Daylight savings will go into effect on March 11th at 2am.  Don’t forget to set your clocks forward.  Yes, that means you lose an hour of sleep, but you also get an extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day!

Daylight saving time in the United States was first observed in 1918. Most areas of the United States currently observe daylight saving time, with the exceptions being the states of Arizona and Hawaii along with the territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands.  From 1987 to 2006, daylight saving time in the United States began on the first Sunday of April and ended on the last Sunday of October. The time was adjusted at 2:00 AM (0200) local time (as it still is done now).  Since 2007, daylight saving time starts on the second Sunday of March and ends on the first Sunday of November, with all time changes taking place at 2:00 AM local time. In 2011, daylight saving time began on March 13 and ended on November 6; in 2012, it will begin on March 11 and end on November 4.  (For more info about DST, check out the Wikipedia entry located here.)

When new homes are being built or existing homes are resold, our industry benefits.  Think about all of the sheet metal that goes into various components of a new home.  There is the traditional Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning (HVAC) and duct work (the type of work many of our customers do) but there are also washers, dryers, refrigerators and other building components that go into a new or previously owned home.  When home sales rise, there is work to be done and products to be bought which is definitely good for our industry.  This brings us to the point of this article.

(The following is a summary from a recent Reuters article you can read here.)

“Signed contracts for home resales rose to a nearly two-year high in January, an industry group said on Monday, further evidence of a budding recovery in the housing market.  The National Association of Realtors said its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed in January, increased 2 percent to 97.0 — the highest reading since April 2010.  Given more favorable housing market conditions, the trend in contract activity implies we are on track for a more meaningful sales gain this year,” said NAR chief economist, Lawrence Yun.  A nascent recovery is under way in the housing market, with the supply of both new and previously owned homes on the market being whittled down in recent months.  Pending home sales rose strongly in the Northeast and South, but fell in the Midwest and West.”

We hope that the trend continues!

We are excited to let you know that we are significantly expanding our HVAC warehouse space!   We leased an additional 10,000 square feet to the west of our existing space in the caves here at Subtropolis.  We needed the additional space because we continue to sell a high volume of finished HVAC duct, elbows and more.  Be sure to check out our inventory of pre-fab HVAC offerings in our online catalog.

Ernie Ketcham and Steve Ketcham are in the first picture.  Check out the gallery below.

We’re excited to announce that Travis Hays has been promoted to Sales Lead! Travis has worked at Galvmet since 2008, leading our southern territory. Travis is originally from Hannibal, Missouri, and grew up rooting for the Cardinals, Rams and Missouri Tigers.  You can tell by the picture that he is a true fan.

Travis has done work with our clients in Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas and we are excited to give Travis this opportunity to grow within our company.  For more information about Travis, check out his LinkedIn profile.

We saw good news recently on Reuters.com that talked about home sales being up.  We hope that you are seeing a positive impact on your business!

Home sales hit an 11-month high in December and the number of properties on the market was the fewest in nearly seven years, pointing to a nascent recovery in the housing sector.  The National Association of Realtors said on Friday existing home sales increased 5 percent to an annual rate of 4.61 million units, with all four of the nation’s regions recording gains.

Sales of both multifamily and single-family homes rose.  “It seems that the housing sector may be slowly picking itself up off of the mat,” said Omair Sharif, an economist at RBS in Stamford, Connecticut.  While the home sales pace was a touch below economists’ expectations, December marked the third straight month of gains, adding to hopes that a tentative recovery was taking shape.

If you’re signed up for our email reports you already know that Galvmet’s Tuesday Specials are back by popular demand. We have specials that cover every product in our line, so if it doesn’t pertain to you one week, it may the next. Be sure to sign up for our weekly specials so that you have member’s only access to these deals.  They are not advertised anywhere else.

To sign up for the weekly deals email, please go to www.galvmet.com and type your email address in the box on the right hand side, and click the button to submit. In addition to our weekly specials there are occasionally opportunities to win great prizes. Galvmet will keep your email secure and will not spam your inbox with daily emails.

Galvmet Steel and HVAC Supply is excited to announce that our founder Ernie will be out on the road to visit some of our customers this year. As a small business we’ve been thankful to our vendors that have been very helpful in creating solutions for some of our unique challenges and helping us navigate a challenging marketplace. In that same way,  Galvmet Steel and HVAC Supply believes we can help our customers overcome some of their everyday challenges.

