Nader Shureih
Editor in Chief
As a market researcher with the federal government, Nader's energies are focused on the good of the public - looking at the Canadian cultural and social landscape for the purpose of developing stronger ties between and among Canadians.
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Archives
NHA Blog
Proud to Launch New Web Video Series for Ottawa Home Buyers
Posted by admin | August 20th, 2010
Hi! Gen Tremblay here, President of New Home Alert. I’m really excited to share with you our very first pilot episode of ‘New Home Ed’ - launched today! Ed is New Home Alert’s newest personality, with a mandate to find local experts to educate Ottawa home buyers. The web video series focuses on what comes before, during and after the purchase of a new home. Ok, so why am I so excited, you might ask, when everybody else and his dog are creating videos and posting them on YouTube?
If everybody else and there dog are posting videos on YouTube, they’re also watching them. Over 1,000,000,000 videos are downloaded everyday on the web. When you combine a camera and an expert, you can get pretty interesting results! We believe that seeing is believing…so we’re bringing you current, engaging, entertaining and educational topics in the form of video. The series is far from being TV material (but kudos to our videographer Chris from Reality Homes for producing quality HD episodes). While fully researched prior to shooting, each episode is unscripted, exclusively local, and brings a human elemant to perhaps dry subjects. It’s real!
Episode 1: Buying an Energy-Efficient Home
The first ‘New Home Ed’ episode is about buying an energy-efficient home. Expert John Corvinelli of Corvinelli Homes takes us through an energy-efficient home, describing the important features and showing us what to look for. He’s excited to be able to share his knowledge and passion with future home buyers. He says ”energy-efficient homes and ‘green’ homes are just buzz words. My goal is to make sure home buyers don’t just use the words, but know exactly what they mean so they make informed decisions when buying a home.”
John was the perfect candidate to shoot our first episode, being so experienced and well-versed in the subject. He’s an honest man who truly cares. We hope this is what you will appreciate from all of our episodes.
Enjoy the first one!
IN THE NEWS: New Home Alert Inc announces launch of website for Ottawa home buyers
Posted by admin | August 5th, 2010
OTTAWA, ONTARIO – New Home Alert Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of its website for Ottawa home buyers. New Home Alert (www.newhomealert.ca) is Ottawa’s leading free search engine for new homes, filling an important void in the local real estate market that websites such as MLS® and Grapevine do not. The website offers the largest selection of local builders from Ottawa and Gatineau, with more than 150 new residential developments and 2,500 floor plans to view.
New Home Alert creates a positive and enhanced house hunting experience for home buyers with easy to navigate content via images and videos. The site also allows users to search for immediate occupancies and energy-efficient homes across the Ottawa-Gatineau region. With regularly refreshed content, home buyers can also benefit from email alerts on their favorite builders and models.
With more than 85% of home buyers now using the web to start their home buying process, “this tool is a great resource for local home buyers to make an informed decision about the most important purchase of their lives”, says CEO Sébastien Lessard. He adds that “There are many advantages to buying a new home, and we felt it was time for home buyers to quickly find the full range of options in our local new home market”.
John Corvinelli, President of long-time local builder Corvinelli Homes, confirms that “having my listings on New Home Alert has increased my number of sales”. He continues by saying that “the search engine is having a positive impact on the new home industry in Ottawa, generating more leads for home builders. Collectively, we are in a much better position to compete with the resale market than individually”.
About New Home Alert Inc.
New Home Alert is a local company established by 3 entrepreneurs to fill an important void in the Ottawa real estate market. Offering thousands of listings, it is the leading search engine for new homes.
New Home Alert’s goal is to be the #1 resource for local home buyers and the most forward thinking form of media for the new home industry. Proud to create a positive new home hunting experience, New Home Alert provides home buyers engaging content.
With promotional opportunities within its platform, New Home Alert also assists local builders and businesses to promote their products and services to home buyers in a creative and engaging new form of media: videos, video blogs and social media releases.
