I pit Home Depot's continuing move to E-Z-D-I-Y

The BBQ Pit
1

I’ve probably bitched about this before, but every time I get bitten by it I am enraged anew.

It’s no secret that every day Home Depot (and Lowe’s) opens its doors there will be one fewer professional option and at least one more “E-Z-D-I-Y” thing on the racks. Anyone who does their own work around the house knows exactly what I meant, but that hyphenate term means “cheap, flimsy, limited, ineffectual and probably overpriced crap intended to make some do-it-yer-very-own-selfies task just super-super-ea-sy.”

It’s reached the point where you can’t buy the basic stuff a hardware store used to carry in its back bins - you know, the stuff you actually needed three brain cells and a tiny bit of experience to choose and use properly. Now, every department has nothing but shiny, packaged “solutions” with crappy components and a junk tool designed to make the job easy for Joe Fumblefingers, Bobby Toolbreaker and Susie Decorator.

All I wanted to do was attach a light duty hinge board to a wall. In between studs, so I needed a drywall fastener solution. Does Home Depot have “drywall fastener solutions?” My, yes, Home Depot has a whole effin’ wall of “drywall fastener solutions,” most of which did not exist a few year ago, if last week. Most of which involve an E-Z self-drilling insert requiring nothing more than a screwdriver.

Okay, so I have little tubs full of those drywall anchors. They work fine for simple, light-duty tasks. Not great, as they tend to turn under screw torque, either driving themselfies deeper into the wall or unscrewing out of the wall. (They also go in a lot better with a proper pilot hole, but gosh that’s not E-Z, is it?)

I needed just a little more holding and distributed strain power, so I rummaged… not a proper molly or toggle bolt left in my bins. So off to HD I go…

To find basically no mollies left at all, and one bulk box of toggle bolts far more expensive and of less value than I wanted to pay. So I review fifteen kinds of E-Z screw-in anchors and decide the metal ones with the t-bar will work well enough.

Located the holes. Drove the first in without a pilot hole… and got the ugliest, twisty mess of drywall paper curls and scudge all around it. No problem, it will go behind the board and some year down the road the board will come off and I’ll patch the hole.

Drove the second and for a brief moment had the same mess of curls and scudge… and then a quarter-turn too hard to set the top of the insert flush punched it right through the board, rattle-rattle down inside the wall, lost until judgment day. Oh, and leaving a 5/8 hole where it passed.

So today I will go to the old-fashioned hardware store and buy - no, not the properly sized mollies I wish I’d found in the first place - a couple of rather oversized toggle bolts that will hold my hinge board where two oversized holes now exist.

Fuck HD and their reduction to crap only idiots can use for idiot purposes and idiot results.

2

So wait, there is an old-fashioned hardware store available to you, with exactly what you want, but you got to Home Depot anyway to buy what you don’t want? Why? So you can Pit them?

3

I hear ya.

I was tempted to write “What?! You overtightened the anchor screw and broke the drywall, and now you’re bitching about the hardware, instead of your poor technique?” -But that would’ve been mean and nasty…

And wrong, of course. I hate those screw-in drywall anchors. Yes, you can get them to work, and they will hold a surprising amount of weight, but they rely on oversized threads through soft gypsum, instead of tension of the hardware across the material as in molly bolts or toggle bolts. Drywall just isn’t a good material for friction fasteners, and that includes screws.

But even the anchor screws beat having to cut out, patch and paint a shelf-wide expanse of drywall just to properly support your shelving… when they don’t punch holes in your wall, that is.

4

I had the same thing happen to me with those things, and I also had trouble finding a good size box of toggle bolts.

The worst part is that Lowes and Home Depot have pretty much driven all of the good hardware stores out of business.

5

My Home DEpot must be a mutant, or something. I needed to use a better fastener for a towel rack than the wall anchor that had worked loose, and figured a toggle bolt was just the thing. I had no problem finding toggle bolts of various sizes at the Home Depot down the street. I installed it in no time, and my towel rack is in great shape now.

6

As the owner of a house made with lath and plaster, I can’t even look at those EZ Hanger things without offending the old construction gods.

I do like Toggler’s Snap Toggle bolts, much easier than the traditional kind, available at a Home Depot near you.

7

Took the words right out of my mouth.

And don’t you have any of the smaller/regional hardware chains around you, at least? Around here, of course we have Lowe’s and Home Depot, but also a slew of Ace/ACO, True Value and Damman’s, just off the top of my head.

8

YMMV; I love those EZ-Ancor things. They’re easy to put in, hold up plenty of weight, and you can fairly easily screw them in flush and smooth them over with spackling compound and paint over them if you need to. What’s not to love? I tend to prefer them for quick and dirty things that don’t need the strength of a toggle bolt.

Plus, it may just be your particular Home Depot. Mine has an assortment of both old-school toggle bolts and molly bolts (they’re listed as “hollow wall anchors”) as well as all the self-drilling anchors.

