper to buy it early in the season when suppliers have plenty available.
If you use gas or electric heat, have your filters and furnaces checked and cleaned.
While you're checking that, check your fire extinguishers, carbon monoxide detectors, and smoke alarms.
Other Tips:
Keep a battery operated or hand cranked radio available for weather reports during a power outage.
Make sure you have your snow shovel in good repair. Down here, we rarely need it so the chances of it languishing in the back of the shed, with the handle loose, and the blade rusting are pretty high. So, check your snow shovel, and bring it where you'll need it. I bring it into the house and have a smaller one I keep in the car. When you need it, you really need it.
If you have water sprinklers, wells and/or tanks for your water supply, fountains, or small ornamental ponds, do your seasonal maintenance on them before the serious winter weather sets in. Check floats, lines, and heating elements if you use them.
Clean your gutters.
Check the weather stripping on your doors and windows.
Turn off outdoor faucets and put a cover over them.
If your house is on pier supports, block the under house vents for additional warmth.
Touch up any caulking.
Lay in a store of extra batteries and check your flashlights. Candles and oil lamps are also good for longer lighting needs. Make sure you have plenty of candles, matches, and oil for your oil burning lamps. A plus for using candles and oil lamps is that hey generate a small amount of heat, but do make sure they aren’t burning near flammables, and have good ventilation. If you have cats, make sure the candles and lanterns are either out of reach of the cats or are in tip-proof containers and that the flames aren’t where the cat’s tail might catch fire. We had this happen with a long-haired cat we once had – fortunately the fire went out on her tail before it burned her skin and she only had singed hair – but if it had caught well on fire, her panicked run through the house could have set any number of fires. Better to keep the flames well out of the cat’s reach.
Check your winter clothes and make sure they still fit and aren’t in need of mending. Give loose buttons a few extra stitches now so you don’t lose a button when you most need it. Keep extra hats, gloves, mittens, blankets, and coats in accessible locations (car, work, friends’ houses…).
Prune weak branches on your trees and branches overhanging the house and/or power lines so when an ice storm hits, they won’t fall and damage your roof or knock out your power. You can probably use the wood in your fireplace or outdoor fireplace.
Keep a pair of good walking shoes and comfortable, warm clothes at the office or in your car in case you have to walk home. I live about 10 miles from work, and in bad weather, it could take me 4 - 6 hours to walk home in good shoes. In my work shoes, I would never make it home. They tear my feet up and break long before I got a full mile away.
Keep extra food at your desk and in your car in case you get stranded because of ice or snow.
Make sure you have at least 2 months of non-perishable foods, canned foods, dried goods, and pet foods on hand. Also, make sure you have a manual can opener and a few manual food preparation tools on hand in case of a power outage.
If you put up holiday lights, put them up now while it’s still warmish. Don’t light them this early.
Put out mud mats and boot trays.
Clean bird feeders and lay in a store of bird feed.
Put out mouse traps and check them often. I prefer to use live traps baited with peanut butter because they make noise that excites the dogs and cats so I know to empty them as soon as they get filled.
Clean out your kitchen cupboards and rotate your food stores.
If you live where storm windows are common, you’ll need to put those up. Here, we only put heavy plastic over the north windows.
Make sure your water supply is ready for a storm or for water main breaks. Insulate your pipes under your house and put a winter blanket around your hot water heater.
If you have a back-up house generator. check it and make sure it’s in good working order and has plenty of fuel available.
Check on your neighbors, especially the elderly ones and the single parents with young children.
Make wheat or rice bags with lavender in them that you can microwave for additional soothing warmth (slide these into your bed before getting in at night for a warm bed and a good night’s sleep).
Decide now what winter volunteer work you want to do so you don’t commit to something on the spur of the moment only to realize you could have been doing more good elsewhere or over-commit yourself.
Check over your winter decorations and have them ready to go for each holiday as they arrive – winter is a busy holiday time – Halloween, Thanksgiving, Cookie Day, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Yom Kippur, Chanukkah, New Year’s Solstice, Elften-Elften, Carnivale, Mardis Gras, etc.
Medical Prepping:
Be current on winter first aid – know how to treat chilblains, frostbite, hypothermia, and dehydration. Be aware that hypothermia can occur in even warmish weather (around 40ºF) if the person gets wet, is in a wind, sweats heavily, or gets dunked in water. Infants don’t have the same signs as older children and adults so watch babies for lethargy and reddened cold skin. Adults will shiver uncontrollably, have fumbling hands, slurred speech, and confusion. They may be drowsy. If you suspect hypothermia, get yourself or the person out of the wind, out of wet clothes, and give lukewarm to warm (not hot) drinks and wrap in warm, dry blankets, towels, sheets, or layers of dry clothes. If nothing else is available, a thick layer of dry leaves can act as a blanket. Skin-to-skin contact under a thick layer of dry leaves, or cardboard or cardboard under trash bags will provide enough heat to warm a hypothermic person up.
Frostbite is particularly dangerous because the affected area will be numb and the person with frostbite may not even know they have it. A visual check of your extremities is essential. If your skin becomes reddened and painful, protect the area from cold as quickly as possible. The nose, cheeks, ears, chin, fingers, and toes are the body parts most often frostbitten.
