One of life's little pleasures

[Ohiogal]

Putting on a pair of jeans straight out of the dryer...

[Phentex]

1. Oh yeah!

[Lars39]

2. Also putting on PJs that you've preheated

under the electric blanket.

[csziggy]

5. In the house I grew up in there was a floor mounted kerosene heater

During the winter we'd hang our PJs over the heater to warm them up before we changed to go to the unheated bedrooms. We'd also hang our school clothes over the heater at night so in the morning they would be toasty warm to change into first thing.

That was the only thing I really liked about that heater. Mostly it smelled so all winter we all smelled like kerosene. After we went to bed Dad would turn it off. As it cooled it made sort of booming noises as the metal cooled - to my six year old self it sounded like something sneaking up the hall towards the kids' bedrooms. I hated walking over that grate even in the summer when the heater was not on. The worst was that it really wasn't powerful enough to heat the entire house - we closed off the living and dining rooms, the bedrooms, and Dad's office. In the winter he had to wear layers of clothes to be warm enough to work - and he was self employed working from home.

[Lars39]

6. We had something similar in one house.

I was scared to walk over it, although it was handy to warm up quickly.

[csziggy]

7. It warmed up fast but the house took forever to warm

Plus that old house - built as a mining town house in the early 1900s, moved to a new location in 1952, poorly insulated, and with leaky windows - would not hold heat in. On a sunny day with no wind it was tolerable in the winter but on a cloudy day with wind it was only a step up from being outside.

We spent a lot of winter evening huddling over that kerosene heater trying to stay warm. That was in Central Florida - think how bad it would have been to live up north in a house like that!

[Lars39]

8. Y'all would have frozen in that house up north.

We’re renovating a house built in ‘62. No insulation in places where it seems like there should have been at least some.

[csziggy]

9. Yeah, the story of that house is part of the history of phosphate mining in Florida

The town of Agricola was built by Swift & Company sometime before 1925. In 1925 my grandfather was transferred from Illinois to Agricola to be assistant mine manager. We had the journal my grandmother kept the first year they were in Florida - it's since been donated to the Florida State Archives. Although she had grown up in Escanaba in Upper Peninsula Michigan and had spent the previous ten years in Detroit, she found Florida to be intensely cold and complained about it constantly in her journal.

By 1952, all the phosphate around Agricola had been mined and Swift sold off the houses and mined where the town had been. My grandparents bought the mine manager's house and my parents bought another house from the town. The total cost was low even for the time and they got "decent" houses out of the deal. My cousins still live in the house my grandparents moved to Eagle Lake, Florida. I grew up in the house my parents moved to Bartow but that house was demolished in 2011.

[Lars39]

10. Fascinating history!

[llmart]

11. I grew up in a "house" with a coal furnace and it only heated part of the "house".

I put house in quotes because this place had been a one-room school house initially and someone decided to sort of turn it into a place to rent out to live. We were poor and my father's work history was always a bit sketchy, so in late fall he'd order so many tons of coal and if he didn't have a job and the coal was getting low, he'd have to find a way to buy the coal on credit. This was in the snow belt of northeast Ohio. This house really only had one bedroom and there were nine of us, so my parents made makeshift bedrooms, one of which was not heated but was over the dug out part that was considered a basement where the coal furnace was. I was always cold. To this day I will scrimp on just about anything if I have to, but I refuse to have a cold house in winter!

[LAS14]

3. :-)

[TEB]

4. Boxers out of the dryer does it for me