Contact Information:
Gen Tremblay - President
New Home Alert Inc.
www.newhomealert.ca
613.858.7298
gen@nha.ca
Franchising opportunities available.
Green Washing in New Homes
Posted by admin | June 1st, 2010
Has your new home really been built to ENERGY STAR standards?
Hi! Seb Lessard here, (CEO of New Home Alert.ca) writing about an interesting subject that recently caught my attention: ‘green washing’ in new homes. The ENERGY STAR certification logo has become one of the most recognized symbols today. Most of our household appliances like the hot water tank, the furnace and windows have the ENERGY STAR logo and the same can now be said with many new homes built in the greater Ottawa region. Some home builders will offer the ENERGY STAR certified home as a standard feature and others will sell this feature as an upgrade. But what does it really mean to buy an ENERGY STAR certified home and are you always getting what you paid for?
The quick and dirty goes as follows: your new home is built with materials and standards to minimize the loss/infiltration of hot or cold air in the house and use products that consume less energy to heat and cool the home. The major differences between a home built to the Ontario Building Code Standards (OBCS) and the ENERGY STAR Building Code Standards are:
· Exterior wall insulation has an R-22 factor vs. the standard R-19 factor
· Basement wall insulation is full height vs. the standard 2’ below grade
· Installed furnace has a 90% AFUE vs. the 88% AFUE standard requirement
· The duct work joints are all sealed vs. not being mandatory in the OBCS
· All windows need to be ENERGY STAR certified vs. not being mandatory in the OBCS
· Fully ducted HRV vs. the standard 50 CFM bath fan
The one thing in common for all home builders is that it costs them more to build ENERGY STAR certified homes, which is why some choose to offer this feature as an upgrade, leaving the buyer to determine if they want their home certified or not.
So what is ‘green washing’?
Here is where the problem lies. Some builders are ENERGY STAR Certified (i.e. have taken the course), but are not delivering each new home owner an individually ENERGY STAR certified home. This is called “green washing”, and you could be a victim of it!
A lot of the features that must be included in the build are hidden behind the closed walls and ceiling. It’s almost impossible for the average new home owner to know if the proper materials or techniques were used to build an ENERGY STAR certified home. To check that your new home was in fact inspected, you need to look on your electrical panel to see the ENERGY STAR registration number for your home. Some builders will even hand you a Natural Resources Canada Certificate confirming that your home was inspected and that it met the ENERGY STAR Building Code Standards.
If you haven’t received this certificate or you can’t find the ENERGY STAR registration number on your electrical panel, give your builder a call to make sure your home was inspected and registered with Natural Resources Canada. After all, kudos to you for having made a conscious effort to become more energy efficient, and shame on your builder for ‘green washing’ your home.
Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for video blog on the ENERGY STAR certification in new homes. We’re meeting a nationally recognized ENERGY STAR builder with multiple awards under his belt, and he’ll actually show us the components that go into building to ENERGY STAR certified home.
Message from the CEO
Posted by admin | August 7th, 2009
Hello readers, Sebastien Lessard here, co-founder of NHA.ca and former new homes sales representative. As of today I’ll be starting a new mission of bringing you the readers and future home buyers, inside the ropes of our local residential construction industry. My efforts will see me try to contact every home builder in our region and get them to share some insight into how they go about building their homes and in turn provide us with the best choice of quality housing.
As you’ll quickly notice, and you may already have, I’m not the most eloquent writer and my French background may come through some times (or often times) in my postings. For this I apologize and hope that you can forgive me!?! You will however notice that I’m very passionate about helping home buyers in their most important financial decision they have to make in their present lives, buying a new home.
As a former new home sales representative I have met with thousands of future home buyers and this experience has led me to understand the hardships and tough decisions that come with trying to find the perfect home. As we did when creating this website, my goal will remain to shed a light on subjects of interest for all buyers and try to present the positive aspects and benefits that come with purchasing a new home from a home builder.
