General Craft & DIY discussion

The days are getting colder. What do you do to winterize your home each year? Or do you have a new home that you need to seal up? What products, tips, & tricks have you found to keep winter at bay?

Winterizing our modular home is pretty simple. We have no basement, but I need to shut the vents for the crawl space & put down new mouse poison. I don't like poison, but the mice move in every fall from the fields, so we have to put it out or we get overrun.

When we first moved in here, there was heat tape on the main water feed into the house. It had a thermostat on it, but it wasn't adjustable. After an ice storm left us without power for 6 days in 0 degree weather, I decided we didn't need the heat tape any more.

I used spray foam insulation to seal one vent next to it & where it comes into the house. The mice were using that pipe as a runway into the insulation under my house.

I think I saved about $15/month on my electric bill by pulling that one bit of heat tape. We have a small fish pond & 2 main water troughs that we put heaters into, too. I have to keep them going.

I love spray foam insulation like this which is sold at Lowes



I'm not sure I ever used that particular brand name, but I've used a variety of different types for over 2 decades. I've used it to close huge gaps. I've sliced, spackled & painted it in some situations. It's fantastic stuff, but care does have to be taken in some situations.

If you have gaps around doors & windows, it can expand & push on the jambs making them stick, sometimes so badly they won't open. I have used it in those situations, but you just have to be really careful that it can expand along the width of the jamb. Fill the area in layers & don't try to put them too close together. Instead of spray foam, we used to pack the gap with fiberglass insulation. That's probably better anyway since it lets the area breath.

Closing up a house too tightly is bad since we generate moisture just by living. The rule of thumb is that 1/3 of the air in your house should be changed out every hour. That never used to be a problem until the oil shortage in the 70's & suddenly everyone started trying to make houses as tight as a spaceship. That led to a lot of mold & rot problems around windows.

How Do you add the photos Jim?

Even new windows need plastic (the thin clear kind) when it's often 20 below zero. My house has passive solar and geothermal elements and is very economical to heat with wood days and propane at night. (wood heat is too much, I can't sleep when it's a hot 70 degrees!)

The cat doors through the greenhouse into the basement shop seem to provide decent ventilation for the house and the wood stove while costing very little in heat loss. It could be a bit better as every time I cook it takes a while to air out the place....

Foxtower, if you click on the (some html is ok) the syntax is there. Basically, I find an image online, copy the url of the image & paste in where the ### symbols are
< img src="###"/>

Just leave out the space after the < sign, but you do need one after 'img'.

Find a page that has just a picture on it.
If the picture is too big or small, use the width & height to change the size as shown in the directions.

For instance, if you go to this page:
http://img2-2.timeinc.net/toh/i/a/too...
you'll see a picture only. It's 300x300 pixels, so should show OK.

I can show it by putting:
< img src="http://img2-2.timeinc.net/toh/i/a/too...

into the message. I'll do that below without the space after the < sign.

GR abbreviated my example, but hopefully you get the idea.

BTW, if you want to put in spaces that GR won't take out, hold down the alt key & type 255 on the number keypad. That's an ASCII space, but treated differently than the normal one which is 32. You have to use the number keypad, not the numbers above the letters.

Luckily, we don't get that cold here in KY. I think 6 below is the coldest I've seen it & that was just one morning. I've lived in cold climes, but not for a lot of years, thankfully.

I am interested in the plastic you use on the windows, though. My daughter & her boyfriend are getting a house with old windows. Some have storms, but others don't so she was asking me about that super clear plastic for windows. I've seen it & used it, but that was 15 or more years ago, so I really don't know anything about what is available now.

Jim wrote: "GR abbreviated my example, but hopefully you get the idea.

BTW, if you want to put in spaces that GR won't take out, hold down the alt key & type 255 on the number keypad. That's an ASCII space, ..."

Thanks... though as I've been wandering I learned it would be even easier to upload a photo to the group photo album and if the reader is really interested there it is without a lot of typing in code I don't really understand. Seems like the path of least resistance for now....

Just for fun I posted a photo with the Fox Tower and the Squirrel feeder.

There really isn't much code to type in. To get the URL, just click in the address bar once, the URL gets highlighted in blue. Right click, then left click on copy (or control-c), then you can paste it in after
< img src="
and add   "/>  at the end. Very simple.

Cool pictures you posted. What are the dimensions of the Fox Tower?

The tower foot print is ten feet by twelve feet tapering to about five by five at the top level and tops out at thirty-two feet.

Being unable to lift a ladder bigger than 24 feet I pre made the roof in peices and used a pulley system to bring it up through the inside. I included a trap door so I could get on the roof and finish it and made bolt on scaffolding for getting the walls around the windows.

