Two Words: PAINT SALE!

If it's Memorial Day weekend, you can usually count on two things: lots of flags and a paint sale at The Home Depot.

That's right! Get $5 off a gallon or $20 off a five-gallon bucket of Behr or Glidden paint now through Monday. (Some brands and styles are not included. Make sure you read the list in the link to be sure! That link can also get you to the site to submit your rebate online.)

In between all of the activity, I know that both This D*mn House and Another D*mn House will be taking advantage of this. We love Behr paint. I'm a big fan of their primer and paint in one, an offering that used to only be available in exterior selections. No more -- it now includes interior, too!

Glidden is good paint, too. Glidden is what was initially used some 20 years ago when This D*mn House was first transformed from a white house to a gray one. For its second painting several years later, we made the mistake of 1) going to a lighter gray and 2) using Sears' Weatherbeater. It barely held up a year and began to look as though we were becoming a white house again!

And, since it sounds like it's going to be beautiful weather around most of the country for this holiday weekend (drastic change for us as it usually pours), you've probably got something that needs painting ...

Spring Into DIY Discounts

I’ve been watching with a little bit of envy as some of you have fully embraced your spring projects. I very much hope to rejoin the DIY brethren soon. This D*mn House is at that phase where something, anything, just has to get done – baby steps toward making it an actual house again!

While I don’t know when exactly that will be, I do know one thing that I will be armed with when it does happen: discounts. We love saving money at This D*mn House. (It’s that much more to put toward the next project!)

Fred and all our friends over at One Project Closer maintain a few posts with the most recent coupons from the major home improvement stores. The first two – courtesy of Home Depot and Lowes – include instructions for getting a 10% off coupon mailed directly to you from each of them. A third, this one for Sears, offers up their latest online deals (like when Kenmore appliances or all things Craftsman go on sale).

Go check it out:
Home Depot Coupons - 10% Off & More
Lowes Coupons - 10% Off & More
Sears Coupons - Appliance Discounts, etc...

These articles contain instructions on getting other deals from these places, too, both online and in-store. Bargainmasters Fred and Ethan do a great job of keeping on top of the lists. Thanks, guys, for making that DIY dollar go even farther!

Healthy Competition

If you are doing a lot of DIY and you haven’t signed up for both Home Depot and Lowe’s Web sites, the bottom line is that you should.

Once you do that, you will start receiving regular “dollars off” coupons. Lowe’s is definitely the most generous of the two. Not only do they send their offers out more often (at least every other month, and sometimes every month) they give you more off and more options to use it. Case in point:

Last week, we received a Lowe’s offer with two cards. One gives you $10 off of $50, the other, $25 off of $250. When we get these, we always use the $10 one. And last time, we even used the $25 one because we’d bought the bathroom tile and the new microwave. We were going to buy these items anyway, so why not claim a free $35 in the process, right?

We’ll no doubt use them both again as the mother wants to buy crown molding for the hall in the basement landing and for the downstairs family room. (I’m hoping there’s going to be a molding sale soon. C’mon Lowe’s, work with me.) We also still need to buy beadboard and chair rail for my bedroom.

Yesterday, a coupon arrived from Home Depot. It offers $15 off a $125 purchase. See, not as generous as the competition. Even so, I may still use it. I’ve got backerboard, adhesive, and grout to buy for the kitchen tile and adhesive and grout for the bathroom tile and I’m not sure which of the two has the best price for what I need. It’s nice to have them competing against each other to get my DIY dollar.

Assuming that I use all three offers from both stores, that’s $50 – off things I have to buy anyway. Here’s another way the Web sites let you save: they’ll email you an offer for a percentage off an online purchase. This saved me $145 off the refrigerator! But it doesn’t always have to be a delivered item. I think I saved $12 last year by ordering bricks and mortar and picking it up in-store. Again, that was stuff I was buying anyway. It’s like getting to pick out your own merchandise to have on sale!

So do yourself a favor and sign up now.

Baby Needs Some Beadboard

In as much as Baby could really use some beadboard, this is an entry to get me in the running for a $100 Home Depot Gift Card. Wouldn’t that be an awesome way to kick off the holiday season? It’s the perfect gift for the DIY-er! (Especially since I should have my own personal parking spot under the contractor canopies at both Home Depot and Lowe's, right?)

