Home Depot Stores:

Home ownership is a great thing, but having to take care and update your home is another. The do it yourselfers (DIY) in America love visiting stores like Home Depot where they can get home improvement ideas and buy supplies. With the housing boom came a huge need for home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowes. Home Depot has 100's of locations all across the United States and they offer almost anything you can think of related to your house or yard. Many contractors have been shopping at Home Depot for years since they get discounts on many items. I have bought many items over the years there, things like lawn mowers, storm doors, wood, light bulbs, light fixtures, and paint. The stores are huge and rather intimidating the first few times you enter them. Setup much like a warehouse, the ceilings are very high and the isles are long and stacked 20+ feet high with supplies. Customer service can be a touch lacking in stores this size, but keep asking the personnel and you will get an answer. We recently used their door installation service for a new front door and the staff in the store was great but the contractors they hired were less than average.

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The official website for Home Depot is at Homedepot.com and it's easy to navigate around. I check periodically on the website to see what kind of online workshops they offer if I can't make it into the stores. They recently put up a 'family fire safety' workshop that teaches families about home fire safety, preparedness, and prevention. The running time was 30 minutes and it was a great refresher for the whole family. There is also a Home Depot store finder on the website, just type in your ZIP code and the locator brings up the nearest stores to you in terms of miles. The selection online is tremendous with pricing, descriptions, and even customer reviews of products. You will often find free shipping when ordering online - usually need to have purchased $49 or more in goods. Some products are only available online while others are in stores and on the Internet. I use the online store as a quick way to see what the pricing is of a certain item and compare that to Lowes. In the stores, you can also rent trucks or tools.

Home Depot Coupon:

I know that I get multiple Home Depot coupons in the mail almost weekly. Often they will be included in a mailer or in the Sunday newspaper. The coupons are for discounted prices on a large range of store products. Sometimes the seasonal items like Christmas Lights will be on sale to get customers into the store. You can also go online to Homedepot.com and check out their "weekly ad". It's kind of like looking at a catalog online with all the latest specials. Some of the coupon websites like Dealcatcher.com will post special coupons that you can redeem online when purchasing products at Home Depot. Of course, if you sign up for the Home Depot credit card when you are in the store you get 10% of your order. Just fill out an application and pretty much you are instantly approved for the savings.

Home Depot Classes/Clinics:

One of the things that I like about Home Depot are all the in-store clinics and classes they offer on home improvement projects and ideas. The weekly clinics are free and anyone can attend them. An expert in a particular field, say drywalling, will give a short instructional clinic on how to approach a project and work from start to finish to complete it. The Do-It-Yourself workshops are also offered as a one-night class and are aimed at women who want to tackle a home improvement project but need a little direction. You can go online and punch in your ZIP code to see what is going on that week at your local Home Depot stores. I searched for my area and found out that they are doing clinics on tiling floors and walls, installing a front door, installing faucets in your kitchen, and measuring and installing blinds. All these clinics are setup as basic instructions for the average homeowner. They try to keep the technical things to a minimum and show you how anyone can do these projects. I have attended several of the Home Depot clinics and found them to be very informative and time saving when it comes down to doing the work myself. Often you just need a few pointers to get through the tough parts and they can provide the details. If you happen to be in a Home Depot store ask a clerk to see what their upcoming schedules look like and get involved. Many simple plumbing or installations of items take a few minutes but you will pay a professional $100 or more to do the work. Learn how do to it once and never have to hire those outside contractors again. Check out Homedepotclinics.com.

Home Depot vs Lowes:

Home Depot dominated the home improvement stores business until Lowes started cracking away at their fortress and winning mark share. Home Depot took a hard fall in the stock market not too long ago and the CEO stepped down. Lowes has been steadily growing while Home Depot has stayed the same if not declined in many experts eyes. Perhaps it was the housing boom that got Home Depot (HD) where they are today and they rested on their laurels. In head to head customer service surveys, it appears that Lowes offers a better experience within the stores themselves. If you go online to compare the two websites, both offer a wonderful selection with easy to browse sites. The in-store experience is not that much different either since there is only so much you can offer for home improvement products. Both HD and Lowes have refrigerators, washers, dryers, hardware, garden supplies, light fixtures, faucets, floors, wood, etc. Lowes found out that the real difference was in customer service and they tackled that issue head on. Lowes has won several awards for customer service and people took notice. I still go to Home Depot since they are closer to my house, but I will not rely on their 'contracting services' again after they botched my front door installation. I figured that HD would look into the background of companies they refer on project of this nature and this wasn't the case. They use only 1 contractor for door installations in my area and the company was a small, family run contractor that didn't do a good job at all. They ordered the wrong door to begin with, the company then painted it incorrectly per specs that we gave them, and then they tried to fix the door right in my front yard with a "quicky" paint job. Terrible work and even worse customer relations. Home Depot didn't even listen to me when I asked to stop working with that contractor and hire a different one, or at least give people the option of using another company. I guess we now know why they are struggling to keep customers.

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