A little over four years ago, towards the end of a warm August month, we made an offer on our house, then closed on it during an also warm September.
Our house was built in the early part of the 20th century as a farmhouse in Mountain View when most of this area was orchards. We bought the house from someone who had just bought the house six months earlier and spent the time doing extensive remodeling to the house, including adding on the master bedroom suite. The front (original) part of the house had a lot of work done to it, although there are still plenty of signs of the original age of the house -- perhaps most notably in the continued existence of the original (ungrounded) electrical system (which occasionally proves a problem when trying to plug in a laptop).
Shortly after moving into the house, we began to wonder if the contractors that we bought the house from had spent a lot of time doing this sort of thing before. Most of the work was nice, but there were a few odd oversights, like the kitchen sink faucet handle that was put in backwards so that we couldn't actually get cold water, or the laundry room door that couldn't possibly be closed if anything -- say, a washer or dryer -- was placed in the laundry room.
Did I mention that we bought the house in a warm month? That fact probably wouldn't have mattered to experienced homebuyers, but this was our first house, and we were not.
We soon discovered the biggest oversight in the remodeling of our home. The living room has a large floor grating with a gas heater underneath it in the basement. This appears to have been put in 20 years or so ago, and provides ample heat to the living room and dining room. The second heater is a wall-mounted gas heater in the kitchen. Aside from the fact that we don't often need lots of extra heat in the kitchen, it doesn't work. And the third heater is another wall-mounted gas heater in the hallway leading back to the master bedroom.
You'll note that I have listed no sources of heat that are actually in a bedroom.
The living room heater is more than capable of heating the front guest bedroom, as long as the door is wide open, but guests often prefer to sleep in there with the door closed, for some odd reason. Or, they would, if it weren't for the fact that they would freeze if they tried. Our cat doesn't always have that option, though. He sometimes gets put in there at night when he has trouble with the idea that 5 AM isn't play time, and when he gets let out, he is often REALLY cold. We may have to stop doing that as it gets colder.
The hallway heater is carefully aimed so as to heat the laundry room, and so barely manages to heat the master bedroom -- but only if the master bedroom door is open, because they installed it on the kitchen side of the door.
After the first very cold winter, realizing the scope of this problem, we tried to get some estimates for installing central heat and air in the house. This led to another odd discovery: that when the 10' x 10' cellar underneath our house was dug out, they evidently tossed all of the excavated dirt over the retaining wall into what had been the crawl space. Thus, the crawl space isn't even high enough for duct work to be run through the house. So before we could install heating, we have to get someone to dig out about a foot of dirt throughout our entire crawl space.
In the meantime, we pile lots of blankets on the bed.