This is getting silly

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As I’ve mentioned before, we have an Italian couple currently lodging with us. They have the loft room at the top of the house, which is a decent-sized double room with ensuite shower room. And of course they can use the other rooms in the house as well, except our study. They are lovely people and generally very easy to get along with. The loft room was created by the previous owners as an artist’s studio, so they added a lot of windows (but they do have blinds). Since it’s right under the roof it tends to get hot in summer and cold in winter, but it has its own heating controls so in winter they have it toasty warm in there while the rest of us are wearing jumpers downstairs. So when the warm weather came we thought they would be happy, but no – now it’s too hot! Over the past week they actually left their room and took to sleeping in the living room downstairs, on the sofa bed. And using the guest bedroom as a dressing room. While I sympathise with the situation this does seem a bit like taking liberties! The last time we had a short but intense heatwave, a couple of years ago, we managed to keep the house relatively cool. I kept all the curtains closed, opened the downstairs windows on the north side of the house, and opened all the windows in the roof. The result was much reduced solar heating, combined with movement of cooler air up through the house. This time though, the Italians have the loft room and so have control of five of the six windows. And they don’t open them because Paola is afraid a spider might come inside! So not only is their room heating up to 35 degrees or more, but the warm air can’t escape fast enough from the rest of the house either By yesterday evening it was really silly. Temperatures outside had fallen substantially, but inside the house was still rather warm even though we had opened as many windows as was feasible at bed time. And the windows in the roof remained firmly closed while the lodgers stayed two floors below waiting to go to bed in the living room. In the end I had to ask them if we could open the window at the top of the stairs to allow some air flow, since they were safely out of reach of any (extra) spiders anyway. So he (Antonio) came upstairs and opened one window wide, and immediately we could feel a delicious cool breeze moving through the house. I don’t know what they did after that because it was well after midnight already so I went to bed, and this morning I went out before they were up. But we’ll see what happens. We may be able to achieve some sort of compromise with some insect mesh on the windows or something. The picture shows the living room at Christmas! All rights reserved. © Text copyright Fleur 2026.