The Coldest Room in the House: Fixing Bedrooms Over Garages and Extensions
Almost every house has one: the bedroom that’s always a few degrees colder than the rest. You turn the radiator up, buy an oil heater, put an extra duvet on — and it’s still the room nobody wants to sleep in.
There’s nearly always a specific reason, and it’s usually fixable.
Rooms over garages
A bedroom above an integral garage is effectively sitting on top of an unheated, often draughty space. The floor between them is frequently just joists and plasterboard with little or no insulation. The result is a cold floor, cold air through gaps, and a room that loses heat downwards as well as upwards.
The fix is insulating the garage ceiling — the floor of the room above — and sealing the gaps around it. Depending on the space available, a thin, high-performance product such as multi foil insulation can do the job without lowering the garage ceiling noticeably.
Rooms with three outside walls
Corner bedrooms and rooms in side extensions have more outside wall than anywhere else in the house. If those walls have an unfilled cavity, they’re losing heat across a large area.
cavity wall insulation is usually the answer, and with EPS bead it’s done from outside in a day. Where the walls are solid or very exposed to driving rain, keeping the masonry dry with a ProPerla wall coating can make a noticeable difference too, because wet walls conduct heat away roughly twice as fast as dry ones.
Rooms in the roof
Bedrooms in loft conversions or dormers often have sloping ceilings and short ‘knee walls’ with very little insulation behind them, because the space just isn’t there. These rooms are cold in winter and hot in summer.
Insulating behind the slopes and knee walls — again often with multi foil because of the limited depth — usually transforms them.
Rooms under a flat roof
Single-storey extensions with flat roofs from the 1970s and 80s often have minimal insulation. If the roof is due for renewal anyway, that’s the ideal time to insulate it properly.
Check the obvious first
Before spending money, rule out the simple things: a radiator that’s undersized or needs bleeding, draughts around the window, or a gap where the skirting meets the floor. If the room’s still cold after that, it’s the building.
Common questions
Can you tell why a room is cold without opening things up? Usually, yes. At the survey we’ll look at the construction around the room and tell you where the heat is going.
Do you cover my area? We’re based in Warrington and work across Widnes, Runcorn, St Helens, Newton-le-Willows, Golborne, Leigh, Culcheth, Lymm, Frodsham, Northwich and Greater Manchester.
Free survey for that cold room
Tell us which room it is and we’ll come and find out why. Free survey, no-obligation quote and over 30 years’ experience.
Call 073 5919 5156 or get a quotation today.
