Without the packaging materials, everything flops all over the place in a very frightening way. The thing about French doors is that they are heavy glass and steel units attached to a thin and flimsy wooden frame. We started sliding the door out onto the cart. Without blinking, the guy said he would be happy to do so (I find that this happens almost every time, since these stores often have a hard time unloading damaged goods).įrom there, things got even better. I made sure to ask the question in a buddy-buddy way rather than an entitled-customer way, adding that I would fully understand if he didn’t feel it was an appropriate deal for him. So I showed my 15% coupon for Home Depot to the department manager, and said this: “Would you be willing to sell us this damaged door on the end for $529, minus the 15% discount that HD is offering, with another $100 taken off for the damage?”. Found a lower price on an identical item at Lowe’s? Take a picture and show it to HD, and see what they do. Got a 15% off coupon for HD? It will work just as well at Lowe’s. Not everyone knows this, but Lowe’s and Home Depot have a policy of always honoring each other’s coupons and matching prices. Step 2: Play the stores against each other: I was now ready to find a store employee and make my pitch. I did a quick web search on my phone and learned that this particular model of door normally sells for $629. The door was also a better-known brand: Jeld-wen instead of Reliabuilt. Plus the packaging material is gone, it’s dirty, and it looks like bad news in general.īut it had an intriguing feature that really appealed to GMM – internal blinds which are sealed between the two glass panels, meaning no need to buy separate blinds, easier operation and no cleaning. But there was also this one door sitting all alone at the end of the line:Īs you can see from the picture, the whole top piece of that door’s jamb has come separated from the side piece. Similar doors at similar prices, but more of the “left hand inswings” in stock. Heading to the exterior doors department in Lowe’s, we found a much better scene. Next stop: the competing Lowe’s just a mile down the road. Normally at this point, I’d just place an order for a new-condition door with the millwork desk, but since I’m only in town for a few more days, and we had traveled over 10 miles in the construction van specifically to get an in-stock door, we decided to have another crack at finding something. This was non-standard stuff and would create more than $100 of hassle to replace, so I decided to call off the deal. Everything looked great (or at least patchable) until I noticed that the specialized bottom weatherstripping was missing from one of the door panels. With the rest of the door now visible, I inspected it carefully for damage. So together we slid the bulky 150-pound door unit off its shelf and onto our lumber cart. I found the department manager and with no negotiation at all, got $100 off of the door, and he agreed to throw in a replacement rolling screen unit from the same aisle, retail price $79. Look around to find any one-off or returned product that has what you need, then ask a store employee what sort of discount they can offer on the scratch’n’dent unit. Step One: If possible, find a discountable product: So we decided to activate Step One in the Hacking Home Depot plan: Packaging materials were gone, frame and sill were dirty, screen was missing. The only problem was that the sole unit in stock had obviously been bought and then returned by another customer. Low-E glass, energy star, the whole deal. Reviewing the selection of doors in HD, we found what we needed: a 6-foot-wide by 80″ high set of doors, with a left-hand inswing on the primary door. We strategically chose a Home Depot location that was close to a branch of its biggest competitor – Lowe’s. So we decided to start our shopping there. When I got to her house last week, GMM had already clipped a Home Depot coupon offering 15% off of all exterior doors. When you add in the fact that this area has a rainy climate with fairly cold snowy winters, we figured it would be quite a significant upgrade to pop in a set of new steel-clad glass doors with energy-star insulation rating and low-E/Argon-filled glass panes, solving all the problems in one go. Plus, both doors tended to develop fog between their glass panes in winter. There was already a set of circa-1992 doors in place, but one of them had partially rotted away due to repeated water and insect exposure. So this week, I installed a new set of french doors out to the back patio at my Mom’s house here in downtown Hamilton (that’s Grandma Money Mustache to you). Because of the Nagging Voices of Success, I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m at my happiest when I get to accomplish something useful at least once every week or so. Money Mustache likes to spice up his long summer vacations with occasional carpentry projects.
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