Monday 19th December 2016: 6.33pm.
This is my latest piece of art and crafts, and is one of those things which is amazingly obviously a great idea as soon as you've seen one. It's an open fire draught excluder, so by preventing all your hot air disappearing up the chimney it substantially reduces the heating you need when the fire isn't burning and reduces the cold draught from underneath doors etc to unnoticeable. Materials were 5mm A3 foamboard from Amazon costing a tenner with standard sellotape to airtight seal the joins both sides. Around the front and bottom is very soft very deformable memory foam 8mm thick and 5mm wide single sided sticky which you can buy in big rolls for about a tenner normally used to seal up leaky windows. It deforms very easily around any bumps providing a very close to airtight seal (it's also great on any leaky windows you might have, I have transformed my bathroom from an unpleasantly draughty place to a non-draughty place by sealing up the large gaps around the windows in the cheap and elderly double glazing in this rented house). The only annoying thing about all this is the fact we've lived in this rental three years now and never thought to do all this draught sealing work until now. I suppose, at least, the constant draughts ensured we never got dosed with too much radon gas, it seeps out of the ground here in Mallow in prodigious quantities, some of the highest in the world.
