Being 2 weeks away from owning my first home, I’m becoming intimately familiar with the whole home improvement concept and I got to wondering…is there really a difference between these two stores? I tend to go to Home Depot because it’s more conveniently located, but is one really better than the other?
Which do you prefer, and why? Share your home improvement trials and triumphs!
Here, I’ll start by illustrating what a complete incompetent I am.
Over the weekend, my mother and I started scraping the horribly alligatored paint off of my new front porch. It wasn’t going so well, so we decided to abandon the dry scraping and go with a paint stripper. I picked up a can of stripper at Home Depot and we returned to the house the next day to give it a try. We donned out gloves, spread out newspaper, got out our tools…and attempted to open the can. No luck. We bang on the can. No luck. We try every method of coersion known to man on this blasted lid, and we couldn’t budge it an inch. After about 10 minutes of this, I gave up. I drove back to Home Depot and made the guy at the returns counter open it for me. He gave it one good twist and it popped right open. How very sad. <sigh>
I use both but mostly Home Depot just because it’s closer. It seems to me that Lowe’s has slightly nicer fixtures, but for most of the stuff it’s pretty much the same.
As far as removing the old paint goes, I’ve tried every method known to man, and I can tell you without a doubt that there simply is not a good way of doing it. What I have pretty much settled on is a couple of carbide tipped scrapers - but you probably won’t be able to find them at eithe Home Depot or Lowes. You’ll need to go to a paint or woodworking store.
Home Depot’s tops in my mind. Whenever I go to Lowe’s, they always seem to be out of what I’m looking for. It may just be the one I go to, but they seem to have really poor inventory control.
Add to that that I can find someone at Home Depot, 90 percent of the time, who knows how to do what I’m trying to do, and is willing to help me out with it, no matter how long it takes me to get it. I haven’t gotten that kind of service from Lowe’s. Lowe’s employees seem more like hired grunts; Home Depot’s seem to be people who have done the work before.
One strike against Home Depot, though: They don’t seem to be able to manage their cashier staffing levels, especially in the evenings. So it sometimes take a long time to check out.
But all in all, we’ve spent probably $10,000 on home improvment stuff in the past year and a half, and almost all of it has been at Home Depot.
They were on a customer service kick for a while, but I think their corporate mindset has changed.
They don’t beat customer service into their employees heads any longer, and their employee turnover rate is sky rocketing, which means a bad shopping experience for me.
You know, I did notice this when I was at Home Depot the other day. The guy in the paint department not only helped me pick out a good stripper for what I needed to do, he also made sure I got gloves to work with (this stuff is caustic, I have a few burns on the back of my hand from where I splashed tiny bits when I tried to scrape without gloves on!) and another solvent to get paint off of the leaded glass windows that I can’t scrape because the glass isn’t smooth. He also explained what sort of paint I needed for the porch floor as opposed to the railings, what type of finish worked best, what kind of primer to get, etc. Considering that I know nothing, I was very appreciative. For that reason alone, I’d keep going back to Home Depot.
Plus, they didn’t laugh at me when I couldn’t get my paint stripper open.
I’ve shopped both, quite a bit, we’ve got several of each store in this area, and employee-wise, they are pretty much interchangeable. I’ve noticed the merchandise, particularly the lumber, at Lowes seems to be of better quality than at HD. But the prices are a tad lower at HD, so it basically comes down to a battle of price versus quality. If I’m doing ANYTHING concerning water, faucets, tub fixtures, etc., I ALWAYS get the good stuff. It’s a lot cheaper to buy a good fixture than to repair your floors after a cheap one gives out, especially tub fixtures, which can leak behind a wall for months before you can notice the damage it’s done.
I’ve shopped both, quite a bit, we’ve got several of each store in this area, and employee-wise, they are pretty much interchangeable. I’ve noticed the merchandise, particularly the lumber, at Lowes seems to be of better quality than at HD. But the prices are a tad lower at HD, so it basically comes down to a battle of price versus quality. If I’m doing ANYTHING concerning water, faucets, tub fixtures, etc., I ALWAYS get the good stuff. It’s a lot cheaper to buy a good fixture than to repair your floors after a cheap one gives out, especially tub fixtures, which can leak behind a wall for months before you can notice the damage that’s been done.
It may just be the stuff I was getting, or it may just be the Lowe’s/ Home Depots around me, but…
Unlike Weedeater, I’ve found Lowe’s has the lower prices. And a bigger selection. Admittedly it’s marginally lower prices, and a marginally bigger selection.
HD is closer, so if I just need to run out and get something quick, it’s HD. (Or Hader Harware- a local chain that we’re not talking about right now.) If I have the time (Like, an extra 15 minutes) I’ll schlepp up to Lowe’s.
