The winter has arrived, and even though this is not the High North of Westerors it does get cold in here too. Well, we are in latitude 61°, which is not very high up in Finland but looking at it globally it very much is! We get the winters the latitude suggests: cold, snowy, long. That's why I felt there are a few steps I'd like to do before it gets all too snowy or cold. Here's a my little list:

• bring rugs onto the floors
• getting curtains up
• cleaning the yard of summer stuff

You see, in the summer we had a few rugs or carpets in our house, for decorative purposes more or less. But now as the floors are getting colder (our house is of the old type where below the floor is open air!) I felt the need to bring in more rugs. We actually bought another Ikea carpet used from a lady here in town for a few euros to match the other carpet we have in the living room, but for the rest we are using the hand-woven rugs we had here already. My Mom made them when I was young but as they have been very well kept and cleaned regularly, they are still good to use.

So I carried in a load of the ones I would like to use this year and distributed them around the house! The upstairs is pretty much covered with carpets and rugs, and the other rooms are also covered as much as possible (two in the kitchen, five in the living room, two in the guest room and one big one in the lobby). Our office is pretty much covered also - Nick actually has two under his workplace, because a) this is a very cold room and b) he gets cold easily!

I also put some curtains up in the windows I had none or only thin ones. In the office I changed the short, thin ones to thicker and longer ones. The kitchen now also has curtains. As I didn't have any pretty thick ones left, I left the summer ones in the living room. The guest room had thick ones already!

Now, upstairs is cool because there we have two ways to hang curtains there - I can layer them! So that's what I did to minimize the cold getting in through the windows.

Lastly we cleaned and cleared the garden of any summers stuff. Garden furniture, any ongoing projects - all carried into sheds or other indoors to wait for spring.

Winter, we're ready!