DIY ideas for making your home cosy on a budget this winter

Posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2018

If you have unpleasant memories of many winters spent feeling the chill even in your usually comforting home, there might something fundamentally wrong with your home’s ability to maintain heat. However, your budget might not quite stretch to a sophisticated heating system.

Fortunately, you can still warm up your home in ways not entailing turning up the thermostat and risking prohibitively high heating charges in the process. Here are some cheaper DIY alternatives.

Fit a wood burner into your home

Sarah Beeny, the well-known presenter of Channel 4 property shows including Property Ladder, has come out in favour of spending on a wood burner. In an article for Prima, she has called this tactic “a super-effective way of heating a number of spaces – little ones fit into the tiniest of areas.”

Wood burners are also 90% heat-efficient, as just 10% of their heat disappears through the chimney. This is the case with the majority of open fires, which are examples of direct heat sources. Be sure to check you have all the necessary permissions before installing the wood burner, however.

Properly seal the insulation in your home

Your efforts to heat your home comfortably could come to surprisingly little if gaps remain in your home’s insulation. Heat will escape through those gaps, whether they are in the loft insulation or around doors or windows incapable of firmly shutting.

If you feel draughts through the windows, one option is sourcing inexpensive cling film-style insulation that you can very easily fit. You can insulate floors with carpet that is thick in its underlay.

Make your own “cocoa station”

What exactly is a “cocoa station”? This is basically a unit where you can keep cocoa supplies in easy reach of your children or guests as they enter your home. Making a storage area of this type can, obviously, afford you to extend a warm welcome in more ways than one.

While it remains your decision exactly what form the cocoa station takes, supplies can serve as both practical and decorative elements if arranged in a basket or on a tray.

Add organic, rural elements to your interiors

Paradoxical though it might seem, letting yourself see fresh foliage fetched from outdoors, even when temperatures outside the home are frigid, can give you a cosier feeling while you remain indoors.

You can let your imagination run riot as you think about how you could give your home decor a rural touch. Potential ideas include placing pine branches in strategically-positioned canning jars – perhaps wrapped with birch bark – throughout the house.

Fill out your bathroom with new features

The bathroom is obviously part of the house to which you are accustomed to paying regular visits. For this reason, there is great importance to keeping it comfortably warm, but you might remain in the dark about how you could do this when your finances are tight.

Fortunately, if you wait until the January sales, you could cost-effectively pick up bath sheets and a thicker bathmat, both of which can help in warming up a bathroom, the Better Homes & Gardens website explains.