If you think so, you can enter too over at Todd’s site, Helpful Advice for Home Construction Improvement. Or, at least, check out his site. Todd’s building a house so he might be able to offer something useful for you. I particularly like his product reviews. And, Todd was gracious enough to offer me a guest column slot earlier this year.

Why, you ask, do I need beadboard? There’s already beadboard up in the kitchen and bathroom, downstairs in the family room, and a stack waiting to go up on the mother’s bedroom walls. Well, I need the beadboard for my bedroom. I think I told you some time back about the lovely toile pattern that is going up in the bedrooms. (The mother’s is black; mine is a wine color.) Really pretty stuff and I can hardly wait to see how it turns out!

With the holidays coming, it would be nice to not have to shell out the money to buy the beadboard! Plus, I should even have a little left over to put toward wallpaper paste. Or toward Liquid Nails adhesive and some finishing nails. Or, some chair rail that will separate the beadboard from the lovely new wallpaper.

Todd doesn’t say how the winner will be selected (whether random or by actual judging). He just wants a blog entry with a link back to the contest. He’s got it!

It sure would be nice to find a little something extra in my stocking this year. At the risk of bragging, I’ve been very, very good this year. And I've got the blog to prove it.

ToolTalk Tuesday: Caulk Gun

The person who coined the old adage about getting what you pay for must have had a caulk gun in mind. I’ve owned many of these over the years, but always a Dollar Store or the cheapest version available from of the hardware stores.

Never again.

I killed my last $1 caulk gun while working on the driveway. I was using the tube crack filler and it just fell apart. The disc part that pushes the tube bottom became inextricably jammed inside the filler itself and the stem fell right out in my hand. It went out with last week’s trash.

I remembered this while working on the shed, fortunately before my last trip to the hardware store. I ducked into the paint department at Home Depot where I was greeted with at least six different guns, ranging in price from around $2 to about $15. With my latest cheap caulk gun experience still fresh in my memory, and knowing that I’ll be wanting to use some Liquid Nails when we get around to working on the bedrooms, I looked right past that $2 model.

Instead, I chose the Workforce brand at $9.97. All I can say is Wow! I used two tubes of adhesive without issues on Sunday. No fighting the full can in or the empty one out of the gun. And no scrambling for a cutter to snip off the edge of the tube. This baby has a cutter built into its handle. Somebody was thinking ahead.

So, if you use your caulk gun regularly, and especially for more than caulk and you don’t have an air compressor version (which I hear are fabulous!) I highly recommend this one. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

Disasters in Pimping

Work began in earnest on Pimp My Shed over the weekend, but the path was fraught with obstacles.

The first challenge was in putting up some framing for the plywood. The problem that started this project, the failing left side, doesn’t provide a lot of options for attaching boards to. I worked around this as best as I could and got almost all of the plywood up on Saturday.

Yesterday’s task was to replace the corners and start getting up the PVC strips. The corners are usually replaced every couple years. I’m not sure when I last did this though. In taking the old ones off, I discovered that a lot of the wood underneath was rotted out. So a job that normally takes an hour total, ended up taking most of the afternoon.

Remember when I was saying a few posts back about I have trouble visualizing? Well this came into play in a big way. I couldn’t see how to fix the problem until I was knee-deep in it. This meant that I had to stop and head to Hardware Heaven yet again on Sunday afternoon. (After having been there both Friday and Saturday nights, I don’t think they’ll be reporting me missing anytime soon. Especially considering that the kid in the paint department at Home Depot looked up at me yesterday and quipped, “Are you back already?”)

In a race against the clock, I got about half the boards up and was still putting stuff away in the dark. I HATE these shorter days. The sun shouldn't start going down before 7 p.m. -- ever.

As it often is with scrapbooking, I was just hitting stride when I had to stop. And while I managed to get the front yard cut on Saturday, I didn’t even get the lawnmower out yesterday to take on the back. And that has got to get done soon. It really is starting to look like a jungle out there!

Maybe one night this week ...

Water and Tar

My evening was filled with both – and a lack of – last night. For the water portion, we’re on a boil order for another 24 hours.

The mother called yesterday to tell me that we had no water. In part, I think it was kind of her way of asking, “Did you pay the water bill?” without asking “Did you pay the water bill?” (Remarkably, not only had I paid the water bill, I paid it early this month. Go figure.)

Our block and some of the surrounding properties have had a continuing series of water issues for months. It was supposedly resolved early in the summer. That effort left a huge hole in front of the neighbor across the alley’s house. They tried for weeks to get it fixed. The water company would say it was the city’s job. The city? They put it back on the water company!

