5 Things That Just Feel Strange To Buy From Home Depot

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The overwhelming majority of shoppers at Home Depot go there for tools, parts, lumber, building materials, and maybe the odd appliance or two. Even the garden center puts up pretty respectable numbers. Generally speaking, when you're gearing up for a trip to Home Depot, it's a targeted trip where you know what you're looking for before you walk out the door, which is perfectly okay. Home Depot too has made quite a lot of money on that type of shopping.

However, as with most retailers these days, Home Depot has spent a considerable amount of time diversifying, either by buying up companies, or by expanding its e-commerce efforts to include other types of products. You can find some odd stuff here and there at Home Depot, like the seasonal pumpkins for carving, but you probably won't see too many strange things just walking around the store. That particular treasure trove is almost exclusively online.

So, if you haven't walked around the virtual Home Depot lately, you may be surprised about what you can find there. Here are some products you can buy from Home Depot right now that feel a little weird buying from a hardware store. Do note that we don't take The Company Store or Blinds.com products into consideration here because, while Home Depot owns those brands, they maintain their own storefronts.

This one isn't necessarily new, but it's still a little goofy. Home Depot sells paper towels and toilet paper directly to consumers. Unlike most of the items on this list, you can actually find these in store next to the cleaning products, which we'll include here as an honorary mention. The paper towels largely make sense. It's nice to have a roll of those in your garage for checking oil or wiping something off. You usually want something a little more robust, like a box of white rags, which are much thicker than kitchen-use paper towels.

Home Depot leans into this as well. They own the brand HDX, which has its own line of paper towels that you can buy one roll at a time if you so choose. That one sits on the shelf right next to the Bounty paper towels that are often prominently featured in store, at least in stores near me.

The more curious product, though, is toilet paper. Home Depot sells Charmin and other brands, often in store. While I certainly appreciate the broad availability of quality of toilet paper, picking one up at the local hardware store is just flat weird, unless it's during a product shortage. Few people have ever gone shopping for a hammer, a shovel, and toilet paper all at the same time, but apparently it happens often enough to warrant selling all in the same stores.

You can buy all manner of fun gadgets at Home Depot, but full sets of kitchen tools and cooking supplies isn't something you'd expect to see in a hardware store. Home Depot has all sorts of kitchen stuff, way more than you would think. That includes cookware like stainless steel, non-stick, and cast-iron pots, pans, and skillets. You can also get baking sheets, bundt cake pans, cupcake pans, and basically anything else you can think of to outfit an entire kitchen with cooking surfaces. Most of the brands aren't terribly recognizable aside from the odd Rachel Ray or Cuisinart listing, but if you look around long enough, you can find all sorts of things.

This extends into kitchen gadgets as well. Many of these are a giant waste of money, but you can find some useful stuff too, like waffle makers, countertop griddles, blenders, and things like that. The brands for these products are typically on par with what you'd find at Target, Best Buy, or other retailers where you would normally go to shop for this stuff.

Usually, Home Depot is a place where you go to buy things to fix your kitchen, not stock it with everyday cooking items. And yet, clear as day, Home Depot has so many of these products that you can outfit an entire kitchen if you wanted.

Home Depot also sells sporting goods, although not quite in the same way as a dedicated sporting goods store or a variety store like Walmart would. You can't find things like balls, bats, hockey sticks, gloves, skates, or any of that stuff at Home Depot. We checked. What you can find, though, are secondary and tertiary pieces of equipment that kind of stick out like a sore thumb in Home Depot's lineup. These include things like full-sized basketball hoops, both portable and permanent, hockey nets with practice targets, and even pop-up batting cages.

This is a rather strange assortment of sporting goods, and it's a little weird that Home Depot doesn't lean into it a little more. These products seem like they're mostly for establishments, like recreation centers or batting cages, rather than for someone at home. That's the only explanation I can come up with for why Home Depot would sell a ball rack, but no balls to put on the rack.

Generally speaking, you can find all of this stuff at a proper sporting goods store like Dick's Sporting Goods while also being able to get the entire assortment of things you'd need to play sports, and some other things that might come in handy. It doesn't make any sense to go to Home Depot to buy a hoop and then to another store to buy a ball. You may as well just get everything in one spot.

If you search for urine at Home Depot, the first thing you'll be met with is pet cleaners. The selection is actually pretty good, and includes brands like Nature's Miracle, which I've been using for years to clean up after my dogs. Those are weird enough to get from a hardware store since pet stores exist, but we already talked about cleaning products earlier. If you keep scrolling and keep your eyes peeled, however, you'll run into something even weirder. You can buy actual urine from Home Depot.

There are two main use cases for owning a jug of urine. The first is hunting. Hunters use it to mask the scent of humans and to attract deer, making them easier to hunt. However, wildlife authorities have been banning the use of urine over the last two decades to help contain the spread of chronic wasting disease in deer and elk. That's why the urine you can find at Home Depot is not for hunting.

The urine sold at Home Depot is actually for home use and comes from the many predators native to North America, like foxes, coyotes, and wolves. You spray this along the outskirts of your property to keep those predators from getting inside and damaging your house, lawn, pets, or livestock, if you have any. There's nothing unusual about this, but no matter how you swing it, logging onto a hardware store to buy a gallon of urine is a little strange.

Arguably the weirdest thing that you really don't expect to find at a hardware store is an alcohol still. These are designed for brewing your own adult beverage, however in the U.S. the distillation of alcohol at home is still generally illegal on a federal level. You may need a permit to use one of these machines for distilling alcohol. The distillers available at Home Depot all aren't name brands, but they seem to work just fine for most users.

You can also buy the airtight bottles used to seal in the carbon dioxide when brewing beer, making Home Depot a one-stop-shop for this kind of equipment. You can also get fermentation bottles. These have airlocks at the top to let gasses escape and are normally used for things like sourdough starters and pickling, but can be used to make mead as well. Home Depot also sells mason jars if you need something to store your mead. Just make sure to sanitize them first.

Home Depot never really comes across as a place to go for making your own alcohol, but it does have a surprising amount of equipment for the endeavor. The only downside is that it doesn't have yeast or any of the other ingredients you need to actually make these things, so you'll have to get those elsewhere.