Business

Sandyman special

As the saying goes, “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” At least with these magazines you can do something about what the weather did to your home.

Daydreaming about how to spend that Hurricane Sandy insurance check when it arrives? HGTV magazine delivers some visions of domestic bliss that are livelier than some of the TV network’s shows. There’s a good spread of topics, from remodeling and interior design to more unique articles on comparing the price of real estate AND the cost of living in different towns if you’re looking for a move. While some home and garden magazines feel like they’ve stuck with the same template for years, HGTV feels full of ideas we haven’t seen , such as Q+As on how to light a fireplace.

The Consumer Reports Kitchen Planning & Buying Guide is the place to go after you’re through salivating at the kitchen porn mags with their impractical yet gorgeous looks. Wood floors — common in designer kitchens — get low marks here. And check it out: Some of the fanciest brand-name appliances are the most repair-prone. (Forget refrigerator drawers.) If you’ve gotten sticker shock realizing that redoing your kitchen can easily cost $30,000 for an average job, the magazine will show you where you can shave costs and still get good value.

Don’t let the cover of Home Renovation Trends fool you— it’s not just for the Hamptons set with helipads, eight-car garages and such. There’s plenty inside for owners of three-bedroom Colonials. If Sandy’s winds blew a tree into your roofline or swept the entire house off its foundation, why not turn that master bedroom and small adjacent bath into a master suite when renovating? Like most home renovation titles, HRT is chock-a-block with before and after photos that can spark ideas with condo owners as well as with owners of your average Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island palace.

The first half of New York Spaces is composed almost entirely of advertorials that provide helpful excuses for renovating your kitchen or bathroom — and spending big bucks on fancy materials to do it. Our favorite is the ad for the Kohler Numi toilet ($6,400), which features an “integrated bidet, automatic seat and lid raiser, built-in seat warmer and foot warmer, built-in music player and FM radio . . .” If anybody else needs to go, they’d better go now, because we’re going to be in there for a while.

New Yorker’s cover shows a guy wading through chest-high floodwater in the dark, with his flashlight illuminating a sign that says “VOTE HERE.” Clever, but inside, the high-brow glossy relegates its hurricane coverage to the “Talk of the Town” section, whose chirpy cocktail chatter makes an awkward fit for fires, floods, homelessness and death. “A box of waterproof matches . . . provided an opportunity for testing proof of concept. “Verdict: false advertising,” chimes one particularly trite and out-of-touch tidbit about a flooded house in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

New York’s cover, meanwhile, has an aerial photo of darkened lower Manhattan, its lights extinguished after getting dipped in the water. Service for the storm-weary is likewise provided here, including a notice for “Retail Therapy,” with a blurb announcing “Good news for fashion doyennes: The Alexander Wang sample sale . . . is still on.” There’s also a feature on Thanksgiving recipes, advising readers on how to prepare a “cutting-edge, Michelin-quality” dinner.

Time evidently thought it would be clever to distribute this week’s issue with two different covers — one saying “Vote Romney” on top, the other saying “Vote Obama” — to different parts of the country. Then Sandy came along, so the editors got the idea to make a third cover for East Coast readers presenting “Lessons from the Storm.” If all of this sounds a little, well, storm-scattered, we might have to agree. Still, the content is solid, with balanced coverage ahead of tomorrow’s election. Special kudos, also, for storm coverage delivered on such tight deadlines.

Newsweek delivers “The Hero Issue,” celebrating disaster rescuers as well as military heroes. Maybe the magazine’s staff deserves a medal of their own this time. They cranked out this week’s edition despite being evacuated from their lower Manhattan offices, which got flooded as the Hudson River spilled into the lobby, knocking out power for the entire week. There’s not a peep about the mess from Editor Tina Brown, who instead focuses on a slew of examples from Sandy to Afghanistan. As Brown puts it, one trait shared by heroes is “their adamant refusal to be portrayed as special.”