How to Keep an Old House Warm in Winter (What Works in Our Farmhouse)

This post may contain affiliate links. If you book or buy through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.

The first real cold snap always catches me. Not because I didn’t know it was coming, but because an old house tells you about the cold in a way a new house never does. The floor by the back door goes first. Then the hallway. By the middle of October I’m wearing socks I would not be caught in publicly, and Dewey has relocated permanently to the one spot on the rug where the heat comes up.

I’ve stopped treating this as a problem to fix. Learning how to keep an old house warm in winter has been less about repairing the house and more about working with what it already is. Our farmhouse is never going to be airtight. I’m not replacing every window. What I can do is close the gaps that actually matter, change how we use the rooms, and make the cold parts of the house less important for a few months.

Find the drafts before you buy anything

Every year I do one slow walk through the house before I spend a dollar. I light a candle and carry it around the edges of the rooms, close to the floor and close to the window frames, and I watch the flame. Where it leans, there’s air moving. It takes about twenty minutes and it has saved me from buying things I did not need.

What I learned doing this is that the cold almost never comes through the glass. It comes through the gap where the bottom sash meets the frame. It comes around old door hardware. It comes out of the switch plates on exterior walls, which genuinely shocked me the first time I felt it. It comes up the basement stairs, and it pours down from the attic hatch like someone left a window open up there.

Those are small, specific, cheap gaps. That’s good news. A drafty old house usually has a lot of small problems rather than one expensive one.

The three things that made the biggest difference

Weatherstripping the exterior doors properly. Not the quick foam strip I did the first winter and then peeled off in April. A full pass around the frame plus a sweep along the bottom of the door. Our back door is the one everyone uses, so it’s the one that gets hit by cold air every time somebody comes in with groceries, and it was by far the worst offender in the house.

Rope caulk in the window sashes. This is the one I tell everybody about. It’s a soft putty rope you press into the gap with your thumb, and in the spring you peel it out and throw it away. No tools, no mess, nothing permanent. I do the windows in the rooms we live in and leave the rest. It took me one afternoon with Lochlan napping and the difference in the room I did first was obvious by that evening.

Heavy curtains, hung right. Curtains only work if they’re mounted close to the wall above the window and long enough to reach the floor. A panel floating six inches off the glass with daylight around the edges is decoration. The other half of this is that you have to actually use them, which means closing them at dusk and opening them in the morning so the south-facing rooms can take whatever sun there is. I’m not always good at this. When I am, the house holds its warmth noticeably longer into the evening.

If you want more on the layering side of this, I wrote about how to make your home feel cozy in a slow, lived-in way, and most of what’s in there does double duty in January.

What I’d skip

Plastic window film. It works, and I want to be fair about that. Shrink film over a window will cut a draft better than a curtain will. But it means that window is sealed shut until spring, and I didn’t realize how much I’d miss cracking a window open on a mild day in January until I couldn’t. It also looks exactly like what it is. So my honest position is that it’s worth doing on the windows in rooms you’re not using much, and not worth doing in the rooms where you spend your days.

I’d also skip putting a space heater in every cold room. We have one, and it earns its keep in one specific spot. Running several of them all winter is expensive, and with a toddler and a cat who treats every surface as hers, I’m not comfortable with more than one going at a time.

Shrink the house for a few months

This is the shift that changed our winters more than any product did. You do not have to heat the whole house equally. We pick the rooms we’re actually going to live in and we let the rest of the house be cold and closed. Doors shut. Curtains closed. We’re not in there.

It sounds like a loss and it really isn’t. In practice it means the living room, the kitchen and the bedrooms get all the attention, and the house feels smaller and warmer and easier to keep tidy at the same time. My slow living cleaning routine gets easier in winter for exactly this reason, because there’s less square footage in play.

It’s also the most honest version of slow living I know. You stop fighting the house and you move with it instead. I said something similar in how to slow down your life, which is mostly about subtraction, and this is the same idea applied to a floor plan.

Warm the people, not just the air

I spent my first winter here trying to get the thermostat to fix how I felt, which does not work in a house like this. What works is warming the person.

Wool over cotton. Slippers with a real sole, because the cold comes up through the floor and no amount of furnace will stop that. A basket of blankets in the living room so nobody has to go looking. A hot water bottle at the foot of the bed twenty minutes before I get in, which is the single best thing on this entire list and costs almost nothing. I keep the bedroom layered the way I wrote about in cozy bedroom ideas, and in winter that stops being about how it looks.

I have an autoimmune disease, and being cold all day costs me more than it used to. A cold room is not a restful room. If I’m going to spend an afternoon on the couch because my body is asking me to, that afternoon needs to actually be warm or it doesn’t do its job. That reframed this whole subject for me. Heat isn’t a comfort line item. It’s part of how I take care of myself.

Danny thinks I take this too far. He is also the person who walks around in a t-shirt in December, so I don’t weigh his opinion heavily.

The outside jobs, before the ground goes hard

None of the indoor work matters as much if water is sitting where it shouldn’t. So before the first hard freeze: hoses off and drained, outdoor spigots shut off from the inside, gutters cleared so melt has somewhere to go instead of backing up under the shingles.

The garden gets put to bed in the same couple of weeks. I cut back what needs cutting, mulch what’s staying, and pull the last of what’s out there, which is usually a bowl of green tomatoes that will never ripen on the vine. If you’re thinking about next year while you’re out there, that’s the right instinct. Starting a garden from scratch in fall is genuinely easier than starting in spring.

Questions I get about keeping an old house warm

Why is my old house so cold even when the heat is running?

Usually because the warm air you’re paying for is leaving faster than it’s being made, and because the surfaces around you are cold. You can be standing in a room that’s at 68 degrees and still feel cold if the floor, the glass and the exterior walls are pulling heat off you. Sealing the gaps and covering the windows and floors changes how the room feels more than turning the thermostat up does.

Does plastic on the windows actually work?

Yes. It’s one of the more effective cheap things you can do, which is why I’m not going to tell you it’s useless. The tradeoff is that the window is sealed until spring and it does not look good. I use it in rooms we close off and skip it where we live.

Are thermal curtains worth the money?

They are, as long as you hang them properly and close them. Mounted tight to the wall, extending past the window on both sides, long enough to touch the floor. Hung badly, they do very little, which is probably why some people say they don’t work.

Should I close the heat vents in rooms I’m not using?

With forced air, mostly no. Closing vents raises pressure in the ducts and tends to push air out through leaks instead of into your rooms. Shut the door to the room instead and leave the vent alone. That gets you most of the benefit without working against your own system.

What should I do first if I only have one afternoon?

Weatherstrip the door your family actually uses, and rope caulk the windows in the room where you spend your evenings. Those two jobs in one afternoon will change how the house feels that night.

Some of this house will be cold until April and I’ve made peace with that. We put the blankets where we can reach them, we shut the doors to the rooms we don’t need, and we spend the winter in the warm half of a house I love. That has turned out to be enough.