COVID inspires home improvement projects
Local stores have seen a surge in sales during the pandemic
Since mid-March when the coronavirus pandemic hit all of us right between the eyes, everyone has been spending much more time at home. That has given people plenty of time to think about and start undertaking home improvement projects.
At least three local home improvement stores can testify to that. Gillespie’s Abbey Carpet and Floor in Fairfield and Vacaville’s Pacific Ace Hardware and Meek’s Lumber and Hardware have all seen a big uptick in sales.
“I think people were sitting at home not being able to work,” said Scott McKenzie, co- owner with his cousin David of Pacific Ace Hardware, “and probably look at their living room wall and thought, ‘I’ve been looking at that ugly color for ten years and I’m not doing anything. So I might as well get some paint and brushes and rollers and paint that thing.”
In addition to paint, McKenzie said gardening sales have also been big.
“People who had never grown tomatoes and peppers and various plants were doing it because they’re home and they were experimenting,” he said. “People who were doing it anyway were doing
it more… People were just gardening like you’ve never seen before. And the funny thing is that down the road you would have canning jar shortages because you had more people canning than they ever had.”
Monte Hoover, president and general manager of Gillespie’s, noted, “People are spending more time at home. Some of them are working from home, some are educating their kids from home. So they want to create an environment that is conducive to those things. With home improvements, a lot of time they get procrastinated over with other things like a nice vacation to Europe or the Caribbean or maybe there are graduation parties, weddings. There are always other things until finally they say, ‘ Enough is enough, we’ve got to do the home improvements.’
“And it’s staring them right in the face. They’re sitting there looking at it. It’s created a large demand and it’s not just for floor coverings. It’s all services that deal with home maintenance, home improvements. I have a lot of associates that I work with in the trades that are experiencing the same things — plumbers, electricians, the list goes on and on.”
Patrick Daily. general manager of Meek’s, said that about a month after the March lockdown, many customers began to come to his store looking for fence and deck materials.
“What I attributed that to,” he said, “is people just sitting at home being bored looking around, going, ‘Hey, you know what? That fence is falling down. Our deck is looking crummy. Let’s fix it.’”
All three stores have remained open since midMarch because they are deemed essential businesses.
“We didn’t (close in March) because we are essential, thankfully, and we are when you think about it,” McKenzie said. “If somebody’s water heater goes out or their oven disconnect doesn’t work or their toilet doesn’t flush, we’d have a real problem, right? Being essential gave us an opportunity to work through it, so we never shut down.”
After a lull in March, the business started to boom at Pacific Ace Hardware.
“About the first week of April we were starting to get really busy and it went through about two months of just a line down through the store almost out the back door,” McKenzie recalled. “We were trying to keep up. Everybody was working as hard as they could, people working extra shifts, extra hours, extra days.”
Hoover said of business at Gillespie’s, “It’s been pretty strong other than the first eight weeks of the shutdown back in March. Business dropped off significantly because people were kind of in shock, what to do, they’re stuck at home. And then after that it’s been pretty strong.”
Daily experienced the same trend at Meek’s.
“When COVID really first got going, we’re an essential business, we were open, but it was dead,” he said, “hardly anybody was coming in. About three or four weeks into it, we began seeing people come in… In the spring and summer we had people coming in and going, ‘Hey, I’ve never been in here, it looks kind of cool,’ and we were like, ‘ Well, come back!’
“There were supply issues in that some of the manufacturers had shut down their facilities because of COVID. So the supply dwindled but the demand stayed or even increased a little bit. Even some of the bigger box stores were running out. We’d get calls frequently from people saying, ‘ Hey, do you have fence boards?’ And we’d say, ‘ Yeah, come on down and get them.’”
McKenzie said there were supply issues at his store as well.
“The struggle was we were running out of hardware,” he remarked. “Ace Hardware was hav ing trouble keeping up. People would see something on Pinterest, something with pipe fittings, for example, a little cute coat holder or cup holder. And then a thousand people would come in looking for those parts.”
None of the three store ow ners/ managers were complaining, however.
McKenzie, who said the phones were ringing incessantly, called that “a great problem to have.”
“We’re very grateful (for the increase in business),” Hoover said. “We feel very humbled by it as well as we feel empathy for industries that are suffering… We do a lot of countertop work. Kitchen and bathroom remodels are big, but also home offices and we’ve done a few home theaters. Some are just redoing their whole house from top to bottom, painting, putting in new floors, new baseboards… We have a lot of homes in this area that are in that 20-30 year time frame that people bought new. They still live there and they are due for updates.”
T he colder, damper weather makes some construction projects untenable.
“There is definitely a seasonality to all construction,” Daily said. “This time of year with the holidays and the weather things always slow down. If it’s raining out you can’t dig, you can’t pour concrete.”
But people are still planning and starting home improvement projects as COVID conditions are now similar to what they were in March.
Hoover said, “I can’t tell you how many people say, ‘ Well, our vacation this year obviously isn’t happening so we decided instead of waiting to do the floors next year we’re doing them this year and we’ll go travel next year when things get better.’”