Cold Front in the Kitchen

The front of our house (sitting room, bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom) is beautifully centrally heated to a nice steady spastic muscle relaxing 21 degrees centigrade. The back of our house (playroom, sunroom, cloakroom), due to complex planning laws and cheap building contracts, is unheated. We have an electric radiator and big wide sunny windows, and most of the time, it's liveable in, sometimes downright cosy.

This isn't usually a problem. If we're using the rooms we turn the radiator on, if we aren't, we don't, and I put a sweater on before I dash through to the freezer/dryer/mountain of clothes which really will get put away one day. There is the added complication of our cat hole - in many households this would be a well regulated cat flap; in ours it is a cat flap shaped hole in the kitchen door, created by the previous residents and never really dealt with by yours truly. It's blocked off at the moment with a table top, a cool box, and a sack of mushroom compost (yes, mine is a classy kitchen, why do you ask?), but when the wind is in just the right direction, an icy draught rushes through at ankle height.

The trouble comes when the coolness of the playroom combines with this icy draught, and meets the steam from the washing machine and the dry heat from the oven. No gradual cooling off as you walk through the house; take two steps past the washing machine and you enter an entirely new climate. I wouldn't be surprised to see rain showers, whipped into little mini tornadoes by the ankle cutting wind. Pretty, but not terribly practical.

Drastic action was obviously required, and I'm not ashamed to admit I took it. The cat hole is a hole no longer; it turns out the garlic bread box from our last dominos pizza was just the right shape to stuff it. I'm sure Ideal Homes will be calling to run a feature on us any decade now.

Tia