So moving forward, you will be able to follow my in & outs of interactions I’ve had with builders, my visits on site of their residential communities and the impressions they left with me afterwards. Now since I’m doing this to help you in your purchase process, your feedback, your insight and your questions will help me a great deal to ensure I provide you with the information you want and need. Therefore don’t be shy to write your comments and in doing so we can all help each other and make our experiences of buying a new home what they should be…fun and exciting!
I’m very excited with this new objective and I look forward to hearing from you! You can also follow me on Twitter @Seb_NHA and on Facebook.
Talk to you soon!
Thoughts?
Posted by admin | August 5th, 2009
Dear readers,
As the summer months pass, and NHA sees more and more visitors, we feel that this blog would be a great forum to help make NHA and the new home community at large a more interactive place by bringing together our collective thoughts and ideas.
The NHA blog welcomes your blog ideas and contributions.
Tell us what you’re interested in, what, in terms of housing, is on your mind, and what is it that you want to read about. Do you want to know more about eco-friendly retrofits? Do you want more information on Ottawa’s neighbourhoods?
Give us your thoughts, submit your articles, leave comments, and we will listen!
More on Art…
Posted by admin | August 3rd, 2009
The other day I read an article, a Pulitzer Prize winning article as it were, about a busker in a metro station in Washington D.C. He set himself up at about 7:30 am on a cold January morning. He pulled his violin out of its case, threw a few coins in the case and pushed it out in front of him, and proceeded to play a Bach piece.
He played for almost an hour. In that hour, over 1,000 people walked by him on their way to work, and he managed to make $32, most of which was a $20 bill that a woman dropped towards the end of his last piece.
No one, save for that woman and a very few other people stopped, even momentarily, to listen to the violinist.
Normally, that wouldn’t be much of an issue, because most of these street musicians, while good, are generally amateurs, and not good enough (I’m generalizing), to warrant special attention. Thing about this particular event though, is that the violinist in question was Joshua Bell, an American musician who, in 2007, received the highest honour for musicianship in the US – the Avery Fisher Prize. His concerts sell for over $100 per seat, and he regularly plays for the world’s elite – heads of state, monarchs, multinational corporation leaders, etc.
He also happened to begin his set with what is considered one of the most difficult classical pieces to play – on a Stradivarius violin valued at $3.5 million.
And he made $32.
Why?
Now, obviously, Bell is good. And not just good, but the kind of good that makes you stop and take a second listen. At least, you’d think so.
Not for these Washington bureaucrats (most of them WERE bureaucrats. The post-event survey noted occupations, and most of those who walked by worked for some federal department or other).
Turns out, this was a social experiment conducted by the Washington Post, posing the question of perception. How do we perceive beauty when it is taken out of context? What, in effect, is the impact of art when it is not framed?
Apparently, we don’t notice it, or give it the credit it deserves as art, or as beauty.
Moral of the story? Make your art apparent. Make the beauty of your home apparent. Contextualize it. Make your home the frame, make yourself its art.
Oh Summer, Where Art Thou
Posted by admin | July 27th, 2009
The weather here has been dismal. For the last few weeks, those moments of sunshine have been few and far between.
At home, we’ve been craving the summer tastes of barbecued foods. Personally, I’m a charcoal guy. In my research in looking for the perfect charcoal grill, I came across a ton of information on the pros and cons of the charcoal vs. gas grills. So much information, in fact, that I’m still looking. Ideally, I’d just dig a hole in my yard, put a few stones around it, place a thick grate above it, and get to cookin’, man style.
Although, if I did that, it would probably upset my neighbours, the city, passersby, and most importantly, my wife.
In the meantime, however, I simply added a grill at the base of my own Q, and threw some charcoal on it before replacing the cooking grill.
In my searches though, I did find some super cool barbecues, like this Electrolux Jeppe Utzon design.
The July weather has been so ridiculous that we decided to try out some barbecue recipes indoors (without the barbecue). We had a couple of friends over for dinner a couple of weeks back, and decided to try making pork (back) ribs in the oven.
