It’s easy to love your outdoor space in the warm weather. It’s a little more challenging when the temperatures drop and you feel like you’re hanging out in the Arctic every time you stand on your deck. If you want to enjoy your deck, patio, or backyard during the winter months, you need a plan to keep the space warm.
When it comes to keeping an outdoor area warm, wind and heat transfer is your enemy. One of the best things you can do is to create an enclosed space out of your patio or deck using cold-weather insulating curtains. A DIY pergola will give you a frame to hang them on (and a roof you can cover as well for maximum coziness), but any kind of simple framing will work, including some simple tension wire affixed to posts.
One reason your outdoor space feels freezing even when it’s relatively warm and sunny outside during the winter? The ground is ice cold. A good-quality outdoor rug that’s water- and cold-resistant will insulate the floor of your deck or patio against the chill, making the whole space seem a bit warmer since your feet won’t be turning into ice cubes. Combined with insulated curtains, you can really warm up that outdoor space this way.
An obvious—and effective—choice is to install some heat sources on your deck, patio, or around your backyard space. A few things to consider:
Firepits (or chimineas, or permanent fireplaces) are great focal points for your outdoor seating, and can throw a surprising amount of heat. But they often don’t have much range, and project heat only towards one side.
Propane, natural gas, or infrared heaters can augment the heating situation on your deck or patio or in a backyard seating area. Standing propane heaters can be arranged around the perimeter, and infrared heaters can be hung from pergola roofs or other structures, if available, to maximize temperatures.
Your choice of heater may depend on whether you can access electricity or gas in your outdoor space, but propane heaters work perfectly well and can be installed just about anywhere.
One way to ensure a comfortable (and impressively fancy) patio space: Install heated floors. Outdoor radiant heated floors will not only keep you a lot warmer in the cold weather, they will also melt off snow and ice to keep the space clear for use. There are two basic kinds of outdoor heated floors: electric and hydronic. The former uses wires under the pavers or flooring materials that heat up; the latter uses warm water piped under the floor.
This is a bigger project than just throwing up some curtains and heaters, of course, but if you’re going to be installing a patio anyway, it’s something to consider, as it will make your outdoor space much more comfortable during the cold weather.
If you’ve got a backyard but no patio or deck space, a simple way to make the outdoors more comfortable is to pitch a tent. A small party tent can give you an enclosed space that you can outfit with a rug, some furniture, and a heat source that will allow you to enjoy your backyard no matter how frigid it gets back there.
When it comes to heating up a tent, you’ll want to go with an electric heater—propane heaters give off fumes, and in an enclosed tent this could be dangerous (and obviously an open flame in a firepit would be a very bad idea). You’ll also want to be very careful about where you place your heater. in order to avoid setting your nice new tent on fire.
