Kitten has been waking up at night and Pants thinks it might be because it's too cold in the basement. So we bought a space heater for her room.
MIL's first response was to move her door immediately so it's off the main room instead of the office. But the whole basement is cold, so that won't work.
Second response was to move her up to Meimei's room. But then where does she go? Certainly not in together, Kitten will be up all night.
Third was to move her into our room and we take hers. Um, no.
The real issue for MIL is that she thinks as soon as we turn on the space heater and leave the room it will set our toddler ablaze in a great conflagration and kill us all. I bought a very safe space heater - automatic shutoff if it tips or overheats, thermostat to make sure the temperature stays even, housing that's cool to the touch. And, frankly, Kitten has no interest in climbing out of the crib and will most likely have to be forcibly evicted from it when she goes to college. So the space heater? Not getting knocked over or touched in any way at night.
And this isn't a permanent solution. The permanent solution is to figure out why the basement is so cold all the time and fix it. I fixed all the upstairs vents, but that hasn't fixed the problem.
The one piece of good advice we got from MIL? Glass doors on the fireplace. The fireplace has no doors and is probably letting a lot of heat out, even with the damper closed.
6 comments:
I wasn't moved to the basement until I was several years older than Kitten, but with my folks' quasi-finished basement with the one heat vent? It was all about the footie pajamas.
It was always cold in my basement bedroom too. Even though it was the second closest one to the wood stove. Do you think there is any insulation in the walls???
I slept upstairs, but we'd still wake up to find the heads of the paneling nails encrusted with frost. So, there were space heaters in our house, pretty scary ones at that -- but Mom and Dad decided for the family that we'd all rather burn up in a fire than freeze to death.
Doors on the fireplace deffinitely will help. What about the windows? Can you put that plastic up on them? Not a designer look, but it does seem to help.
Remember when Nancy put plastic on the *walls* at the Jay Sax house? yeah. good times...
In the meatlocker!
Yeah, we're looking into the window issues. We believe that close to every window in the house will need replacing, hers first.
I found that caulking around my windows helped somewhat as well. Probably a dumb question, but are there heat vents in the basement?
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