Wanted - creative ideas for keeping open-plan room warm!

Eliza_2

I've done a lot to make this freezing cold stone house as warm and insulated as possible but the biggest problem is that the living room is open plan, with the stairs rising from it so upstairs is lovely and warm and downstairs freezing. I can't panel off the stairs or put a door at the bottom as the stairwell is massively bigger than the staircase and I can't see how to block the void off. The house is rented but I have a long term tenancy and do most things myself. I thought the solution would be to build some sort of wall between the living room and stairs, so the stairwell would have its own corridor from the kitchen, without having to walk through the living room itself. Difficult to explain. As it isn't my house I can't build a 'proper' wall but thought a room divider affair might do the trick. I've looked on the net but most seem to be screens, rather than wall to floor dividers. I'd also need a door in it to go into the living room. Whatever I do it would mean the living room would be small but I can live with that, at the moment in winter it's unusable and the one radiator does nothing. I thought of curtains but as they would run along the new corridor, which would be fairly narrow, I'd be constantly tripping over them!!

Has anyone got any bright ideas please? Anything to stop the warm air from going upstairs. And if I do wall to floor panels how would I fix these and how would I put in a door?

Thanks

Eliza

LeeSouthEast

I suppose underfloor heating is out of the question?

oneeye1

how about some type of curtain system

knowloads

can you not put a door at the top of the stairs,???

Becles

My ex-inlaws have a big through room downstairs, so there's a big open gap between the dining room and the sitting room, then a seperate door out of each room. They keep the sitting room door closed (it has the sofa in front of it!) and they have a curtain pole on the ceiling inbetween the two rooms. They have thick velvet curtains that push back out of the way during the day. On an evening, they pull the curtains across and only use the gas fire in the sitting room for heating.

It works as the sitting room is lovely and warm, but you get frozen to the bone when you have to nip up to the loo!

dander

I like your curtain idea. Would you be able/allowed to fix some kind of curtain rail along the line of where you would put the corridor wall, attached to the ceiling. You could then hang an interlined curtain there - you could get the heaviest weight of curtain weights and add them along the bottom to help keep it in place and try and stop you tripping on loose ends. Or would it be feasible to add curtains around the actual stairwell?