You adapt to cold or heat, but you have to be willing to go out and work in it.
When I was growing up, when the radio said 'If you can stay inside, do it, don't do any strenuous work outside' my dad had my brother and I putting Aluminum fiber coat on the roof of a building at his shop. We just soaked our t-shirts, tied the arms around the back of our head like a bandana, and flopped it over our heads. when the shirt dried up and we got to warm, we would go down, grab a drink, and re-soak the shirt.
It was also 19F this morning for the bike ride in to work today.. 3x leg underlayers + dress pants ontop, 3x shirt underlayers, 2x wool sweaters, and my bright yellow DON'T HIT ME shirt, + some thinsulate carheart gloves and a face mask was plenty. I felt like a bit of a wussypants compared to MMM's description of what layers he needs, but then I thought of the above humidity differences. Snow is also a different animal here, it doesn't get soaked back up into the air due to the humidity, and will often persist long after a snowfall.. Our local Ski/Snowboarding mountain was open until last weekend!
B) It's not clear to me if you have a central HVAC system or if you depend entirely on baseboard heat or Cadet-style room heaters. If it's the latter, then you might consider saving up to retrofit your house with a forced-air HVAC system. A forced air system will help keep the house (on the inside) at an even humidity which will help keep you more comfortable, and it's much more efficient.
It's all electric baseboard, but we do have a fireplace, which I address a little later. The Energy Audit company suggested going for several Ductless Mini-splits, that would allow us to retain zonal heating. Our house also would be difficult to run the HVAC vents. I'll try to get some floorplans and whatnot on this post in the future.
Cheaper than the space heater in the garage for your pipe heating needs are resistance wire wraps for pipes. If you have copper plumbing (I hope it's copper and not galvanized) then you should just need to heat a few places.
Copper pipes indeed! We also have a non-functioning water softener that is hooked up, called in about getting it serviced, and due to it's age they said it wasn't worth fixing. I'm not sure if I should just let it hooked up as it is now with the bypass valve on, or just remove the thing and put in a pipe fitting.
I recently put some foam insulation around the pipes to try to help out with some of the heat loss, but the resistance wire wrap sounds like a much better way to go.. I also assume I should look into a thermal blanket to put around the whole water heater..
Note: You don't want reflective insulation on the slab; that won't do anything, especially in winter. Radiant barriers don't block cold, they reflect heat (infrared) back to you (or back out). You want polyisocyanurate foam panels as a thermal break and a heated floor surface over that.
What kind of windows do you have? Do you have newer thermal pane windows or are the windows original to the house?
The windows downstairs are still older wooden windows, double pane. The windows upstairs are newer vinyl windows, but the area around the frames was pretty leaky.. I pulled off the trim, and added spray foam around them. I'm waiting on the summer, and trying to figure out if I should refinish the trim before I put it up or find some new trim. 5 windows total, existing trim looks like it has been put back up at least once before.. I'd be putting it up with a ball-peen hammer instead of a nailgun, so it would be a bit more labor intensive.
That electric bill isn't high on a day to day basis if you look at it as a Texas summer. On days when it's over 100, we spend that much in electricity to keep the house at 80 degrees.
Does your electric company have "budget billing" that helps you level out the different months?
We don't use any AC in the summer at all. My Mother HAS to have AC blasting all the time, so she bought a cheap wallmart AC for when she visits, we let her turn her room into an icebox, and keep the door closed. If we are having a heatwave, and the humidity makes it to high, we set the AC for a reasonable temp (like 85) for our bedroom. We had ceiling fans installed after our first summer in the house, no air movement + humidity with around 100* temps was unbearable. The air movement was a huge plus. Our summer bills in the table above are all very minimal. Since it is historic data, Computer on 24/7, cable box on 24/7, Electric range for cooking, Ceiling fans on in the summer for our baseline.
We have a sufficient enough cash reserves that 'spiky' bills with our electric isn't that big a deal.. We just know it will be higher in the winter and lower in the summer.
Second, that slab has got to be cold. She might want to consider wool blend socks at home with shoes. Change them over the course of the day and especially when she gets home. Wet, cotton socks = freezing for me. If my feet are cold, I could be wearing down jackets and pants from head to ankle and still be freezing.
She has wool socks that she usually wears, in addition to slippers. I think sometimes she wears the cotton socks, perhaps I can get her to switch full time to wool socks till it gets warm again.
Third, Wood heat is warm. Can you look for a used fireplace insert and try wood heat? Nothing beats it for staying warm for me. Radiant heat, i.e., fire, trumps convective hot air any day of the week for comfort.
We have some firewood, and our fireplace is just open. I have considered an insert before, but haven't looked into it much. DW likes the 'real' fireplace, but is always to cold to really enjoy it, and it is hard to keep enough air circulation to keep it going.. I'm always tending it myself, and we can't let it go overnight. Perhaps it is time to add a bit more that way.
As a cold person, I appreciate your pursuit of comfort for your wife. The only time in my life I have felt like normal people and not cold all the time was when I was pregnant. It sucks to be cold all the time.
On our honeymoon in Barbados/St. Lucia, she was cold! The only times she wasn't was when she was in the hot tub just outside our room, or laying in the sun. Even wearing her full wetsuit in the water, she was cold right away!