On Memorial Day, while the burgers were still thawing, I dumped the kitchen junk drawer onto the table. Out came a year's worth of receipts: Menards slips with the 11 percent rebate stubs still attached, Harbor Freight receipts that had faded almost blank, and a couple of screenshots of Marketplace messages I'd printed for no good reason. I wanted to know which of the tools we'd bought since closing actually earned their spot in the garage.
I made two piles. One for tools I grab almost every week. One for tools that have mostly been sitting in their packaging, waiting for a project that keeps not happening.
The pile I use every week
The DeWalt 20V drill and impact driver technically don't belong in this post, since I bought the kit on Black Friday in 2023, months before we owned a house. But they're the most-used tools I own by a wide margin. Curtain rods, a wobbly stair railing, the new spigot this month, every flat-pack piece of furniture in the office. If I could only keep one thing in the garage, it would be that kit.
After that, in order of how often they come off the shelf:
- Ridgid 12-gallon shop vac ($99 last summer). Garage floor, basement cobwebs, drilling dust, the dirt Moose tracks in. Moose considers it his personal enemy and leaves any room it enters, which is its own kind of usefulness.
- Klein non-contact voltage tester and outlet tester. Cheap and used constantly. Some of our upstairs outlets are old two-wire circuits, and I don't touch a switch or a fixture until the breaker is off and the tester stays quiet.
- Werner 6-foot fiberglass stepladder ($139 in September). More on this one below.
- The used 24-foot extension ladder ($90 on Marketplace) for the gutters at the low Cape eaves, and the $59 roof rake from February, which earned its money in a single week of ice dams.
The pile still in the box
This pile is smaller, but it stings more.
Exhibit A is a corded random orbital sander kit from Harbor Freight, $39, still in its shrink wrap with a pack of discs. I bought it last fall during a burst of confidence about refinishing the kitchen cabinets. The cabinets are 1994 oak, and we've talked about painting them roughly once a month since, but the talking hasn't turned into a weekend yet. The sander is waiting.
Exhibit B is a 100-piece drill and driver bit set. I use about six of the pieces. The other ninety-four are very organized.
Exhibit C is a tool I didn't buy, which might be the best decision in the whole drawer. Last summer I had a tile saw in my online cart for about a hundred dollars because I'd convinced myself we should regrout or even replace the pink 1952 tile in the bathroom. Then we lived with it for a few months and realized we like it. The pink tile with the black trim stays. The tile saw stays at the store.
In my day job, we'd call the second pile dead stock: inventory you paid for that isn't moving and probably won't. The fix at work is the same as the fix at home, which is to stop buying ahead of demand.
The ladder lesson
For most of our first summer I used a wooden stepladder from my parents' basement. It wobbled on the second step and creaked on the third. I put up with it because it was free. Then it shifted under me while I was changing the light over the basement stairs, I grabbed the railing, and that was that.
Gary was in his driveway when I carried it out to the curb. He looked at it, then at me, and said, "Buy once, cry once." That's his answer to most tool questions, and it was the push I needed to spend $139 on a fiberglass Werner instead of $45 on another light aluminum one. It's heavy and it's ugly orange and I trust it completely, which is not a sentence I say about many ladders. I don't like being up high, so the ladder that doesn't move is worth more to me than almost anything else on the list.
The other lesson came from Gary's garage itself, which has a tool for every job and is generously open to me. Before I buy anything now, I ask him first. If he has it and I'll use it once, I borrow it. If I'd use it every month, I buy a decent one.
The rule I wrote at the top of the tool tab in the house sheet is short: no tool gets bought until the project is on the calendar. The sander is still in the box. Tessa says the cabinets can wait until after the wedding, which I am choosing to hear as a maybe.
