The list was folded inside the cover of her church cookbook, in pencil, in the handwriting that got shakier toward the bottom of the page. Nine items. No title, no explanation, just the numbers one through nine and a few words each. It took me most of a winter to understand that it was not a chore list. It was a sequence. She did them in that order for a reason, and doing them out of order — which I did, the first year — undoes about half of it.
She kept a drafty 1920s house in east Tennessee warm on a widow's pension and never once said the word insulation to me. Here is her list, in her order, with what I have learned about why each one is where it is.
This is first on her list and I ignored it for two years because it sounds like housekeeping, not weatherizing. It is both.
Once the furnace runs, the air in the house goes dry and everything in it holds a different shape. A mattress that has been slept on all summer in one position develops a low spot, and a low spot is where a cold draft pools around you at four in the morning. The rugs are the same argument at floor level: the traffic path wears thin, and thin is where the cold floor comes through.
Do it the same weekend, before the first burn. Ten minutes for the rugs, and enlist somebody younger for the mattresses.
A summer of dust and pollen on the glass cuts the light coming in, and from November to February that light is doing real work. My south-facing rooms are noticeably warmer in the afternoon after the windows are clean, enough that I stopped thinking of it as a cosmetic job.
The practical argument is simpler: in January you are not going to stand outside with a bucket. She washed hers in October and again in April and never in between.
Close the house up, turn off the furnace and any fans, and walk a lit candle slowly around every door and window frame. Where the flame leans, you have a draft. Mark it with a bit of masking tape and come back with the weatherstripping afterward, so you are not stopping and starting.
The doors will surprise you less than the windows. The window I would have sworn was fine — the one behind my reading chair — bent that flame sideways.
There is a small switch on the housing. Clockwise, on low, for winter: it pushes the warm air that has collected at the ceiling back down the walls without creating a breeze on you. In a room with a high ceiling this is the difference between the thermostat reading right and the room feeling right.
Half the people I have told this to did not know the switch existed. I did not know until I was fifty-one.
Everyone says clean the gutters. Her list says clean them and then run the hose and watch. Water that pools at the foundation freezes at the foundation, and that is what moves a house and cracks a basement wall. The downspout extension is a six-dollar part that most houses are missing.
This is the one everybody skips, and it is why your back rooms never get warm.
If you have radiators: hold a small key at the valve on the end, open it until water spits instead of air, close it. Air trapped at the top means the top half of that radiator is doing nothing, and you will feel it as one cold room at the far end of the run.
If you have forced air, the equivalent is the return vents, not the supply vents. Everyone vacuums the ones that blow. The returns are what let the room breathe, and a blocked return — a sofa pushed against it over the summer, a rug half over it — will starve one room while the rest of the house heats fine. Walk your house and find every return. Then look at what you moved in front of it in June.
I had a spare bedroom I believed had a duct problem for four years. It had a bookcase.
A sofa flat against a cold outside wall does two things: it keeps the room's warm air from washing that wall, and it holds damp against the plaster. Two inches of gap is enough for both. In her house every big piece sat slightly proud of the wall from October to March and went back tight in the spring.
Not stockpiling. Her list named four things: salt, flour, coffee, and lamp oil. The modern version of that argument is the things that make a three-day outage bearable rather than the things that keep you alive: something hot to drink you can make without power, something to read by, batteries for the one radio, and enough water put aside that flushing a toilet is not a crisis.
She lost power for three days one winter and did not blink. I asked her once what she would have done if it had been a week and she said she would have walked to her sister's, which was four miles, and I believe she would have.
The last line on the list is the only one that is not a physical task, and it is the reason the other eight are any good. Every spring she wrote down what had failed: which room was cold, which pipe worried her, what she ran out of. By October she was not relying on memory, and neither was anyone who came after her.
That is how the list got to be nine items instead of three. It was revised for about forty years.
My first October in this house I did items two through eight and skipped the first one, because turning mattresses seemed like something you do in spring. Then I ran the furnace for a week and found the low spot in the bed and the cold line along the floor at the same time, and had to move furniture in the middle of a cold snap to get at the rug.
The order is not sentiment. Do the settling and the moving before you close the house up and turn on the heat, because after that everything in the house is harder to shift and you will not want to.
I keep her list where she kept hers, folded in the cookbook. I have added two lines of my own at the bottom in pen, which felt presumptuous the first time and now just feels like the point of the thing.
Her list is a 1920s frame house with radiators, storm windows, and a coal stove that became a gas furnace in 1961. Mine is a 1978 ranch with forced air. Four of the nine transferred exactly, three needed translating, and two do not apply to a lot of houses at all.
If you rent, items five and six are your landlord's job and you should ask in September rather than November, in writing, because the same request in January joins a queue behind everyone else's emergency. What you can still do yourself: the candle test, the fan switch, the furniture gap, the returns, the pantry, the notes.
If you live in an apartment above the first floor, the gutter item is not yours and the draft situation is entirely different — your losses are through the windows and the entry door, not the foundation. Spend the whole afternoon on item three instead.
If your house is newer than about 1995, it is probably sealed tighter than hers ever was, and the candle test may find almost nothing. That is not a failed afternoon; that is the answer. In a tight house the useful items are four, six, and seven — air movement rather than air leaks.
I put these in pen at the bottom, which felt presumptuous the first time.
Ten: photograph the furnace label and the filter size. Every October, with my phone. Twice I have stood in a hardware aisle in January trying to remember whether it was 16×25×1 or 20×25×1, and both times I bought the wrong one. The label also has the model number, which is what the repair man asks for on the phone before he decides whether to come tonight.
Eleven: run the heat for twenty minutes in early October, on purpose, with the windows open. Two reasons. The first burn of the season smells like scorched dust and it is much better to meet that on a mild afternoon than at ten at night in the first cold snap, when you cannot tell whether the smell is normal. The second reason is that if it does not come on, you have found out in October — when a repair is a scheduled appointment rather than an emergency call at holiday rates.
The first year I skipped this, my furnace did not light on the first genuinely cold night, and the man who came out at eleven at night charged me a hundred and forty dollars to replace a thermocouple, which is a thirty-dollar part on a Tuesday afternoon.
The whole list is two Saturdays. The materials, the year I did it properly: weatherstripping for three doors and two windows, about thirty-one dollars; two downspout extensions, twelve; a furnace filter, nine; a radiator key, four. Call it sixty dollars and a weekend.
My gas bill that winter ran about eighteen percent under the previous one. I will not pretend that is a controlled experiment — it was also a milder January, and I have no way to separate the two. What I can say without qualification is that the back bedroom stopped being cold, and that was the bookcase in front of the return, and that cost nothing at all except the four years I spent believing it was a duct problem.
She kept the paperwork — that is why it held up.
Are your own documents where someone could find them?