I DON’T own a home. I live under tenuous circumstances in a dilapidated rental apartment in Brooklyn. I still decorate with art from friends, furniture plucked from the street, and piles of books in precarious Dr. Seuss-like stacks.

The Home Depot on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, a giant three-floor wedding cake of a space, can be seductive to someone like me. It’s layered with everything you could possibly want in order to spruce up, renovate or maybe even build a house. You could walk around the vast space for more than an hour, as I did, and keep adding things to your personal job jar until you have enslaved yourself for the next 10 years.

Not only that, you will fantasize of some future time when your credit history isn’t so dubious and you have a home that needs all the available flooring, counter space, window treatments and tile. Soon, sauntering through Home Depot, you will have created a hideously gaudy Siegfried and Roy mansion in your mind.

Carpets are immediately to the right as you enter. There are many choices, even intense-length shag styles and extreme colors like Mystical Night and Scented Sachet. Lighting is to the left, a glowing menagerie of wall sconces, track lighting and lamps, including a Disney plastic Tinker Bell lamp ($49.97) that would be cute if it didn’t look as if it might be recalled next week for containing lead. A flex-arm lamp ($34.92) has pinwheel-shape shades in purple, pink and green, and went from tacky to kitsch and back again as I stood there looking at it.

At the flooring section nearby I was dazzled by the polished stones in the Solistone decorative pebble collection. The designs have names like Rumi, White Onyx and Turkish Amberet, along with an accompanying photo of a pebble-walled bathroom in erotic midnight blue that looked suitable for the Pamela Anderson-Rick Salomon honeymoon suite in Las Vegas.

If you happen to be replacing the front door of your third home, I found an aisle of grand handles and locks. The doorknobs in the Baldwin Estate collection have names of upscale areas that are strangely evocative: Kensington, Roanoke, Pasadena. The Edinburgh, a traditional gated-community-style door handle, is an evocative $688.

I hung around this section to see the Manhattanites who would come to Home Depot for such a door treatment, but they never appeared. Maybe the Baldwin Estate collection is merely for show, or maybe it’s finally true that New York City has become an upper-middle-class suburb.

I spent a long time staring at the faucets, which are mostly in the $200 to $400 range, from traditional two-handled bathroom-sink styles to those contrived, inefficient gushing troughs you might find in an overdesigned Thai fusion restaurant. Next to this are shower heads. Most notable is a display for the VertiSpa, which has a normal apparatus along with five adjustable nozzles that shoot water vertically down your body ($279).

“Why settle for an ordinary shower?” reads the display’s tag line. Yeah, you’re right, VertiSpa, why should I settle? I am so incredibly far from owning property, but the Depot was giving me fix-and-flip fantasies, a sentiment that carries a lot of weight these days.

Like the rest of the country, Home Depot is feeling the effects of the subprime loan crisis. The chain reported a 14.8 percent drop in second-quarter profit this year, and this could just be the beginning. An estimated two million foreclosures are expected by 2009, with an associated property loss of $106 billion. That could mean far fewer people putting Edinburgh doorknobs on their doors. You can’t help think, as you walk through this gigantic store with its optimistic orange You Can Do It banners, that you may be observing the first glimpse of a soon-to-be-bygone era when everyone thought homes were risk-free investments.

The employees reflect this national nervousness as well. Some were friendly and nice, but many seemed erratic, unsure, moody. I overheard two employees talking about how they were being badly scheduled, and at the garden center, inexplicably placed in the basement where there is no direct sunlight, I watched a customer plop a large metal planter in front of an employee who was replanting a fern and heard the following exchange:

Customer: “Do you know how much this is?”

Employee: “No.”

“Oh. Are there other planters around that are this size?”

“No.” Pause. “Are you going to get that one?”

“Well ... if I knew how much it was, I would consider it.”

Not everything here feels rife with portent. Downstairs among the tools, paint, shelving and other more hands-on items, I actually bought stuff. I found a 75-sheet tub of Clorox Disinfecting Wipes (perhaps the best cleaning innovation so far in this millennium) for only $4.99.

Under the store’s Eco Options section for cleaning supplies, I found a bottle of OdoBan Bowl Control Organic Acid Cleaner. In April, Home Depot created the Eco Options distinction for about 2,500 products, which also includes fluorescent bulbs, sustainable woods and natural insect killers. I’m sure my snobby eco-conscious friends would find something on the label to scoff at, but at $4.39, I was relieved to find something even slightly organic that wasn’t as insanely expensive as the precious tubes and bottles you find at Whole Foods. It’s commendable of Home Depot to carry cheap, environmentally sound products so you don’t have to stand there deciding whether to buy a $15 bottle of toilet cleaner or murder everything in the ocean.

The office section, also downstairs, is inspiring. It has large willow basket “tuckaways,” which, at $12.94, are less than half the price of similar baskets at the Container Store. A Leaning Bookcase, which looks like a ladder with shelves ($59.97), is either very cool or will soon look as dated as those dumb CD towers I used to own. After a lot of calculation, I bought five corner shelves in a honey color ($8.97 each) and an electric screwdriver ($19.99).

Upstairs at the large bank of cashiers, I began to notice everyone else’s purchases, people holding paintbrushes and shelves and light fixtures. It was comforting to see their minor ambitions. One after another, we bought our hopeful little improvement projects and walked out into the autumn night of our subprime lives.