It is amazing the wealth of info that is stored there.

Swing by the LSU or McNeese book store and look for Principles of Real Estate, a college class on RE, it's an easy read.

Unfortunately, the only way we felt 100% comfortable with location was being there frequently before we bought our first one, spending weekends driving down, visiting local open houses, farmers markets, grocery stores, parks, reading local paper (which you can do online, so that one may be helpful to you) & watching local news, finding a good agent who lived there his whole life and new the micro-areas.

I don't care about paint, i will mix them to make new colors sometimes, lol.Tile is the only way i go in bathrooms and i get that at the re store also.http://www.habitat.org/restores/default.aspx

Your "real hardware store" or lumberyard for contractors definitely has them.

Ask a store to stay open till one minute past 5:00 PM and they act like you just asked for their firstborn.The entitlement mentality has got to go.

This is true for certain retail but not all.Retail is actually picking up speed.The issue isn't the stores are not doing sales.The issue is they built a really big footprint and then things went online not requiring the same space anywhere.Retail development has downsized more now for many aspects.Brick and mortar is not going away but evolving.

Just locate some vendor local to you using the internet, then go into the bricks-and-mortar store to buy.

He doesn't add in the two rentable garages, which are currently being used by the Gideons, my father let them store Bibles in there for free.

I buy most of my materials from the big box stores.