I love my mountains, except when I can’t see them. Our lovely Utah topography — wide valleys with mountains on all sides and lakes in the middle — tends to trap gunky air in the wintertime. That lets in less light, which makes everything extremely cold. And the lack of normal convection means the air just gets gunkier and we get colder until a storm comes and knocks everything out. And then we start over again.
The single pane windows in my place are not standing up well to temps consistently below freezing, and sometimes below 0º F. So I’m sitting there near a window for the little light I can get — because it really is too cold and nasty to go outside — and seeing my breath fog the air. Not good. I called the landlord but got a “Sorry-Out-of-Luck” and our awesome maintenance person brought in more insulation, and a suggestion to hang up some room-darkening curtains or blankets. But I need LIGHT! So I whined a bit on Facebook last night, and my friend Ty gave us this idea: bubblewrap!
Ty suggested hanging it with water. I couldn’t get that to work until I tried hanging the stuff vertically, rather than horizontally (which I would have done in the first place were these side windows not such an awkward size). Once I did, that I had all of the stuff up and ready to go within about half an hour. We just measured sheets the height of each window, sprayed the window a bit, installed the sheets bubble-side-down, and then added more strips of bubblewrap til each window was thoroughly covered.
The heater is still running like mad. But, it’s actually starting to feel warm… and I’m liking that 🙂
