I've returned exactly one tool since we bought the house. I've thought about returning several others, mostly at 11 p.m. while staring at a receipt, but only one actually went back in its box. Two years in, the tool tab in the house sheet is long enough that I can tell what earned its money and what didn't.
(Tessa turns 30 today. She's at work cleaning teeth, and she asked that this post not be about her, so it's about a stepladder.)
Rebuy: the Kreg pocket-hole jig
I bought the Kreg jig last August for $40, mostly because I needed to build a workbench and didn't trust myself to cut real joints. It drills an angled hole so a screw can pull two boards together, and it's about the most forgiving joinery there is for someone like me.
It has paid for itself several times. The 8-foot garage workbench was its first project, and that bench is still rock solid after a year of abuse. Since then the jig has built the small bench in my basement workshop corner and, last month, the boot bench by the side door. Every one of those would have been a wobbly, over-screwed mess without it.
The downside, honestly: pocket screws look bad anywhere you can see them, and each board thickness needs its own screw length, so I now own five boxes of Kreg screws. That's the real ongoing cost of the jig. It's still the best $40 in the tool tab.
Rebuy: the 6-foot fiberglass stepladder
I bought our Werner 6-foot fiberglass stepladder in September 2024 for $139, after standing in the ladder aisle for twenty minutes trying to talk myself into a cheaper aluminum one. Gary's line from the day my wobbly wooden one went to the curb was still in my head: "Buy once, cry once." I cried a little at the register.
After the drill, it's the tool I use most. It held me while I clipped Christmas lights at the corners of the eaves in November, painted the sloped upstairs bedroom in February and swapped the kitchen light fixtures in April. Fiberglass doesn't conduct electricity, which I think about every time I'm working near wires, even with the breaker off and the tester saying the circuit is dead.
It's heavier than aluminum, and Tessa thinks it's ugly. Both true. It's also stable enough that I don't think about it while I'm on it, and for a guy who gets nervous above about 12 feet, not thinking about the ladder is the whole point.
Returned: the phone thermal camera
Last October, a few weeks after our energy assessment, I spent $229 on a thermal camera that plugs into a phone. I'd seen the assessor's images and wanted to find every cold spot in the house myself. For about three evenings, it was fascinating. The knee walls glowed purple. Outlets on exterior walls showed up as little blue squares. Moose was a bright yellow blob that wouldn't hold still.
The trouble was that it showed me where things were cold and nothing about why, or what to do about it. The blower door test had already told us more: a hard number (2,950 CFM50 before the insulation, 2,080 after) and a list of where the air was coming in. And when I went draft hunting at the start of November, a thirty-cent incense stick found the actual leaks around doors and outlets better than the camera had. The smoke goes sideways. There's no arguing with it.
The camera went back in its box in early November, inside the return window, and I handed it over with a little embarrassment. I don't think it's a bad product. For someone chasing one specific problem, like a hidden leak in a wall, it might be exactly right. For us it was a $229 way to look at things we already knew about.
The column that came out of it
The tool tab already had a column for "could I borrow this from Gary?" After the camera, I added one more: "what question will this answer that I can't answer now?" If I can't fill it in, I don't buy the tool.
Gary's column gets a workout this weekend. His roofing nailer is going up on our garage roof Saturday morning, along with my dad, my nerves and a harness I'm told I won't need.
