Tips for buying home improvement tools and products.
- If you’re looking for inexpensive tools, Harbor Freight is the place to go. Just keep in mind they can be not as durable as major brand tools. Many are good enough for the average user. The product reviews right on their website are very helpful to avoid the complete junk. There is some complete junk there.
- Another good option for inexpensive tools and higher quality are garage and estate sales. Used of course. Pawn shops can have good deals on simple hand tools but other things could be overpriced.
- For hard to find items try Grainger. They have local distribution centers so you can get free shipping.
- For hard to find building products that you can’t find from stores like Grainer or MSC, ask your local home improvement store or lumber yard. They often can order from the commercial building product distributors. Down side is that you’ll likely need to buy a large quantity. Try selling what you don’t use on Craig’s List.
- Craig’s List is another good way of buying building products and used tools. Sometimes people will give some things away so they don’t have to throw them out. Here’s a key safety tip for large transactions: Find out if a police station in the area allows transactions to take place in a monitored parking lot. More and more are doing this. If you do that, cash is the best bet. You never know if someone is going to give you a forged check or steal your account number off yours.
- Safety Tested: When looking for deals on electrical products make sure they are UL (Underwriters Laboratories) or ETL tested. They safety test a wide array of products often for fire safety. You can look up products to verify actually tested by going to s.ul.com/OCD or Intertek ETL.
- There are of course the obvious choices of Sears, Lowes, Home Depot, and Amazon. ACE Hardware can often have sales that are very price competitive too and they have coupons. Lowes coupons are not easy to come by. You can sign up to get them if you’re moving but it takes a while. Home Depot will honor Lowes coupons as well. Also check price matching. More and more stores will actually price match Amazon.