'Never going back': How moving house changed this homeowners life

Sure, it might seem extreme, even unnecessary, to have a roaring fire going at the same time as the underfloor heating is burning increasingly expensive gas, but the fact is, I’m making up for lost winters, after freezing my extremities off for the past 10 years.

We spent the last decade living in a typical, century-old Sydney house that was designed and built by someone who either refused to accept that winter was coming, or hibernated for three months every year.

Obviously, we weren’t complete idiots, and every year we would try to heat the place with something insufficient and borderline pointless. We bought supposedly unstoppable and reassuringly expensive Scandinavian electric heaters from Denmark, which were wonderful, as long as you sat on them and never moved more than a metre away.

One year we had a gas line run to the back of our house, bought a gas heater and then found out that, because it wasn’t “flued”, we would have to leave a window open so as not to poison ourselves. It did a wonderful job of warming up our thin and impossible-to-insulate roof, but the tiled floor in the living room still felt like an ice rink.

Each year I would tell myself it would be better, and yet every time I would find frustration floating in front of my face – along with the condensation from my breath – which is why I can honestly say that moving to a house with underfloor heating, and a fireplace, has changed my life even more profoundly than leaving Canberra (which is much colder, but at least some of the houses I lived in had pipes that didn’t freeze) and never going back.

Incredibly, however, it has not done the same for my children, who somehow find the temerity to whinge about it.

My daughter, who is 10 and thus has never known what it’s like to be warm in winter, told me that she still misses the old house and that one of her best – but surely not warmest – memories is of her and her brother sitting in front of the old gas heater, wrapped in blankets, shivering and drawing pictures of tropical beaches to stay warm.

My teenage son, on the other hand, has been cursed by living in the warmest room in the new house. For some reason, the vent for the gas heating in his room seems to have a direct connection to the fiery bellows of Hell, and it’s so warm in there that I often find him with his ceiling fan on, to keep cool. Pointing out to him what a vast and infuriating waste of power this is will only be effective once I start making him pay the bills, and suggesting that he just open his damn door instead receives a similarly blank stare.

The absolutely lovely and house-proud man who sold us our new and wondrously warm home told me that he’d not lit a fire in the wood stove in the front room for a decade, ever since he’d been forced to install the gas heating because his daughters kept whinging about being cold (I’m guessing the loudest daughter used to live in my son’s room). 

I looked at him like he was mad and started Googling “chimney sweep” (a wonderful opportunity to be reminded of the joys of Mary Poppins). I’ll admit, some of our guests have fainted from the heat when I’ve got both kinds of heating going, but I relish the chance to sweat in July. 

The other great joy I must mention is the underfloor heating in the bathrooms. It’s so lovely that some evenings I just sleep in there, my cheek on the tiles, sighing with joy.

The kids’ bathroom has it too, but I’ve turned theirs off after asking them how much they were enjoying it – I got a “Meh” from one and a “I didn’t know it was on” from the other. 

I’ve got half a mind to send them off to live in Canberra for a year, or at least the next few months.