13 | April | 2016 | Design Life Hacks

04.13.2016

0900

As a child, I grew up watching my father fix the house little by little using his collection of tools. This childhood observation conditioned me to understand that owning tools was essential to get any job done around the house. However, any tool owner knows that whatever tool you buy, it comes with a warranty and there will always be a more powerful version of your tool out on the market somewhere at some point in time.

Owning tools can be quite costly and takes up a great deal of space. If you are a collector of tools and owning tools is essential to your day-to-day routine, then by all means, I think keeping them is the best decision. However, I am not a part of that population. I love to fix up my home and there’s a great satisfaction when I finish a job, but I don’t like to maintain tools nor do I like the amount of space they can take up.

The concept of borrowing, sharing and renting tools is not new, in fact, it’s quite old. There’s a level of trust and blind faith you must have in order to hand over your valuable tool to someone who may or may not know how to use it correctly. This idea of sharing tools creates a larger library of tools for any community in which the members understand who owns which tools and opens the communication lines between neighbors. By teaching each other how to use tools properly may in fact bond a community in a very unique way. Home owners, renters and potential home owners understand the frustration of maintaining a home so that bond in itself is unique. I personally have a numerous conversations with friends and family about how I prepare my home for each season of the year. Between the list of what tasks needs to be done to what tasks have yet to be done, neighbors young and old understand the need for certain tools and how to go about obtaining them.

Sometimes you only need to use a tool once or just use a specific tool once in a while so renting it may be a better idea. Some tools are not expensive and by owning all of the tools that you could possibly need, shuts you off from your neighbors. Granted, perhaps you’re the guy who everyone goes to in order to borrow tools, and in that scenario, you’ll be everyones’ ‘go-to person’ when it comes to tool inquiry. When you borrow/share/rent tools, it forces you to step outside and talk to one another.

We all know how to survive on our own, some of us are better at it than others, but part of me asks the question, how do we survive with each other? Borrowing and sharing tools is a small task to conquor “surving with one another”, but I think it opens a door of communitcation with one another.

There are programs designed to allow you to rent tools such as Loan-A-Tool from AutoZone or Cresco Equipment Rental.

Tools I borrow: