STORM WINDOWS

Storm windows should be carefully fitted or they will come far from serving their purpose.  If they are of the right sort they will soon repay their cost in easing up the furnace.  Preferably they should be swung from the top, both for ventilation and washing and to avoid a check upon egress in case of fire.  Some persons object to storm windows on account of the supposed stoppage of ventilation, but that rests entirely with the occupants of the house.  They can get plenty of fresh air without letting the gales of winter have their own sweet will.

With floors, walls, and windows determined upon, we have a good start on the interior of our house.  But we may only pause to take breath, for we now have to give most careful consideration to two decidedly important factors in our comfort—­lighting and heating.

CHAPTER III

LIGHTING AND HEATING

If common sense has governed our proceedings to date, the new house we are building, or the ready-built one we have chosen, will have full advantage of the one perfect light—­that afforded by the sun.

NECESSITY OF SUNLIGHT

The health-giving properties of sunlight are so well known to all of us that we wonder why so many otherwise sensible folk seem to shun it, with trees and vines, awnings and blinds denying access to that which would make the house wholesome.  When possible, every room in the house should have its daily ray bath, and our apartments should utilize the light of the sun as early and as late as may be.

Perhaps nature intended all creatures to sleep through the hours of darkness.  If we had followed that custom we might be a race of Methuselahs; who knows?  Why some one has not established a cult of sleepers from sunset to dawn is really inexplicable.  But mankind in general has persisted in holding to a different notion, and since the sun declines to shine upon us during all the hours of the twenty-four, and we insist upon cutting the night short at one end, we have had to devise substitutes for the sunlight.

Of course the sunlight does not always leave us in unbroken darkness.  Few of us are so far departed from the days of mellow youth as to forget certain summer evenings, linked in memory with verandas or bowered walks, when moonlight—­and even that in a modified form—­was the ideal illumination.  But even if we could employ the good fairies to dip them up for us, we should find the soft moongleams of the summer evening a rather doubtful aid in searching for the cat in the dark corners of the basement.