I like Lowe’s better, but not so much I’ll skip a trip to HD to save time.
-Rue.
For us, Home Depot is also closer, so we go there if we need parts for something or garden supplies that don’t include plants. If we need wood, fixtures, paint, or plants, we go to Lowe’s. They have nicer quality stuff, and the items always seem to be easier for me to find and more nicely arranged than HD. I moved from VA to NC last year, and this was true of both areas.
FWIW, both places offer workshops on how to do a variety of home repair and remodeling jobs; you might want to look up the schedules the next time you go and see if anything interests you.
I just moved into a new house two months ago, and spent a lot of time buying home-improvement stuff. Lowes is a little closer than Home Depot to me, but I found myself going to Home Depot more often. Why?
[ul]
[li]Home Depot is open 24 hours. Lowes closes at 10. While I haven’t done any late-night shopping runs, I like the idea that I can get something at HD if I need to at an ungodly hour.[/li][li]Home Depot has a bigger selection on most home improvement items. Lowes beats it in some areas (most notably shelving), but a lot of the time, HD wins.[/li][li]As others have said, the folks at Home Depot seem more knowledgable. The Home Depot folks I queried either had an answer, or knew who would. The Lowes people tended to either make wild guesses or simply didn’t know.[/li][/ul]
Lowes is cleaner and slightly better organized, but that’s not enough to get me to shop there on a regular basis. I have nothing against them and will shop there if I need something, but most of the time, I’ll probably go to HD first.
They’re equidistant for me so 5 years ago as a new homeowner with very agressive improvement plans I took a very hard look at both. Lowe’s lumber, like Weedeater said, seemed much better, as did their plants and their customer service. I liked them so much I even bought their stock and it did really well for me. I still go to Lowes 1 to 3 times a week just to putter around and get ideas. HD? Only on the rare occassion Lowes doesn’t have it.
Another thing, HD has come into our forested area and clearcut a couple of new locations surrounding the Lowes in an effort to compete. Other large empty buildings were available in the area that they could have used but they decided to knock down several thousand trees instead. Major, major point loss in my book.
I used to work at one and became very familiar with the stock and their policies. I don’t need a lot of help picking stuff (I’m pretty experienced in home improvement projects, plus I live for home improvement shows )
Home Depot is useful if I’m not close to a Lowes but I absolutely refuse to special order anything from them ever again. I recently ordered two kitchen sinks. It was supposed to take about a week to get them in - wound up being almost two months. Turns out the sinks had arrived on schedule but they sold them to someone else, supposedly marked my order as having been refunded (funy how I never got any money back) and were decidely unapologetic about the mixup.
Right now, neither of them is particularly close by, but HD’s a bit more convenient (still a half hour away, tho), so it’s where I go if I have to go to one, usually. (Just bought a wet/dry vac there this morning, actually. :))
But I like Lowe’s a lot more. I have a hard time finding things in HD. And just after we bought our previous house down in Bristol VA, Lowe’s opened up a superstore about a mile from the house. Helpful, knowledgeable people, good prices, good-quality lumber, and they installed a sliding-glass door for a reasonable price. (Them things are heavy - get someone else to do it!)
These days, I get most of my hardware-type stuff at the Ace that’s about 5 minutes from my house. They’re helpful and knowledgeable, and (except for sunny Saturday mornings, when it seems that everyone in northern Calvert and southern Anne Arundel counties (MD) has converged on the store) they do a good job of keeping the checkout lines moving.
Home Depot, without a doubt. The very first experience I had with Lowe’s was awful. They also messed up a beautiful lake and denied doing it, while they were building here in Atlanta. It has taken almost three years to get them to clean the mess up, and even THAT had to be done with lawsuits filed on behalf of the home owners first.
I think what we are seeing here is that Lowe’s and Home Depot are pretty much the same. Individual stores may differ slightly and individual experiences may differ greatly, but overall there’s not much difference.
Does nobody shop at locally owned stores anymore? In addition to getting better quality merchandise and helping stimulate the local economy (rather than the making a bunch of stockholders richer), the employees at a local hardware store, lumber yard, nursery, etc. actually know what they’re doing, rather than just being some dumb high-schooler with a part time job.
I much prefer Lowes. I have had nothing but bad experiences at Home Depot. The customer service is terrible there. I think someone could starve to death in the Home Depot and no employee would care, they seem to go out of their way to avoid customers who need help… The lines are always long and slow. One time we were trying to load a dishwasher in our truck and the people who are supposed to help out front saw what we were about to do and promptly went in the store. The HD is closer to my house and is bigger but I almost always regret going there. I also think Lowes has lower prices, but have not looked into it that much. Customer service probably varies according to store management but Lowes is definelty better in my town.
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