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If you’ve always dreamed of building your home, you’ve likely thought about the perfect place to situate your home as well. So if the place that you’re wanting to live has an environment that includes harsh winters, this is something that’s going to need to be considered when you design and build your home.
To help ensure that you’re safe and comfortable in your home even during cold weather, here are three tips for building a home in a place with harsh winters.
Be Strategic About Entrances
One thing that you’re going to want to think about when designing and building your home so that it’s ready for winter is where you enter the home.
For each of the entrances to your home, it’s ideal for the area to be covered in some way. This will make it so that you have an area that won’t build up with a lot of snow right as you’re trying to enter or exit the house. It will also give you a place where you can dust yourself off from the snow outside and allow you to either take off or put on some of the layers you wear outside. Another great addition could be to have some kind of mudroom off of the entrance that you’ll be using most often so you don’t have to track snow or mud through your home.
Get A Reliable Heating System And Backup
Harsh winters usually bring with them harsh winter temperatures. Because of this, you’re going to want to put a heating system into your home that you can depend on.
A great idea to ensure that you always have the heat that you need is to give yourself two or more sources of heat. This could include a forced air system along with a few fireplaces. You could also install a generator that can be used if you ever are to lose power during a bad winter storm so that you know that you’ll always have access to the heat you’ll need to survive.
Properly Insulate Your Pipes
Another thing you’ll have to worry about when the temperatures outside start to drop are your pipes. If the pipes in your home freeze, not only will you not have access to water, but the pipes could also burst and cause a lot of damage to your home and property.
To keep this from happening to you, you’ll want to ensure that your pipes are properly insulated when your home is built. Try to include enough insulation in your home and around your pipes so that freezing and bursting isn’t something you’ll have to constantly be vigilant about each and every winter.
If you’re wanting to live and build your own home in a place that’s known for having some pretty harsh winters, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you properly build your home for this environment.
