Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Cold, Winter Mornings

Living in a cold, snowy, northern state, I was surprised by two things.

One is that mudrooms/laundry rooms/back entryway/whatever-you-like-to-call-it aren't as big as they need to be.  It takes a lot of room for boots and snow pants, hats and mittens, coats and scarves.  Add multiple people to a family and that causes exponential math equations to make even Susan's mind explode. ;-)

The other surprise is that not every home has a fireplace, mine included.  No sitting around the fire at night listening to the fire crackle while reading a book or playing a game or wasting time on the internet.  I, at least, get one, sometimes two, glorious weeks of doing just that at camp.  Which makes it quite special and greatly anticipated.

Despite these two surprises,  I've been given a lovely home in which to live and it really has served our family and friends well.  We make it work, even if we trip over boots on the way in and out.  Or forgot to get our coat before we put our wet boots on and yell for help from the doorway.  We are so used to these scenarios , it simply seems normal.

However one of the little things that make this home so nice for a cold, snowy, winter climate is this:

Both of our bathrooms have this same switch.  That top right button sure makes showering in the winter not something to dread. So even though we will stumble over boots, search for mittens and scarves, and are not able to warm ourselves sipping coffee, tea, or hot chocolate next to a roaring fire after we were out in the cold and snow, we have this little luxury.  A little button that warms us up on a cold winter morning.

3 comments:

Susan said...

My head didn't explode. If it was really exponential growth in the number of hats and scarves and stuff, I think my emotions and my yelling would indeed explode. But since it's just a geometric growth, I manage to share your frustration while keeping my skull intact.

Don't you just LOVE those buttons? We don't have them in our house, but we've stayed in hotels with them. Whoa, baby ... no goosebumps getting out of the shower!!

Ewe said...

Once when we lived in MN in the parsonage, the heater in the bathroom broke. It was going to be very expensive to fix. I was able to get by without a lot of things, but I insisted that they fix that even with the high cost because we had a newborn. It ended up that a member came over and fiddled with it and it wasn't as expensive as they thought it would be. But oh we appreciated that bathroom heater after we had been a short time without it in the winter. Our bathroom was small and with little kids I didn't want a heater that plugged in, it was a necessity to have a heater in the ceiling.
We didn't have a fireplace there either-my boys drew pictures of fireplaces and taped them to the wall for me! It is unbelievable to me to have a fireplace here in this much more mild climate that all I do is flip a switch.
And here I have a large entryway where the only thing there is a place to hang coats and it still isn't enough room.

Barb the Evil Genius said...

We have a gas fireplace, but if we use it, the rest of the house gets terribly cold. This is due to the fireplace and the thermostat being in the same room. But then our current home is too small to have them very far apart. The fireplace is pretty to look at, anyway.