After that project the local building inspector just rubber stamps whatever I build!

We don't do much as far as 'winterizing' here in southern KY ... just doesn't get all that cold for a MT native despite the Lexington weather forecasters breathless about the 'bitter cold' expected when it gets into the teens!

The most interesting weatherizing I did was with the travel trailer I lived in for the two winters I spent living on the ranch on the Crow reservation at the base of the Pryor Mountains. Stacked baled hay around the base of the trailer as far up as the bottom of the windows and over the windows on the north side of the trailer. Really made a big difference, especially keeping the floor from being so cold.

I imagine he would. Sounds like a really neat project.

Sharon wrote: "We don't do much as far as 'winterizing' here in southern KY ... just doesn't get all that cold for a MT native despite the Lexington weather forecasters breathless about the 'bitter cold' expected..."

Sounds like your weatherizing is for the AC in the summer!

Of course "bitter cold" is relative. I don't mind 20 below zero, but 80 degrees kills me!

It seems I have to replace our front storm door soon. The top hinge is breaking for some reason. That's not all bad. We've pretty much hated that door since we moved in. It uses one huge sheet of glass that covers the entire door as the storm. That doesn't work well in our house since we have a lot of dogs. I had to put up a screen shield to keep them from going through it when the storm wasn't in. That means that I have to unscrew the shield to put the glass in or out & then there is the problem of storing a piece of glass that is 30"x66". It's a complete pain & the screw holes were starting to strip, so we've just left the storm in all year for the past 2.

I checked at Lowe's for screen doors when we first moved in & all theirs with sliding glass panes had solid tops with the center opening up. I really wish I could find one that had the top open up so the dogs couldn't hit it. I still need to drop by Penrod's & check out Builder's Supply, too. Last time I looked, there wasn't really much choice, though.

Winter preparations have been tested and so far so good!

Had three inches of snow yesterday followed by freezing rain. I always worry if the tractor batteries will survive the onset of cold weather, but the three year old battery in the old CASE worked just fine. The ones I used to get at the auto parts store would only last two years, but I switched to Briggs and Stratton batteries that seem to work stronger and last longer.

We started off at 50 & rainy & wound up at 30 with a few flakes of snow yesterday. The day before it was 60 & really rainy, 1.5" on top of the 2.5 we'd just had 2 days before. We're bouncing around the freezing mark so everything is cold & muddy.

Now there's two inches of snow remaining coated with ice. The cat and squirrels enjoy it, but the dog and I find it difficult walking.

Darn, Winter looks like it's here and though I usually groom the walking trials with the old snowmobile it's too icy... the machine won't turn on ice. Maybe next weeks storm will leave some nice powder.

I'm always dissapointing when it starts out icy... how are we ever going to hit the usual ten feet of snow if we keep getting freezing rain?

I hate freezing rain & we get a fair amount of that. We're drier, but I made sure to keep the truck in 4wd while doing the hay tonight. There's a skim of ice on the ponds where the sun don't hit them, but it was sunny today & it didn't freeze deep. Erin & I decided not to go for a ride on the horses because it was so sloppy. Again, we hovered around the freezing mark. It was 24 this morning & 34 this afternoon.

It's always interesting to compare weather with real people from different places... as long as they don't gloat because they think their version of weather is somehow better. I think we all can have remarkable weather!

Most of the ground is frozen here, though yesterday after plowing out the ex I took a shortcut with the blade down going back to the garage and hit a soft spot under a pine tree... A big lump of sand got caught on the blade and I ended up spreading sand forty feet across the lawn! ( I kept thinking it would all fall off any second now...) What a mess!

The weather is what it is where ever I am, something to deal with. I don't think I'll move to Montana. Too cold for too long. I did live up near Aspen for a year. It was high desert & the cold never went through me like it does here with the higher humidity.

I find it easier to deal with real cold than this half way stuff & bouncing around, but that's KY for you. Wait a minute & things will change. Fronts tend to meet on top of us, so we get a real mix from the Gulf & north, but mostly from the plains to the west. It's not unusual for our temperature to change 40 degrees in a day, so it's tough to get used to & dress for.

It's not so different here, like 40 degree changes... just subtract a couple dozen degrees.

You must have some great storms coming across the plains (while praying they aren't tornadoes!)!

We're lucky in the tornado department. They tend more to the west or go south of us. We're 500' higher in the hills, but they do regularly rip through not many miles away. We had 17 one day not all that long ago.

I do prefer my average temp, even if it's over a 40 degree range, to be above 0. So does Marg. We're not much on hot, hot summers, either. We're pretty happy with the climate we have. It's actually just 1 degree warmer than where we moved from in MD, but it doesn't have the stabilizing influence of the sea.

