Design Your Home - Sample

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Winter 2012

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Brandon and Area

Choosing the Right Wood ďŹ&#x201A;oor Keeping Your Pet Calm during your Holiday Celebrations

Fireplace

Efficiency Is your Home Safe while your on Vacation? 1

Brandon and Area Design Your Home magazine is a Brandon, MB based company created to promote and feature all the great trades in our local area. With the limited amount of media in the Brandon and area, this magazine will assist you and your company with great exposure. Design Your Home magazine will help local companies feature their business and the special work they do. Design Your Home magazine will focus on the home and proper ty. Each issue will have ar ticles on Home and Building, Real Estate, Design and Decorating, Gardening, and a special featured Home and Business.

Why feature in Design Your Home: • The only Local Home Magazine. • Over 15,000 magazines published • 3 readers per issue, equals to 45,000 points of exposure. • Timeless, often kept and referred to again and again. • Published 4x per year: August, November, February & May • Located in very high traffic areas. Delivered to a target audience. • We have articles that feature tips and advice from Home owners and experts. 2

Letter from the Editor Welcome to the First issue of DesignYour Home! A Brandon, Manitoba based magazine, serving Brandon and area. My name is Stewart Dyck, I reside in Brandon, Manitoba and found a need for a local Design and Style magazine. After moving back to Brandon and into our new home, I found it difficult at times to find the right people and products for my home. My wife and I ended up doing extensive research and talking to others to find what we were looking for, and sometimes, not finding it! I have brought together a team of local individuals and businesses to bring you this magazine. Jaime-Lynn Dyck, Marketing and Sales Manager, Scott Kasprick of Reaxion Graphics, Leech Printing and many other local freelance writers and photographers. My goal is to use local talent to bring our readers this FREE publication in order to help them with their home, cottage, apar tment or condo needs. Each issue will bring with it articles about home, cottage, apartment or condo living from the interior to the exterior. We also hope it will help you find local ideas, products and companies that will help you make your living space your home! - Stewart Dyck

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Brighten Your Home For Sales Prospects

One way to shine in a competitive housing market is to create a good first impression.

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ccording to home-selling exper ts, some quick tips for speeding up this process include burning candles during open houses, filling the home with the aroma of fresh-baked cookies and hanging a wreath on the front door. Home-improvement exper ts say that investing several thousand dollars in new kitchen counter tops or a bathroom remodel will give the home a whole new look and that you will most likely recoup your entire investment, if not more. A quick fix can make a significant difference but you don’t have to spend a for tune, say exper ts. An inexpensive yet effective way to increase a home’s curb appeal while adding value for its next owner : Add dimmers in key rooms of the home. Priced from just $10, dimmers can completely change the look and

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“A quick fix can make a significant difference but you don’t have to spend a for tune...” feel of a room while adding ambiance and creating moods, not to mention saving energy and increasing the life of your light bulbs. Plus, your listing can include a mention of your dimmers, to differentiate it from the rest. Dimmers can improve the mood in large and small homes. Cramped for

space? A dimmer turns a family room into a home theater, a homework station and a workout room, while an eat-in kitchen can be transformed into a romantic dinner-for-two paradise, just by adjusting the lights. Want to really be a standout in your market? Add a wireless, whole-home lighting control system that lets you turn lights on and off from the car, your bed, the patio or any room of the home. This type of system significantly increases home value while providing added safety benefits, such as tying in with a security system. Adding dimmers is truly a quick fix, requiring less than 15 minutes for installation time. If you run into trouble, call your local electrician. Dimmers are available nationwide at home improvement centers and lighting showrooms. DYH

Robertson Real Estate Call: Jane Smith (204) 555-1234

- Space For Sale Contact

today!

Fireplace Efﬁciency Reduce your energy costs by transforming your inefficient fireplace into an energy saver.

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he fireplace has long been the favorite spot to gather in the Canadian home. A place for warmth, the fireplace adds ambience, sparking memories that are to be treasured. With soaring energy costs, the chief negative of having a fireplace has to be its inefficiency. When there is a fire burning, the fireplace does indeed radiate warmth in its general vicinity, but it also creates a convection current that can actually pull conditioned air out of the room and up the chimney causing your furnace to work over time. When the fire is not burning, the fireplace has a damper which is supposed to block inside air from escaping and outside air from invading. The problem is that the damper is usually made of metal (this type of damper technology hasn’t changed in over 100 years!) and has no seal, which means that the damper is incredibly inefficient. Your home has a dir ty little secret – the fireplace that is designed to warm your house is actually doing the opposite and costing you hundreds of dollars in energy costs. Don’t fret – with a little investment of time and money, you can turn that inefficient fireplace into a powerhouse heater that will reduce your energy bills and add even more charm to your existing fireplace. The following is a list of 4 things that you can do yourself to drastically reduce the heating costs associated with the inefficiency of your fireplace. 1. Top Sealing Dampers replace the fireplace throat damper and are

