10 Cool Tips for a Hot Autumn

Not liking the cooler temperatures? Get over it! For many, autumn with its changing colours is the highlight of the year. We share some of our favourite ways of making the most of this in-between season.

1. Get a chiminea

Fix It ezine March 2014

Getting too chilly to keep enjoying outdoor living? Now there’s no need to leave it all behind and escape indoors. If you don‘t have a firepit, outdoor fireplace or patio heater, a chimenea can be a cost-effective and cosy alternative.

These funky freestanding front-loading fireplaces originate from Mexico, where they’re used for cooking as well as keeping warm on cooler evenings.

2. Create an outdoor room

By covering part of your deck, patio or courtyard, and screening it from the breeze with planting, walls or covers, you can continue to enjoy your outdoor living for longer.

3. Build a sunroom or conservatory

The advantage of these is that they add to the available space in your home and you can use them all year round.

4. Create an indoor garden in your home or office

If you don’t have room for a conservatory, the next best thing is to bring the outdoors in. There are loads of options available to you. If you have space, these indoor gardens are like a breath of fresh air in an otherwise unnatural environment. If you don’t have space, you can achieve a similar effect with a vertical garden, one of those clever hanging devices that looks like a work of art made of plants.

5. Warm up your bathroom

Bathrooms don’t have to be cold, uninviting places. Using warm colours and lighting candles can create a relaxing haven. Installing heating, especially lovely ambient underfloor heating, will prevent that nasty shock when you first walk into your bathroom or hop out of your tub. There’s nothing more romantic than a bathtub for two and nothing more invigorating than a spa bath or home sauna.

6. Learn how to stay warm at home without a heater

Autumn’s cooler temperatures can bring on soaring energy bills, but there are all sorts of ways of keeping your home warm without turning on a heater. Many of these have been covered in our earlier articles or check out this article on how to stay warm without a heater!

7. Transform your house into a Passivhaus

The ultimate way to keep your home warm without heating is to convert it into a Passivhaus like this one in chilly Austria. Built to a standard developed by the Passivhaus Institut in Germany, based on the work of Dr. Wolfgang Feist, this house is heated purely by body heat, cooking heat and passive solar heat. Read more here

8. Move to Helsinki

This aquatic centre looks positively tropical, but it’s actually deep under one of the world’s colder cities, Helsinki in Finland. Those clever Finns have taken the Passivhaus several steps further by creating a PassivCity. Instead of expanding outward like most cities, they’re expanding downward. As well as the underground swimming pool, they’ve created shopping areas, parking “caverns”, a cathedral, a hockey rink, and a data centre – all of which are insulated by rock to stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Even cleverer, the Finns have used the heat generated by this underground metropolis to help keep the above-ground part of the city warm. You can watch a video here

9. Get a Home Theatre

The best way to keep your mind off the increasingly wintry weather is to distract yourself. And what better way than to watch a movie in your own home theatre? If movies aren’t your thing, you might prefer to set up your own workshop or hobbies room for getting away from it all.

10. Spend more time in bed

Scientists say that we’re suffering from a new epidemic – we’re simply not getting the sleep we need. People who get less than seven hours’ sleep a night have been shown to be more susceptible to stress, high blood pressure and even heart attacks. We’ve noticed that bedrooms are often the last rooms in the home that people think about renovating. But we have a question for you – even if you aren’t getting enough sleep at the moment, what room do you actually spend the most time in each day?

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