Zero... whats wrong with zero? I just hit zero degrees F this morning.... made for a invigorating walk for me and the doggie accross the ice coated world.

Zero is no big deal here... some winters we go weeks wishing we'd get that warm!

I got to admit though, hitting the lowest temperature I recorded in the seven years I've lived here was a remarkble experience! Forty-three degrees below that balmy zero mark! WOW! Auto seat cusions (if you remember not to touch the metal handle with your bare hand.. real bad idea) turn into granite!

Yeah, no thanks. How far down do you have to bury pipes? 4'? I think the frost line here is 18", in MD I thought it was 20 something. We always figured 28" was safe. Do you have to add pipe to standard frost free hydrants?

Having lived most of my life in MT, where you bury pipes 6' down to be safe, I was absolutely appalled to get to KY and discover pipes at 6" to 1' ... that still just seems wrong!

On the other hand, we didn't even have a fire in the wood stove this morning either.

6'! Woah! That's some digging.

True ...

But then, the first winter I was back in MT (from Spain) I was going through town (Sheridan, WY) just after midnight on New Year's Eve after visiting with some friends and happened to glance up at the time/temperature sign on one of the banks.

Nice big numbers ... - 42 degrees ... not including wind chill.

I'm just thinking what it must be like to get water lines around the farm. Do they have ditch-wiches with longer blades or is everything dug by backhoe?

We used a ditch-witch for the waterline we ran up to the upper barn.

Foxtower wrote: "Zero... whats wrong with zero? I just hit zero degrees F this morning.... made for a invigorating walk for me and the doggie accross the ice coated world.
Zero is no big deal here... some winters..."

We always had livestock so were out every morning to feed ... cattle and horses were fed first with loose hay and a team and bobsled, later with 4 x 4 pickup and baled hay.

I can remember the last two winters in MT feeding horses. The pasture was about a mile cross country, 3 miles around by the 'road'. Had a Dodge diesel 4 x 4 plus chains in back, loaded it and would start out. With the snow deep, it took about an hour to get the 3 miles to the upper pasture to feed.

And one of the first things you learn in that kind of country under those kind of conditions is that you always start out in 4 wheel low with chains on the rear tires. If you get stuck and can't get out, you chain up in front ... then turn around and go home!

Tire chains make a huge difference. It's hard to believe how much. My tractor is 2WD, a John Deere 5103 with a front end loader. In the winter, it was about useless for moving snow or manure around until I got tire chains for it. With them on, the tractor has as much traction as ever, even with a full bucket. I wanted them for a couple of years, but it was $500 for a new set, so I kept looking around. I found a set that is a hair too long - they're for a Case - but were only $200 lightly used.

I need to put the chains on soon. They're heavy, over 100lbs for each wheel, but easy to put on. I drag them out flat, drive the tractor over them & put a bungie through the rim, then drive forward slowly until they're on. A bit of adjusting & they're good to go.

I usually leave them on from December into March or early April, depending on the weather. I don't like driving around much with them, so take them off before I do the spring harrowing.

We've got chains for the tractor as well.

I had regular heavy duty tire chains for the rear of the Dodge but a friend cut down an old pair of tractor tire chains for the front. Figured the most aggressive chains would be the ones I'd need if I was already in deep s ------ snow!

Love chains! I could not plow snow without them....

In a nice warm climate like Maine we only have to dig down four feet. When we needed to put in the ex-wifes water line across a field with nice sandy soil it took the two of us one day to hand dig the 200 foot trench.

Finally, after rain, snow, sleet, snow, rain and snow the snow finally won! I was able to get the old Snowmobile out and groom the walking trails through the five inch deep snow pack. Makes for easy walking when the doggie and I go out in the woods to enjoy the stories the bunny tracks tell.

We've been hovering around 50 for a week & got an inch of rain this morning with lots of wind. Tonight it is supposed to drop into the 20's & ice/snow mix is forecast. Yuck. I HAVE to be in to work tomorrow, too.

It's being a warm Winter so far... forecast to be up in the thirties all week so the dog and I have been out playing more as around here 30 degrees is almost t-shirt weather!

The snow pack has settled to about 17 inches.

Today while out in the woods walking the doggie he started sniffing around in the snow off the trail, and then stuck his nose in just the right spot! A nervous quail disquised as a lump in the snow just two feet from me burst out and took off!

Not the only bird we startled today, but the only one I've ever startled from a hidey hole under the snow!

