Harry Potter Room, Warner Bros. Studio (not my photo)
[from FB post: July 6, 2010]
The bedroom was 95F last night and cooled down to 85F this morning! Yikes! So I slept in the Harry Potter room in the basement.... delicious and cool, but the bed was awful! hahaha I haven't slept on a twin in YEARS! I kept thinking I was gonna roll off
[from FB post: July 7, 2010]
After a long whine about the heat to my friend Mohsin in Lahore, Pakistan, he was quite unsympathetic. They get temps well over 100F all summer with high humidity and no AC cuz there is not enough electricity to run the grid even if you have it!! So I guess I can deal with sleeping in the Harry Potter room a few more nights.... It's all relative.
After starting the renovation of the Museum House, we found ourselves swimming in space in its full basement. That huge house literally added a third to its square footage by having a daylight basement since it was built on a sloping lot. At the dark end of the basement there were a few windowless rooms and closets. One of them became a wine-cellar, one a workshop and, the one under the stairs, the "Harry Potter Bedroom". I noticed that room was always deliciously cool even on a hot summer day, and I projected that in our retirement when people would visit with kids, they might get a kick out of staying in that room. As it turns out, I was the only person ever to sleep there and not because I was a HP fan.
Overall, Milford summers were lovely. Of course, there were hot spells, but usually in the evenings the temperature cooled off quickly and significantly so that by morning a light blanket might even have been needed. Occasional truly hot spells where the evenings stayed hot had to be endured and it was on one of those that I "remembered" our basement room with its single bed and delicious cold darkness. As related above, a single bed felt so tiny, but it was against a wall, so I figured my chances of rolling off were at least reduced 50%? I was grateful for the natural AC of that huge old house.
Meanwhile, in the hot realm of the "muggles", every store within 100 miles of Milford was sold out of air conditioning units virtually overnight. People were driving ridiculous distances to buy AC units. I will be the first to admit that sleeping "hot" is among my least favorite things to do, but for a heatwave of only a few days duration people had so little tolerance? As I recall, about a week later I was back up in the master bedroom throwing my blanket on by morning.
In the end, I was the only one who ever slept in the "room under the stairs", but it was a good investment. I used it a few times over the years on hot nights and chuckled myself to sleep that the Museum House was so magically awesome it even had its own natural AC.