Ernie will be visiting customers to find out how we can help and what you would like to see us do. If you’d like to discuss something with Ernie, or would like to show him your organization please give us a call so we can put your company on his schedule. Thank you for your business and we look forward to working with you in 2012.

At Galvmet, we are tired of hearing all the bad news, so we are going to focus on something positive to talk about.  We are going to do this every month.  To start off 2012, we were happy to see the news from Reuters that cancer death rates are continuing to fall. They have been dropping by 1.8 percent per year in men and 1.6 percent per year in women between 2004 and 2008, according to the American Cancer Society’s annual report on cancer statistics released on Wednesday.  Advances in cancer screening and treatment have prevented more than a million total deaths from cancer since the early 1990s, according to the report.

What does this have to do with our business and the steel industry?  As far as this post goes, not much.  However, hearing and celebrating good news is a great way to change direction and outlook.  We hope these monthly “good news” stories brighten your day in some way.  As always, thank you for reading our blog.  Please let us know if there is any question we can answer or topic we can cover in the coming months!

Happy New Year from Galvmet!  As we move into 2012, we are excited at the opportunities for growth in the industries that we serve.  It has been a good year, though challenging at times, and we appreciate everyone that has been involved to make that happen.

We hope that you enjoy New Year’s Eve and go into 2012 with a renewed sense of excitement in your work and personal lives!  We look forward to talking with you soon.

More on the New Year celebration from Wikipedia

The New Year is the day that marks the time of the beginning of a new calendar year, and is the day on which the year count of the specific calendar used is incremented. For many cultures, the event is celebrated in some manner.  The New Year of the Gregorian calendar, today in worldwide use, falls on January 1st, continuing the practice of the Roman calendar. There are numerous calendars that remain in regional use that calculate the New Year differently.

The order of months in the Roman calendar has been January to December since King Numa Pompilius in about 700 BC, according to Plutarch and Macrobius.  January 1st has been the first day of the year, except during the Middle Ages when several other days were the first (1 March, 25 March, Easter, 1 September, 25 December). With the expansion of Western culture to the rest of the world during the twentieth century, the first day of  January became global, even in countries with their own New Year celebrations on other days (such as China and Pakistan).

In the culture of Latin America there are a variety of traditions and superstitions surrounding these dates as omens for the coming year. January remains a symbol of the New Year’s celebration.  The Gregorian calendar is now used by many countries as the official calendar. This has meant that celebrations for the New Year have become much larger than before. Some countries(e.g. the Czech Republic) even consider 1 January to be a national holiday.

It is the season where people are decorating trees, hanging lights and looking forward to time spent with family.  In business, we see our clients, employees, vendors and peers as an extended family and we appreciate you so much.  Merry Christmas from our team at Galvmet!  We hope that you enjoy some time off, good food and special moments celebrating the season!

Origins of the Christmas Celebration from Wikipedia

Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days. In much of the world’s nations, Christmas is a civil holiday, is celebrated by an increasing amount of non-Christians, and is an integral part of the Christmas and holiday season.

The precise day of Jesus’ birth, which historians place between 7 and 2 BC, is unknown. In the early-to-mid 4th century, the Christian Church in the West first placed Christmas on December 25, a date later adopted also in the East. Theories advanced to explain that choice include that it falls nine months after the Christian celebration of the conception of Jesus, that it was the date of the Roman winter solstice, or of some ancient winter festival.

The original date of the celebration in Eastern Christianity was January 6th, and that is still the date of the celebration in Armenia, where it is a public holiday, and for the Armenian Apostolic Church. As of 2011, there is a difference of 13 days between the Julian calendar and the more generally used Gregorian calendar. Those who use the Julian calendar or its equivalents thus celebrate December 25 and January 6 on what for the majority of people is January 7 and January 19. For this reason, Ethiopia celebrates Christmas, both as a Christian feast and as a public holiday on what in the Gregorian Calendar is January 7.

Many of the popular celebratory customs associated in various countries with Christmas have pre-Christian or secular themes and origins. Popular modern customs of the holiday include gift-giving, music, an exchange of Christmas cards, church celebrations, a special meal, and the display of various decorations; including Christmas trees, lights, garlands, mistletoe, nativity scenes, and holly. In addition, several figures, known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, and Santa Claus, among other names, are associated with bringing gifts to children during the Christmas season. Because gift-giving and many other aspects of the Christmas festival involve heightened economic activity among both Christians and non-Christians, the holiday has become a significant event and a key sales period for retailers and businesses. The economic impact of Christmas is a factor that has grown steadily over the past few centuries in many regions of the world.