I love this idea. It’s a fun project to do with your kids. Cheap too. It’s a snowflake made out of paper. Make it into an ornament for your Christmas tree, decorate your fireplace mantel with snowflakes, or put it in a frame to hang on your wall. Here’s a “how to” guide.

One morning, I was in the bedroom while my husband was sleeping in and I noticed light coming from our vent which resides in the floor. Our house is built in 2007, and since we moved in we knew our house wasn’t built to the standards of “Builder Code.” We had a nice lovely draft that blasts us every winter from our all-electric fireplace into the living room. Our bedrooms were always freezing.

Our utilities are sky-rocket high because of our unknown ventilation problems. Fast forward to an inflated economy and two babies later, we finally decided to do something about it. I have no real excuse as to why we didn’t act on this sooner. Call us lazy. My husband decided that with rising utility cost, it was time to do something about it.

He ended up buying Duck Tape and we did a little home-improvement job ourself instead of contacting a professional to find the source of our leaks.

We went around the house and took off every cover of our floor vents and found wonderful gaping holes, bigger then what I originally saw. We uncovered the crawl space under the house to show you just how big of a gap of air we were losing to our crawl space vs the living space.

After all the covers for the vents were removed, my husband took a piece of tape and aligned it to the inside of the vent. He had to pry his finger under the carpet to be able to get the tape to slide in.  He had enough left over so he could then continue taping the gap closed with the edge of the floorboard.  To secure it, he had enough tape to tape it underneath the carpet so the vent should no longer have a wonderful gaping hole.

We noticed a huge difference immediately in our utilities. Our bill hasn’t come in yet, but it’s a lot warmer in our house. We also noticed that our air conditioning/heating unit has not kicked in as often as it use too. I’ll keep you posted on how much we saved.

Are there any home improvements you have done to reduce your utility bill?

Pst – Our house is an all electric home.