Sounds nice. We had a 40 degree day on Sunday that felt colder than the 30 degree one the day before. Gray with a humid, cold wind rather than still & sunny. Now we're heading into the 50's with more rain coming.

The top hinge on our screen door broke a while back & I finally got around to replacing it - the whole door, not just the hinge for 2 reasons. They don't make it easy to replace just a hinge since it's an integral part of the jamb. Also, we never really liked the door.

It was cheap aluminum without a decent sweep. We could have lived with that, but it also had just one big panel for the screen & storm door. That meant pulling a big glass panel when we wanted air & the screen was right in the dogs' faces & claws. The grid I added to keep them from going through the screen had to be removed before the glass panel could be swapped in or out. Clunky, to say the least. And we had no decent place to store the glass panel except in one of the bedroom closets.

I bought a vinyl clad, wooden screen door to replace it from Lowe's for $140. The screen can be set as either the top or bottom panel. It came as the bottom, but I made it the top one. Now we can let in the breeze when we want easily.

It took a couple of easy hours to install & fit perfectly. It's made so I could decide which side to hinge it on & had a very nice, adjustable sweep, too. I had to drill it for the handle, but even that was simple. Instead of a paper template, I had a solid aluminum decorative plate. Just put it in position, mark the center of the holes & drill 3 of them, each 5/16" diameter. The handle fit into them & that meant the screws from the other side only had 1/4" or so to go to find their home. None of this waving the screw around as you try to fit them with an inch of air in between.

Anyway, it wasn't a hard job & came out very nicely. The door is solid & tight.

Jim wrote: "The top hinge on our screen door broke a while back & I finally got around to replacing it - the whole door, not just the hinge for 2 reasons. They don't make it easy to replace just a hinge since..."

I need to do something about my storm door. I've been completely avoiding how bad it is.
I'm not very handy at things. Though, one of my favorite magazines that I borrow from the library is Family Handyman. I love reading about all the new products they recommend !

I've installed a LOT of screen & storm doors over the years & I was quite impressed by this one, Jaye. The directions (Yes, I read them.) were good & they've really come a long way in making these. There were a lot of little things that used to be a drag, but were quite easy this time.

No need to worry about which side the door is hinged on when you buy it since I decided that when I installed it. The handles used to be a drag, tough templates to follow, lots of air & a huge hole to fit the latch through. Not this time. Easy as pie. I didn't have to worry about it, but I think if the frame was out of square, it still would have been easy to fit.

I don't suppose every brand is like that & this wasn't the cheapest they had, but it certainly wasn't the most expensive. Not many tools were needed either. They would have installed it for $70, too.

It's past time to do my winterizing, not that I have much to do. One thing is to go around & make sure all the windows are locked. It's amazing how much cold air can come in between the 2 panes. Another is to walk around the house & shut all the vents to the crawlspace. The worst part of doing that is I get distracted & often forget one or two. (Sometimes I have the attention span of a gnat on crack.)

The horse water trough & the fish pond already have their heaters in. The shop has its heater on & I've been pleasantly surprised to see it holding steady at 60 without having to fiddle with it much. The Boss takes care of the heater in the house & the tack room. We just use a little 1500 watt space heater out there & keep it about 60, too.

Today I'll get the propane tanks (30 pounds each) out of the big barn & put them in the shop along with the indoor propane heater. I'll run it for a while to make sure all is OK. It's just for emergencies. They give us 3 - 4 days of heat if the power goes out.

I'll also run the generator with a load on to makes sure it is OK. It's a little one, a 2000 watt Honda, but it's enough to run one appliance (fridge, freezer, or microwave) & a light. The rest of the time, it can keep the computers & TV going, but they're on UPS's, too.

We used to get a lot of power flickers. Haven't since they put the new line in through our fields & apparently hooked us up to it. My neighbors to the south have lost power a couple of times & we've been fine, so hopefully this is an unneeded precaution.

I also need to get the salt out & up on the porches along with a flat shovel. I keep them both there all winter so I don't have to slog around when it's nasty out. I can pop out for a few minutes & get it taken care of. Far better than getting the pickup cleaned off or walking the few hundred yards to the barn.

I've been thinking about a generator. One that runs on propane. But my wallet is only allowing me to think, at this point.
I have a well. So when the power goes that's that for water. This time of year I stock up on gallons of water, just in case.
There's a town pump down in the center of town. Last week I heard it had a padlock on it. I have to find out why as this is where I refill during long outages.

Is that a portable indoor heater that you have?

Yes, the heater is a $200 propane one rated for indoor use. I keep a carbon monoxide detector plugged in to the generator when I run it, though. I don't fully trust it. We've only needed it once since I bought it, but I run it for a few hours every year.

