Why? Although he is likely to get the same or less than he paid for his current house, the price of a new place also is lower. And he might never recoup the cost of an addition at resale.
With about 40 days off between mid-October and early December, I decided to take care of a few things around the house: a new vanity for the first-floor bathroom, and doing something about the corner of the basement I've been describing as my office but that I share with crickets and the spiders that eat them.
This meant many trips to Home Depot and Lowe's, neither of which I had visited regularly in recent years. I expected to have both places to myself, given the condition of the real estate market and the surprising sluggishness of the home-improvement market.
I was wrong about Home Depot. After a couple of experiences dealing with crowds of consumers and contractors, I limited my visiting time to before 7 a.m. and after 1 p.m.
Maneuvering in Lowe's was easier, but I think that had more to do with location. My nearest Home Depot is in the same shopping center as a Wegmans (where I also shop in the off-hours, and for the same reason as at Home Depot), while the Lowe's I use is a bit too distant from the nearest mall for it to be of much use.
That may be Lowe's problem. A lot of them popped up nearby after Home Depot arrived, which is understandable in a boom market but problematic in a bust. Lowe's' fiscal third-quarter profits fell 44 percent, the company reported last month, owing to the cost of closing 20 underperforming stores.
Home Depot's third-quarter profits rose 12 percent - with its performance stronger than Lowe's for the last nine quarters. Home Depot is a much larger company, and a good chunk of that increase resulted from repair/replacement sales after Hurricane Irene.
