• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, September 14, 2010

Faced with a reluctant recovery, Lowe's says it's rethinking the way it forecasts consumer spending, coming to terms with smaller scale, DIY projects for people who are staying in their homes longer and longer.

"We're bouncing along the bottom, and while we first thought we'd see an improvement in consumer spending in the first half of the year, we're now pushing that expectation of the housing recovery back a quarter or two, into the second half," Robert Niblock, CEO of Lowe's, told investors attending the Goldman Sachs Seventeenth Annual Global Retailing Conference, which was also webcast.

But he also said that the historical assumption that a stronger housing market automatically translates into higher comparable store sales for chains like Lowe's just isn't holding up in this economy. "In the past, the value of the home was generally being maintained, but now that the value of their home has dropped, that offsets some spending," he says.