Spring has sprung, as they say, meaning that now is the perfect time to prepare for next winter.
Why? Well, just think about it. While you donโt want to be one of those irritants who crows about Christmas as soon as the last one is over, preparing for the cold snap now, when some stock is out of season and therefore cheaper, will save you cash and let you beat that winter rush.
You know the winter rush, right?
Itโs that time when youโre walking through the town centre and people in shops look more like looters than customers. Panicked staffers on checkouts; clamorous customers pawing at the last iPads on store shelvesโ the winter is a nightmarish period of time to shop.
Which makes now the perfect time to get your winter preparations out of the way! Youโll meet calm people on shop checkouts, mingle with polite customers and, if youโre lucky, pick up some bargains.
1. Warm Your House Early
What is really irksome in the lead-up to winter is when the freezing cold kicks in. Youโve got ice cubes for feet, the big chill in your living room, and no heating to get you through it.
For a start, try getting new, preferably double-glazed, windows for your house. Theyโll be easier to install in the springtime and will retain heat more cost-effectively than blasting a radiator on.
After which, make sure your home is adequately insulated and that your heating systems are top of the line. That way, you wonโt have to suffer in the cold when winter comes.
We have new windows in our house, but that didn’t help when we ran out of wood pellets for our pellet stove in February! We will definitely be buying an extra ton of pellets this year because running around in the cold, looking for bags of wood pellets to buy was NOT FUN!
2. Pick Up a Christmas Bargain
Itโs already been mentioned but, by crikey, shopping during Christmas time is stressful. Just walking down the high street makes you feel like a salmon trying to swim downstream when another thousand salmons are swimming up against you. And those salmons have Christmas shopping that theyโre constantly bashing into you with, bloody hypothetical salmons.
So, the lesson is to get your Christmas shopping out of the way quickly, picking up bargains all through the year, to beat that festive stress.
3. Get Stocked Up
You see it like an annual event on the front of newspapers โ โCOLDEST WINTER IN A CENTURYโ, exclaims the newsstand every winter.
Although theyโre mainly setting out to scaremonger and sell papers, the tabloids are right that, as climate change causes fluctuations in weather, the temperature is becoming bitterer in those winter months.
To remedy this, you should stock up like itโs the coming apocalypse. Buy grit-loads of grit, keep provisions of tinned foodstuffs and maintain a backup generator in case the wild weather blows out your main power supply.
After which, you neednโt worry about the winter weather again…