Our living room was always the coldest room in the house, and I blamed the big window. Then one night I stood on a chair to grab something from the attic and felt a waterfall of cold air pouring around the hatch. The window was innocent.

An attic hatch is basically a hole in your ceiling with a thin board over it. No weatherstripping, no insulation, nothing. The fix took me about forty minutes.

What you need

• Weatherstripping tape or foam seal
• A piece of rigid foam board, cut to fit the hatch
• Strong tape or a few screws

The fix

1. Clean the edges of the opening where the hatch sits.
2. Press weatherstripping around the lip of the opening, not the hatch itself.
3. Cut rigid foam to fit the back of the hatch. Two layers if your hatch is big.
4. Attach the foam with tape or screws. Do not block the latch.

Why this works

The weatherstripping seals the air gap, and the foam board adds the R value the thin plywood hatch never had. Together they stop the draft and the heat loss. I noticed the difference the same evening.

If you have pull-down attic stairs

Those are worse. The whole unit is a gap. Buy a premade attic stair cover, it is a zippered tent that seals around the frame. Mine cost about fifty dollars and installs in ten minutes.

The bonus

While I was up there I shoved a rolled-up towel around any pipes that run through the attic floor. Cheap, and the furnace runs noticeably less now. Forty minutes of work, and the living room stopped being the room everyone avoids in January.