As mentioned briefly a day or two ago, it's time for wrapping the front door again. This because the wisdom of siting your house at the top of a hill and pointing your front doors in the direction of the prevailing wind on the open prairie is something perhaps better understood from the perspective of a settler making a statement in 1861 than from that of a homeowner in 2016 who must face an LP gas bill... but I digress.

In previous years I've put rigid foam insulation across the entirely of the inside of the front doors. Our approach this year is different. This year the plan is to sandwich the foam insulation in-between the storm doors and the front doors. This will, hopefully, give us something approaching the the insulating capacity of covering the entire doorway without the ugliness of it all.

We have been re-using the same foam panels over the past few years. I was able to modify one of the panels to fit in the door opening. This was a bit more challenging than one might think. While it was easy enough to cut a single panel to fit in the space - ideal because it decreases the number of seams or weak points for air to leak thru - getting it into the opening between the double-doors was another thing. The space they offer when open isn't quite as big as the space I needed to fill. This left me with three potential options:

Cut the panel and make it from two separate pieces.
Take one or both of the doors off the hinges; or
Try to gently bend the panel and hope that it doesn't break.

I went with option #3. Two separate pieces offers an entire additional cut through which wind can blow, so that was a no go. As for the hinges, well... when anything 155 years old is continuing to operate as designed, trying to take it apart and put it back together seems... inadvisable.

Long story short, I was able to gently coax it into place. A little bit of trimming was needed to get it all to drop where it needed to be, but it's in there as a single panel. Add in a bit of Frog Tape (which is gentle on the ancient paint), and we were ready to go:

Front Door

I put the silver side to the inside, and the white, painted side to the outside. This should look more like a regular door from the outside, and perhaps the silver will reflect some light back into the hall. The windows are frosted, so you can't see much of the lettering through them.

Now it's just a waiting game. As the weather gets colder and the winds pick up we'll see how this measures up to the more complete wrapping of the past. I don't expect it to be quite as good, but if it's close I'll be content with the trade off of having the doors visible and the whole thing less claustrophobic than in the past.