When you’ve bought into the dream—an adorable little farmhouse in coastal Maine to live in full-time and escape the rat race, as author Jessica Kerwin Jenkins did a few years back—there may be one thing you didn’t fully bargain for: winter. Or rather, winter + darling 1840s farmhouse = major endurance feat.

“A friend used to come over and ask for the sweater report, instead of the weather report, because I always wore so many layers,” Jenkins recalls. “And I once actually had blue lips working at my computer.”

She and her husband, Nico, a philosophy professor, experimented with all the traditional tricks. One year, they banked the outside perimeter of the house with hay bales; another year with a sheet of plastic stapled to the shingles and camouflaged with evergreen branches. They used a 1950s product called Mortite, almost like a giant roll of coiled clay, to press into the corners of the window frames, and cotton batting to plug up drafts. “These houses are built on enormous blocks of granite and have an imperfect seal,” she says. “The wind whistles in through the gaps and up between the floorboards.”