We have some friends here in Ottawa that have developed a new spice blend designed primarily for ribs, and we had a couple of these bottles of Ribs 101 spice rub, so we tried it out.
Neither of us had ever made ribs before, so this was all experimental. Thankfully, our guests were just as experimental, so using them as guinea pigs was welcome in our culinary adventure.
It was a very simple process: take the ribs and pull off the membrane. I like my meat lean (take that as you like), so I cleaned off some of the fat, and my wife placed a generous portion of the rub over the ribs. We sealed them in foil and cooked them in the oven for 3 hours at 350.
When the 3 hours were done, we pulled them out and brushed on one of two different sauces that my wife had made – one was a molasses/Jack Daniels concoction, and the other, a spicy tomato based sauce. Both equally delicious. We threw the ribs back in the oven at the same temperature for another 10 minutes.
Done. And they were literally fall-off-the-bone good.
And because of the cumin and paprika in the rub, I think the Ribs 101 guys found a perfect blend for any of the more popular meats; beef, chicken, pork, even lamb would work with this stuff.
I’d love to hear about your experiences with the rub, and what you chose to do with it. You can find out where it’s available for sale here.
A Couch by any other Name…
Posted by admin | July 15th, 2009
I have this thing for seating. I need it arranged just right. I want to be just as comfortable when I’m alone as when I’m entertaining. We’ve been looking for the perfect chaise lounge for a long time now to set opposite our couch (sofa), and nothing (affordable), seems to have hit the spot with us yet.
The following intro on the Sofas Galore website on the history and evolution of this particular piece of seating furniture is the best I’ve found online:
Couch actually has two meanings in English. The first and older meaning comes from 14th century Old French, specifically couche, meaning “bed” or coucher, meaning “to lie down.” In the 16th century, couch also came to mean “to put into words” - an interesting twist for a piece of furniture with so many different names.
The words couch and sofa are synonymous today, but they actually mean different things. A traditional couch was built similarly to e a chaise lounge or bed. Only the head end was raised, and a couch had only half of a back.
The word “sofa” is borrowed from Arabic, specifically the word suffah, which means “bench.” In 17th century English, sofa first meant a raised section of a floor that was covered with carpets and cushions. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), by 1717 sofa had come to mean a long stuffed seat for reclining. Unlike traditional couches, traditional sofas had full backs and two raised ends.
As furniture design evolved, new couch designs required new terms. These couches often took on the names of their manufacturers or designers. Davenport, meaning a large upholstered couch, entered the language in 1897. According to the OED, chesterfield was coined as a couch word in 1900, derived from its inventor, the Earl of Chesterfield. Today, chesterfield means a couch with arms as high as its back.
As for loveseat, it’s unclear when this term for a small sofa or double chair came into being. However, loveseat is one couch term that requires no explanation.
We did find some other super interesting and unique pieces here though… browse this site. You won’t be disappointed.
www.founddesign.ca. This is a great spot run by a man with a superb eye for the unique and classic in furniture, down in Old Ottawa South.
I’m actually kind of excited about the comeback that classic furniture is making. Pieces like the Egg chair, the Barcelona Chair, and one of my favourites, the Grand Confort Chair, designed by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. These pieces shaped furniture design, very much the same way that the Beatles and Rolling Stones shaped the evolution of music. Actually, that may be an interesting blog - the relationship between music and home design… How the different design and music epochs impacted each other.
Stay tuned!
What do you call a Man with no Arms and no Legs hanging on your Wall?
Posted by admin | May 27th, 2009
Picking out art for the home is a tough thing. At least, it is for me. My wife and I have had conversations, discussions, spats, talks and deliberations over what to do for wall art.
The whole decorative ornament thing, we’ve figured it out. We (luckily) have very similar taste. And we’re both anal. So our pieces always match.
But when wall art is concerned, there are so many things to consider – theme, colour, texture, size, content… the list goes on.
I personally try to bring it back to basics. What suits my character? My person? I refer you to my first blog entry – we tend to make our homes our personal spaces, so that guests and visitors are oriented as to the space they have entered. Who we are is reflected in how we live.