9

I love those things. Basically I just take a hammer, pound my phillips screwdriver through the wall to poke a pilot hole, then use the same screwdriver to run it into the wall. They also are very easy to take out, literally just like backing out a screw. I wouldn’t mount a tv with them or anything but I’ve got my guitars hanging on the walls with them and they’re kinda heavy.

The only time I don’t like them is if I screw up and try to go into a stud. Then they crumple and tear up the wall. I’m worthless with a stud finder and I don’t know why. They never seem to be accurate for me.

10

I didn’t go to the hardware store because, like most old-school stores, it was closed on the holiday. I was also at HD for other things anyway. I should have known better than to buy something other than what I knew I wanted.

I have installed hundreds of the screw-in anchors and am familiar with their strengths and weaknesses. I have driven them through the wall with a power driver and stupid inattention (to the torque setting, if nothing else) but this SOB twisted through the wall with next to no effort or warning.

I am sure there is variation between stores, if not because of local management decisions (uh, ha ha ha…) then because these updates are done in rotation as old stock runs down and a different replacement scheme follows.

I don’t really care if the stores fill up with EZDIY crap - maybe it really is easier for people who don’t own a tool that didn’t come in a little packaged set. But getting rid of a decent selection of mollies and toggle bolts - and the equivalent in each department - is just criminal. And yeah, it’s harder every year to find a real hardware store. I buy a shocking amount of such little stuff from Amazon these days.

I just really wanted to get this little project finished and didn’t want to wait to get to the HW store today. Shows me. Talk about angering the something gods.

11

We just bought a house a couple of months ago and we’ve been to Home Depot half a dozen times with our “professional” (a friend of the family who builds houses for a living and picks up repair work on the side for extra cash) and we’ve never had an issue finding what we needed to repair things. It may be a problem just with your local not having what you need.

Though I will say the DIY thing is why we have so many damn things that need to be replaced here in the first place. Apparently they put down multiple layers of linoleum in the bathroom over the years and never pulled up the first layers before putting down their next one, causing the toilet to not be able to attach to the flange and leak through the floor and rot out the floor boards. We’ve since replaced the bathroom floor completely and it is perfect and all, but there is an air bubble under the bathtub where they clearly installed a tub themselves and it is going to eventually cause a crack in the tub and more water damage. That is next on the list of things that need to be fixed. If they’d paid the money to have a professional do it right they might have been able to ask more money for the house in the first place and we wouldn’t need to essentially rip out our bathroom.

12

After the first disaster, you didn’t drill a pilot hole for the second toggle bolt?

13

This rant doesn’t match my experience very well at all.

On the issue of drywall anchors, yes, they have those self-drilling ones, and those are perfect for certain kinds of light-duty solutions. I used them for my curtain rods 10 years ago and… not a single problem. (This should also point out that they’re not new.)

But they also carry all of the other options like toggle bolts. If you didn’t find them, did you ask for help? You mention rummaging, but not asking for store help. They are there. I’ve purchased them from Lowe’s. Sometimes it really is necessary to ask an employee to find something for you when you don’t see the specific product you need.

14

They make special metal ones that will drill into a stud if you happen to hit one. Pretty cool, if I do say so.

15

My experience covers several decades. It also covers four years with this specific HD. No, they do not have any selection of the traditional fasteners - one multi-pack each of mollies and toggle bolts, in the usual big-box selection of which about half will never be of any use. Not worth $10 when I only need two and have grown out of storing every unused fastener for “someday.”

I was more careful than my first rant might have indicated. The first one appeared to go in solidly but made a mess of the ring around it - simply poor design of the screw body; the good drywall anchors pull the edges in with them, not push them out to the sides. The second one went in more or less the same, but stopped a sixteenth shy of flush. One quarter turn, with a hand driver, to seat it… and it tore loose and fell into the wall.

When I used the top one to hang the board loosely so I could paint it in place, it pulled the anchor body out of the wall under very little weight or tension.

I bought two plain 3/16 x 3 toggles and installed the board in about two minutes flat this afternoon. I would have preferred some large mollies, but with the larger holes already knocked in for me, toggles were faster and cheaper.

16

I’ve never had good luck with mollys pulling in properly, but I fully support the toggle bolt solution, especially when you have one the plastic anchors ream out your wall as yours did.

17

Mollies do take some skill and experience to use right - too big a hole, or apply torque without some inward pressure, and they’ll “strip out” leaving you frustrated. I can see why the basic DIY crowd might hate them. There are also dozens of different sizes and you have to judge all the dimensions correctly to get a good, tight, solid anchor.

But chosen and installed well, they’re unbeatable for attaching stuff to hollow walls.

18

I keep trying to go to the old HW store near me but they only have what I need about 30% of the time and I have to go to Home Depot to get the part. The Home Depot has a much better selection of practically every thing. The main thing the local place has going for it is that if they have it I can find it pretty quickly.

19

Wait. You are pissed at Home Depot. But you still support them rather than the Mom and Pop? Talk about cutting of your nose to spite your face.

20

People who don’t drill pilot holes deserve what they get.