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installed at the top of the chimney. The top sealing damper has a seal that acts like a storm door keeping the expensive conditioned air inside the house and the outside air – outside. This principle works year round, whether you’re heating or cooling your house. This product can be purchased online and is easily installed by either a homeowner or a handyman. 2. A fireback is a cast iron plate that is placed at the back of your fireplace. Its purpose is to protect the back wall from fire damage and it usually

features a design that adds to the homes decor. The fireback improves the fireplaces efficiency by absorbing the heat from the fire and radiating the heat back into the room. 3. A Fireplace Heater pulls fresh air from the room, circulates it through a chamber that is heated by the fire and then blows the heated air back into the room. These heaters are closed systems so no smoke from the fireplace is invading the home. Depending on which kind you

purchase, these heaters can make a significant difference in your homes temperature, even heating a full room on its own. Specific fireplace heaters can be installed with fireplace glass doors which will kick your cost savings up another notch. 4. Fireplace Glass Doors will likely carry the largest investment, but you can reduce some of that cost by doing some of the work yourself. There are a number of fireplace doors that can be purchased online and come with easy to install instructions. The fireplace glass door creates a barrier between the living space and the chimney, thus reducing the area that your furnace will have to heat. This alone is a good reason to install these doors, but it’s not the only reason. Fireplace glass doors offer another level of safety for the home by protecting children and pets from the fire. If you have a wood burning fireplace you will want to purchase the screen mesh that is designed to go with the fireplace glass doors. This will allow you to have the doors open while the fire is burning and still have your home protected from sparks and embers. Fireplace glass doors are now being manufactured with modern designs and really add beauty and charm to the fireplace. If you’re handy, all of these suggestions are easy to accomplish, but call your local heating or fireplace representative. If you’re concerned about high energy costs but you want to keep your fireplace, then it’s time to plug up the holes in your monthly energy budget by plugging up the holes in your fireplace. DYH

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F i r s â&#x20AC;&#x2122; e o p n l r a e ce f

Located on 1st & Main - 204 555-1234

- Space For Sale Contact

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Keeping Your Home Secure While On Vacation

Imagine returning from your holiday to find your windows broken, your cars and possessions stolen or even your pets gone. Your space has been violated.

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elax, because with the proper preparation you can discourage intruders and have a carefree vacation. Depending on how long you will be gone, there are a few common sense things you can do for your home, pets and possessions. Discourage thieves by getting a house sitter. This is the best way to ward off trouble. If you know someone who will regularly stop by your house water your plants and turn on the lights you are lucky. If you have animals you might want to think about hiring a house sitter for while you are away. This way your pets are properly cared for and your home is safer. Peace of mind is wor th some extra money. If you are going to hire a house sitter - make sure you use reliable and trustwor thy service. Ask around and get references. If you can’t get a house sitter, the goal is to make your house look lived in. It’s a good idea to have a trusted neighbor to look after your home. Someone who can keep an eye on your property and who has a contact number for you should anything go wrong. Use light timers to make it seem like there are people in your house. Light

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timers and radio timers can be very effective in deterring criminals and are easy to install.

- Always lock your door and leave a key with someone to check on your home while you are gone.

Think about the state of your lawn before you leave. Overgrown grass is a loud signal that there is nobody home. If a neighbour or someone you know can’t maintain your yard (cutting your grass or shoveling snow), consider hiring a local company that specializing in this.

- Turn on the radio/TV and leave some lights on

If you are going to be gone long enough for your mail to pile up, make an arrangement with a neighbor to pick it up - a pile of unopened mail is an obvious signal to criminals that nobody is home or have your mail held at the post office. Even if you aren’t going away for a long time there are some things that you need to do every time you leave the house.

- Do not leave your spare key under the doormat or in any of the equally obvious hiding places. Rather give a copy to someone else and don’t have a spare key anywhere in your garden while you are home. If you MUST hide your key on the proper ty be creative! Develop a reciprocal relationship with your neighbors. Watch their houses when they are away; keep your eyes and ears open for strange happenings and ask them to do the same for you. Group together and form a neighborhood watch of some sor t. If you follow these tips you can be sure your chances are good that you will return to a secure house. DYN

y! a d o T l l Ca ndon Bra 234 -1 5 5 5

Double Force

ALARMS

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