Warm toes at last!

[Alice Abbott]

I know you are having really severe weather in the UK. It's really cold here too but just a sprinkling of snow at the moment, lots of icy rain for weeks and generally miserable considering we are in south west France. We are having problems with frozen water in the well pump so at the moment only have the water we stored just in case. We have lots of woolly sweaters etc but have been feeling the cold these last few days. So, after consulting a book and in desperation, we have just made ourselves a Spanish item of furniture called a mesa camilla.

Bear in mind that we have a lovely warm kitchen thanks to the woodburning range and a warmish living room thanks to the large fireplace. But it's a huge room and I don't think the fire burns all that efficiently - you can be toasty sitting next to it but if we want to use the laptop, which is on a wooden stool across the room, we have to huddle in rugs. All very well if you want to use it without power or internet, put if you do the cables only just reach in through the window frame and tie you to that corner. But we now have the problem solved and for nothing!

Take one old door and two wooden "saw horses" (not being used outside as all our logs are chopped for this winter). Than take an old blanket and drape it over the new "table". It needs to reach at least to the ground and preferably have some left over. In our case I laid a sheet over that but only to make a pale surface so things don't go missing on it. Then take an old metal bucket and put even more holes in it and place it into a metal tray. Put the tray on some bricks under the table. Then shovel up lots of glowing embers from the fire and partially fill the bucket.

So here's the best bit. You can then sit at the table with your legs under the blanket and your lower half is toasty for hours! To do things properly you are supposed to have slits in the blanket so that you can wrap the flaps around your bottom and legs but with the extra length there is still plenty to wrap around and keep the heat in. I've discovered that having warm feet makes all the difference. And at the end of the evening we take the bucket/tray thing into our bedroom and it seems to warm that room too. Just as well as we have no heating in there and inches of ice on the windows all the time. We DO have a stone waterbottle donated by one of our neighbours but I'm always worried about it falling out and breaking so it's only used to warm the bed before we get in.

I'm sure our mesa camilla would give H & S people heart failure but we do take care with it and keep the kids away from it.

[Millymollymandy]

I'm laughing cos I'm sitting here with the electric version - one of my Xmas presents - an electric foot warmer/bootee, with a blanket draped over my lap and all tucked in round my legs, and my Secret Santa shawl over my shoulders! My SS gift has barely left my body since Christmas.

Glad you are warm now Alice as it's hard to type with cold fingers and really horrid having cold feet!

[theabsinthefairy]

Your foot warmer sounds like a great idea.

We have some flat kiln bricks which go in the Rayburn and then into our bed for our tootsies before we go to sleep. And with a metre of snow outside and -12C on the forecast for our daytime temperatures next week we are really going to need 'em!