That’s why I have some trouble with just using one of the various factors in choosing art for my home. Colour alone, even if it coordinates with the rest of the home, isn’t enough to make it work. Nor is texture, or any other variable on its own.
See, the thing is, art is a tough thing to define. My parents have an ornate Persian rug hanging on their wall, a violent blue background with decorative floral elements in various colours, which do not necessarily adhere to the soft pastel decor of the rest of the room. But it works, because it is indicative of the personality of their home.
In my many, many searches online for wall art, I’ve come across a few sites that have great stuff, if not at least offer a point of inspiration from which to refine one’s search.
One of my current projects is the result of finding this gem of a site (disclaimer: don’t leave any mean comments because of the name. I didn’t choose it!): The Rasterbator. For those who are looking for large scale art at a fraction of the price that it would cost to buy it retail, this dandy piece of FREE software is perfect. Pick any image, upload it into the Rasterbator, and the software rasterizes the image and sends it back to you in printable PDF format (on 8.5*11 sheets) for you to print out and assemble. The kicker: you can create an image up to 20 metres in size.
I’ll take a picture of my print and post it when it’s done.
I also want to point out an interesting approach to wall art by an Alberta couple, called Inspirations. These guys came up with a pretty cool idea. Both designers by trade, they took a novel approach to both material and the concept of “art”. Here, you can choose from a variety of inspirational quotes in vinyl that can be adhered to your wall and taken off in minutes. They look pretty damn clean too. And I love that you can create your own – check the site out. It’s a pretty cool idea. One of my favourite pieces was a wall mural – a black and white silhouette of palm trees.
Ok, I’m famished. Time for a martini.
A Man’s home is his Castle
Posted by admin | May 4th, 2009
The home has taken on a tremendous number of different forms. From cave dwellings to the mud huts of villages in North Africa, to urban apartments in city centres, to the suburban developments of the late 20th century, homes have been a key indicator of their socio-economic times.
None, however, have quite so much presence as those least humble of homes – medieval castles. These tremendous structures were designed not just to shelter, but to protect, to survey, and to dominate their landscapes.
The point behind these structures was simple – They were designed to say “I own you” to the serfs, or peasants, occupying the surrounding farmland. Built by rulers to protect their territories, they also made very clear to onlookers that there was power not just in the walls, but behind them as well.
Take a look at what is arguably one of the most famous castles in the Western world, Windsor Castle in England. This building is, without exaggeration, enormous. Its floor area alone, not including the gardens, is 484,000 square feet. Granted, this is the result of about 900 years’ worth of renovations. It’s actually pretty interesting, because you can follow the country’s history by the types of renovations and constructions that took place at the castle. When at peace, grand apartments and wings were added. When at war, it was more heavily fortified.
In the East, castles took on a slightly less ominous and imposing position, although, ironically, they were usually originally conceived primarily as fortresses. Himeji Castle in Japan is the most popular in the country. This complex is comprised of 83 wooden buildings. Huge stone walls jut out of the mountain top on to which the structure is nestled, a typical building approach to fortresses. It even came with stone dropping holes – large holes built into the high points of the foundation from which protectors of the castle could drop huge boulders onto the oncoming forces. The K.I.S.S. principle at its best, if you ask me.
One of the coolest things about Himeji though, is something I read in Wikipedia:
“One of Himeji’s most important defensive elements, and perhaps its most famous, is the confusing maze of paths leading to the main keep. The gates, baileys, and outer walls of the complex are organized so as to cause an approaching force to travel in a spiral pattern around the castle on their way into the keep, facing many dead ends. This allowed the intruders to be watched and fired upon from the keep during their entire approach.”
Pretty cool, huh?
The article goes on to say, “However, Himeji was never attacked in this manner, and so the system remains untested.”
Anti-climactic, I realize.
The opinions and positions expressed in any blogs, wiki's and comments in the above links do not necessarily reflect those of nha, its partners, members or users.