This old house is around 140 years old (according to MPAC – the people that set our tax rates). That means that there have been around 140 winters (barring any weather anomaly that I'm not aware of!) where the people inside had to keep warm.
I honestly don't know how they did it without just throwing money (or labour) at the problem. There's no insulation in the 
walls at all. Just air. That means that they either paid for wood, gas or coal (or they had kids that collected, chopped, split, stacked, moved and stoked) or went cold. Yikes.
Now… when the bricks were all in really nice shape they would have stopped the wind nicely, but they all need to be re-pointed now – which we'll do in the Spring. So… when the wind blows from West to East the cold air comes in the West wall, goes through my beautiful house where it warms up nicely. Then it exits through the East wall where it gets very cold again.
I think you can all see the flaw in this plan. Even our brand new Trane combined with our Maxim Corn Furnace can't keep up with all this air flow (well… at a price that we can afford anyway – they happily chug away even on the coldest days).
So – for the first time in 140 years – we called in an insulation company to blow insulation into the air spaces between the walls.
I should stop here and say that I'm very, very thankful to whoever built this house. Usually the construction materials for the exterior walls go something like: Brick, board, lathe and then plaster on the very inside – there seemed to be either no need for insulation or no concern for being cold. Our house isn't built like other houses.
From the outside in our house goes: brick, 1" thick barnboard (that's 16 inches wide and 8 feet long), a structural 2x4 giving a full 4 inches of air space, 1" barnboard again, lathe, plaster and then drywall. How cool is that? I figure that there is four times as much wood used to construct this place than they would use to rebuild it today. And it's all really thick, really sturdy and really, really expensive wood.
The point of the construction lesson is that the 4" air space is enclosed in 2" of solid wood – this house is built to stand for another 100 years after I'm done with it!
Blowing in the insulation was a four day affair and involved a little groveling, a little mechanical failure, a little math detective work and a whole lot of dust.
<<to be continued!>>
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