Hypothermia is a more serious condition than frostbite, so treat that first. If there’s frostbite but no hypothermia, warm the affected areas gently – immerse the body part in cool to warm water (not hot – it should be comfortable to the person with the frostbite) or use skin-to-skin warming (an armpit is good for fingers). Do not walk on frostbitten feet or toes, this will further damage them. Do not use a heating pad, hot water, a heat lamp, or the heat of a stove, fireplace, or radiator for warming the frostbitten areas because they are numb and the person won’t feel when the damaged skin burns – and burns on top of frostbite is miserable. Seek professional medical care if you can.
Make sure your CPR is current.
Have at least 2 months of prescription medications stocked.
If you suffer from SAD, consider a light therapy box using blue LEDs, one that’s on a timer that gradually brightens in the morning as you waken so you suffer less from SAD. Wear sunglasses around the blue LED lights or avoid looking directly at the lights because the blue spectrum is more harmful to your eyesight.
Make doctor appointments for annual check-ups, flu shots (if you get them), pneumonia shots (if you get them), and for getting prescriptions for winter meds. Don’t forget vet visits for pets.
Wintering your Garden/Yard:
In the garden and yard, mow a last time and do end-of-season maintenance on your mower.
Weed and mulch your gardens. For those plants that can grow over winter, be sure you have sufficient row covers or hot caps for them. Here in the south, where we have mild winters, I can, with care, grow tomatoes year round, along with rosemary, basil, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, sage, parsley, and some hardier lettuces. My berry fruits, though, need to be mulched, and my pretty African Daisy tree needs to be wrapped in burlap and mulched and hot capped.
My roses need pruning and mulching.
My gerbera daisies need mulching.
My rice beds need draining and covering.
My wheat beds need a winter crop of clover planted.
The rest of my swimming pool gardens need mulching. Hay is a cheap mulch, but not as cheap as leaves or recycled cardboard. I usually put down a layer of leaves, and water it down, then a layer of a dozen sheets of newspaper wetted down, and then a layer of cardboard over that, wetted down and weighed down with a few bricks. In spring, this mulching gets pulled off and ground up and then put back for a natural compost along with the actual compost (I keep a compost at a friend’s house because the city where I live doesn’t allow composting).
Potted plants need to be brought indoors or into a sheltered patio on the south side.
Annual plants in pots need to be dumped into compost and the pots thoroughly cleaned for next year.
Garden tools need to be cleaned, oiled, and put away.
Coil hoses and store them.
Winter Emergency Kit:
The following items should be in a winter emergency car kit. You can have more things, but try not to have less:
* a shovel
* windshield scraper and small broom
* flashlight
* battery powered radio
* extra batteries
* water
* snack food
* matches
* extra hats, socks and mittens
* First aid kit with pocket knife
* Necessary medications
* blanket(s)
* tow chain or rope
* road salt and sand and/or carpet scraps
* booster cables
* emergency flares
* fluorescent distress flag
And whatever else you feel you need to do for winter.
EDITED TO ADD:
LynnS gave instructions on softening cheap wool blankets such as go on sale at Harbor Freight Tools occasionally:
We got a monster deal on 85/15 wool/nylon blankets at Harbor Freight last year. Like, $5 apiece. We bought a huge stack. The problem: These kinds of cheap blankets--including army surplus--are notoriously scratchy. Here's how to take most of the scratch out and make them useful both as utility blankets around your house and car, and even as incredibly cheap outer clothing fabric for vests, overshirts and the like. Nothing close to the skin, but good enough for those kinds of things.
You need:
A scratchy wool utility or army surplus blanket
A full bottle of cheap hair conditioner (VO5, Suave, whatever's on sale--we bought a bunch on clearance at 69 cents)
A washer and dryer
Time
Fill the washer with enough warm water to cover the blanket. Add the entire bottle of cheap hair conditioner, agitate a little to distribute it throughout the water. Put in the blanket, agitate just a little. Turn off the washer and let it sit for several hours.
Spin out the water. DO NOT RINSE.
At this point we do something heretical: We put it in the dryer. Because the blankets we're using are 85/15 wool/nylon, they don't shrink much if at all. If you're using 100% wool (not likely in most cheap blankets), this will result in a thick felt--which actually has its own applications but may not be what you want. In that case, air dry. It won't be as useful generally BECAUSE:
Drying in the dryer removes a lot of useless fuzz from the blanket! And this makes the blanket even softer while still maintaining its effectiveness as a source of warmth. While you're drying, check the lint trap every five minutes. It will need cleaning, I guarantee it, and after this process you may want to clean your vent thoroughly.
This process turned a stiff, stale-smelling, prickly utility blanket into a drapier fabric mildly scented with Relaxing Blackberry Sage Tea VO5 conditioner, soft enough to serve as a comfortable lap robe or as fabric for a vest, and fuzz-free enough to spread on our beds. Cost: $5 blanket, 69 cent conditioner, and however much electricity and water we used.
I'd like to add that if you have an old, scratchy 100% wool blanket, especially if moths got to it, you can felt it using the process LynnS described, and then cut it up for various things: boot liners, over-mittens, vests, jackets, caps, ear muffs, and hand muffs. any leftover scraps of felted wool can be made into toys, used as stuffing for soft toys, or cut into shapes to use on a felted storyboard as felt clings to felt. Kids get hours of fun with felt storyboards, a useful tool in the winter when going outside isn't a good idea.