FEATURES:
- Ceiling fans
- Nursery
- Sheer and unrelenting possibility
I thought we had come to the Home Depot to replace the metal numbers on my mother’s
mailbox. But the problem we bring is not the problem we leave with. We walk down an aisle full of toilets, sinks, and light switches. Inexplicably, we are soon considering a patio repaving. And then new carpet for my brother’s bedroom, and a garage conversion. At the Home Depot, home improvement dreams begin to look like a matter of elbow grease and the right YouTube video.
We are in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, at the location closest to my parents’ house. As with many Home Depot stores, getting here is convenient if you have a car—I-295 and US Route 1 south will drop you off at its doorstep—but if you don’t, good luck. The area is blighted with three-lane highways meant to ferry you exclusively between Chik-fil-A, the Oxford Valley Mall, BJ’s, Sesame Place, and the suburbs.
We linger in the lighting aisle. It is easy to overlook the surreality of the Home Depot warehouse, where the components of a home have been dissected, taxonomized, and put on display. I look up at forty fans and chandeliers suspended from the ceiling, turned on for our comparative viewing pleasure. A house and a home are not the same, but under the ungodly glow of light fixtures for forty different houses, I can imagine one for our home.
I try to talk my mother out of the repaving, as it seems beyond her physical capabilities, given that she has just had knee-replacement surgery. But I realize that to think practically is to misunderstand the Home Depot’s appeal. This place is about fantasy. And unlike IKEA, where the fantasy is pre-dreamed for you, Home Depot implores you to think bigger. What it lacks in editorial direction, it makes up for in sheer and unrelenting possibility.
Yet the Home Depot is also stubbornly real: home improvement quickly becomes bogged down by the particularities of hex bolts versus carriage bolts, or the appropriate type of caulk needed to seal gaps in your windows. Everything is harder to do than you think it is.
But actually some things are easier to do than you’d think! This is what my mom believes, at least. In the past, buoyed by the dreams of change, my mother and I have, with the help of the Home Depot, installed a new butcher-block counter; repainted her bedroom, and mine; resurfaced the kitchen cabinetry; created a shelving system for the laundry room; replaced the flooring in our covered patio; revitalized a dying garden bed; and evicted a groundhog from beneath a shed.
We emerge from the dark, sawdusty warehouse into my favorite part of the store: the tranquil open air of the Home Depot’s nursery. Here we learn that nature’s elements—soil, stones, plants—come in near-infinite, branded varieties. If you are looking, for example, to repave your patio, as we seem to be, again, you will find not only brick pavers, but also Gravalock, Techno Earth, Wellco, and VEVOR synthetic grid systems. Nearby, a squadron of garden fountains trickles water in a tsunami of Zen, and my mom asks an attendant the difference between gardening soil, houseplant soil, and organic soil: “Isn’t it all just dirt?”
I wait by the mums and watch the sliding door into the warehouse open and close. When we were young, my mom used to bring me and my brothers to the Home Depot for free crafts workshops. We would ice skate with our sneakers on the sawdust floors. With soft mallets and Elmer’s glue, we built birdhouses, storage boxes, and little trains. We wrote our names on the complimentary orange aprons, and the Sharpie bled through the thin fabric. All these things are still at my parents’ place. If you look carefully, next to the laundry-room shelves, in a box sitting on the laminate flooring we installed twenty years ago, you’ll find three mini birdhouses, shoddily constructed, lovingly preserved.
