Our house is in fantastic shape for being nearly 125 years old. There have definitely been renovations along the way, but a lot of the house still has that old charm.

With all the beauty, there is bound to be some sacrifice. And yes, you’re right. It’s most obvious in the winter months when we’re forced to hibernate inside.

Our house is simply cold. Friends staying overnight? Make sure they bring slippers and a hoodie. Watching a movie in the living room? Well, bring the popcorn and settle in with one of our extensive living room blankets. Oh, it’s a great time to start drinking hot tea or cocoa as well.

Old houses are inherently leaky when it comes to heat, but there are definitely things we can do to make it better. We are lucky that this house was insulated some years back, which greatly helped. Our first floor is also insulated from the second floor (making heating/cooling bills better when we aren’t using the upstairs space).

Our main challenge of late are the windows that proliferate the house. Many of these haven’t been taken care of in awhile, and are definitely starting to show their age.

The glazing (the crinkly white stuff) is the material that is used to seal the glass to the wooden frame. When the glazing cracks and breaks it gives the elements another way to get inside (and other tiny critters). This is also detrimental to the window, since the glass is not properly held into the window.

The windows will rattle something fierce when there are loud noises outside (train, semi truck) or during heavy winds (they have a better chance of breaking too).

So…. it’s time to start the re-glazing project that we’ve procrastinated on. I will say that we did try several years back, and during the process of removing the glazing, I broke 3 beautiful wavy glass windows. The first time is newby issues. I went carefully and slowly on the 2nd one, but no luck. By the third one, I called it quits and said that we’ll need to find a method to get these windows out without shattering into pieces.

Luckily, our first window seems to be a “later model”. A good one to get my feet wet.