The cost of keeping warm in an old house

Submitted by 99bricks on Thu, 2011-09-22 09:01

Just over a week ago my wife and I were pacing the bare wooden floor of our
sitting room wearing hats and scarves. It was -2C outside and, clearly, not
much warmer inside. We had a fire lit and the central heating going full
blast, but did it make any difference? No. As we shivered, our thoughts
turned to the scene in Withnail and I in which Withnail, overwhelmed
by the intense cold of Monty’s farmhouse, remarks that they “might as well
sit round a cigarette”.

Tags: 

More Like This - List of Related or Similar Content

  • Death valley

    The house might well have been in Surrey. The bricks were a bright baked red,
    the window frames were painted white and a high chimney on the left served
    the large ground-floor sitting room, which overlooked a tidy lawn. It had
    all the right playthings: a swimming pool, a tennis court, verandas and
    stables.

  • Is it worth it? Aberdeenshire £220,000 o/o

    What it is: A traditional, granite and slate farmhouse with open views
    over the Don Valley. Inside there are two bedrooms, a living room and a
    kitchen and the house stands in gardens of nearly half an acre.

  • Log fires are making a comeback

    Each morning, as the Siberian winter grips Britain, gas supplies are rationed
    and heating bills soar, Georgie Ursell carries her seven-month-old baby down
    to a warm kitchen and slides another log into the woodburning range cooker
    before putting on the kettle and porridge pan for breakfast.

  • Time and Place: Jo Malone

    In the early 1990s, my husband, Gary, and I rented a tiny one-bedroom flat on
    Draycott Avenue, in Chelsea. I worked from home as a facialist. We had
    barely any furniture and no curtains. I say it had a bedroom, but it didn’t
    really: I used that as a treatment room for my clients. Our sitting room
    acted as the shop floor for my little business.

  • A house of two halves in Jedburgh

    John and Ann Roberts’s home, near Jedburgh in the Borders, is a house of two
    halves. As you approach it along a long country lane, you see only the
    200-year-old farmhouse. Hidden from view is a large, four-bedroom modern
    extension that contains a spacious living room, office, kitchen and two
    bathrooms. The extension more than doubles the floor space of the house.