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.