I guess someone agreed to something yesterday as there was a truck and crew on-site (even after I got home last night). That was what caused the water shortage.

When I got home, the mother had moved a lot of stuff from under the carport (included her 80 million $%&^@ flower pots of varying sizes) and had cleaned the front half of the driveway off and swept it down. That was a lot of work and helped me a lot. I had started clearing and crack-filling on the back half Sunday and resumed it again Monday evening. After applying some asphalt primer to the array of oil spots, I think I’m pretty well done back there now.

Now it’s on to the carport and then out to the front half. Did I mention that our driveway is HUGE?! Freakin' ridiculously huge. We could put the whole house on it at least twice!

I ran out of liquid crack-filler, as I knew I would, so shortly after dark, I headed out to get supplies. Much to my dismay, the Sears Hardware closest to me did not have the asphalt caulk OR the liquid filler I like and had been using. Totally out! They did have some gravel patch and I picked that up as well as a cheap bristle applicator.

Home Depot didn’t have the big container of crack-filler either and the caulk cost nearly twice as much. (Though it’s supposed to be better and cover about 25 percent more.) The good news: The mid-grade sealer I decided to buy instead of the cheap stuff? MARKED DOWN! Part of HD’s companywide initiative to compete by marking down prices throughout the store. Saved me $15 so I was pleased. I just hope I bought enough. I did according to the coverage specs, more in fact, but their coverage estimates are rarely accurate.

I've got a half-day of vacation on Friday, so that’s when I’m hoping to get the bulk of actually sealing finished, if not completed. Tonight and tomorrow night’s agenda: serious crack-filling!

FYI: Paint Sale!

'Tis the season for all those painting projects. I always watch for Behr sales and they're doing their few times a year event at The Home Depot now.

Here's the details of the sale which ends July 2. You get $5 off a gallon or $20 off a five-gallon pail.

I got mine during the Memorial Day sale like I do every year, but I may pick up a gallon of primer since the new porch railing that is going up once the brick is done will need it.

Happy painting!

After the Storm (s)

Things began to die down last night as sunset approached. In fact, the sun started peeking through as one of the last heavy showers fell. Me being me, I began searching madly for the rainbow.

I found it.

And then I found the sun shining through my neighbor's rain gauge and thought that was an interesting shot. Looks like we got in excess of 2.5 inches of rain. And we're in for more. In fact, we've already had at least one round this morning, The doppler, though, doesn't show anything else immediate but says there's a 30 percent chance, and that we're possibly in for a thunderstorm.

I hope the chance stays low as I am going to meet Lawrence later to get that new water heater! After some comments on the blog, discussions with some folks at work, and wisdom from Lawrence, I've decided to go with the GE at Home Depot. Lawrence has something going on this morning so I'm going to meet him at the store later. Going a little earlier to get some things I need for other projects.

I spent about two hours last night moving all the gear that has currently taken up residence in the family room (all for future This D*mn House projects) so that we have a clear path in and out of the basement for the great water heater exchange. While that takes a lot off my mind, it puts it a lot on my plate. So, going to grab some breakfast and get the day under way. Yee-hah!

Now That's Customer Service

Do you know why JCPenney (or, for the more chic set, Jacques Penoit) has been in business so long? In two words: customer service.

I was kind of mad at them for a while. I'd made some purchases and then a rather substantial one and EACH time I would get a promotional postcard in the mail afterward for money off what I just bought. It seemed to be more than coincidental. And it made me mad.

Then, the day my most recent substantial order arrived, so did a postcard offering 10 percent off what I had just purchased! I was really mad. So I called them on it. They waffled -- initially. But then they came through.

Not only did they make good on the 10 percent -- they nearly TRIPLED it! I was really excited to say the least. It made up for all the other promotions I'd been cheated out of in the past. I can mark them off of my running list of retailers with whom I have scores to settle. (Top of the list right now are The Home Depot, Staples, and Walgreens.)

Then, Mom decided she didn't like the rug she'd bought for her bedroom after all. So we took it back to JCPenney's. While there, she ordered something else and the clerk asked if we had a promotional free shipping code. We did not. All I could think was "Here we go again." But, the clerk just keyed one in anyway. Turns out, that saved about $16. Cha-ching! Money that can be used on the next disaster at This D*mn House. And rest assured, there will be one.

The moral of this story: ASK. All they can say is yes, right?!