One reason I have such a little generator is that they need to be run under load once a month to keep them properly charged. Otherwise they can have issues, usually generating electric at less than 60 herz. (You can tell by plugging in a clock with a second hand & timing it for a minute.) Not a big deal for a regular light bulb (Do you still have any?) but a huge deal for the compressors on energy efficient appliances or so I've been told. I'd hate to burn up a $500 - $1000 appliance for the sake of convenience.

I forgot to get a pet safe ice melt & we just had an ice storm with an inch of snow on top, more to come tomorrow. I have plenty of salt, but that's tough on the dog's pads. Drat. I think I'll just leave the snow on the back deck for traction.

Jim wrote: "Yes, the heater is a $200 propane one rated for indoor use. I keep a carbon monoxide detector plugged in to the generator when I run it, though. I don't fully trust it. We've only needed it once..."

Maybe the laws are different state to state? I don't even remember hearing from anyone about an indoor use propane heater. I talked to the gas man and he started talking about ventilation methods through the wall to the outside.

Jim wrote: "I forgot to get a pet safe ice melt & we just had an ice storm with an inch of snow on top, more to come tomorrow. I have plenty of salt, but that's tough on the dog's pads. Drat. I think I'll j..."

traction... yes, sometimes when the porch freezes over and i'm out of salt i have to throw some snow back on just so i don't end up fracturing myself.

I don't think it's a law thing, but it could be. Some propane heaters are rated for indoor use, others not. Here's the one I bought:
http://www.lowes.com/pd_131258-51644-...

Mr. Heater 18,000-BTU Portable Radiant Liquid Propane Heater. Ah! I do see it's not for sale in MA, so I guess it is a law thing. I had a similar one wall mounted in my last house & it had no vent, either. Never had a problem. Whenever you start venting, there's a huge heat loss. Better than dying of carbon monoxide poisoning, but they have these things down pretty good now.

We're having some extreme cold around here. We've been here 6.5 years & previous years the low was 6 degrees. We hit 4 degrees a few days ago, but tomorrow the high is supposed to be 0 degrees with windchills of -36 & the following day isn't much warmer.

It's 37 right now, so lots of bouncing around, but I think a couple of days of super low temperatures might be too much for our pipes, so I'm going to batten down the hatches this morning. I'm fitting a trashcan with a light over my frost-free hydrant outside of the shop & will wrap the house outside spigots in towels with trashbags over them.

I'll have to make a box to go over the spigots in the horses' wash stall. They're not frost-free, but are usually OK because they go directly into the heated tack room. (Frost-free would have stuck into the room too far.) I may cut the wall out around them & will definitely crank the heat up in there.

No matter how much hassle it is to wrap these up, it's not nearly the problem a broken pipe is. Anyone else having such issues? I hear it's extra cold for most of the US now.

Jim wrote: "We're having some extreme cold around here. We've been here 6.5 years & previous years the low was 6 degrees. We hit 4 degrees a few days ago, but tomorrow the high is supposed to be 0 degrees wi..."

Sounds like you have plenty of work around there. All extra projects are probably put aside for now.

I just came inside from digging off porches and some of the deck so they don't get too much heaviness from a partial melt or rain or whatever happens. Who knows, at this point.
I park my car near the end of the driveway when snow is coming. The neighbor hits the street plow build up at the end, after he's done with his lane.
We got about 15" with 2 foot drifts around the house/car. Luckily, it was fluffy for a change !
The road hadn't even been plowed when I had to go to work. I'm going back to a 4 wheel drive vehicle next time I get a car.

We had a bit of snow, but it's all gone. It's up to 54 degrees now. I hear they've changed the weather forecast so the high tomorrow is up to 9 degrees, far better than 0!

My pickup wouldn't start after I got done building a box around the wash stall spigots. No idea what happened, but the horses had far too much interest in what I was doing. Indy beat up my mirrors. We finally tied them in the barn so Marg could tow me out of the field.

The coldest weather we've had here since I moved to KY from MT. It was 12 above when we got up at 6 AM ... which is going to be the high for the day. It's now about 5 above and has been starting to blow a bit, with the wind chill it's down to 10 below now.

House and cabin are okay though we're certainly going through the firewood. Tank heaters in both of the big horse tanks and the horses that are usually watered out of a spring-fed tank we've let down to get to one of the 'city water' tanks. The stalled stallions we're simply breaking out the ice and packing water to twice a day.

Mares live out, have trees and brush as a windbreak and with about double the hay, are fine. The short haired house dog, however, is NOT impressed. As far as she's concerned, she's in the house, on the couch next to the wood stove and under a blanket until temperatures get back to something reasonable!