Tools Every New Homeowner Actually Needs (and Which to Borrow)

You get the keys, and within about a week the house starts asking for tools. A curtain rod here. A loose hinge there. A shelf that has to go up before the in-laws visit. The reflex is to drive to the hardware store and buy whatever the project needs — and then do it again next weekend for the next project. Six months in, you've got a garage full of tools you've each used exactly once.

There's a cleaner way to think about it. A small handful of tools earn their place; you'll reach for them constantly. Everything else is occasional, expensive, and mostly just storage. Here's how I'd sort the pile.

The small kit worth owning

Buy these once, buy them halfway decent, and you're set for years.

• A cordless drill/driver. This is the one. You'll use it the day you move in and roughly every weekend after. Don't agonize over the brand — an 18V kit from anyone reputable is fine.
• A 25-foot tape measure. Get two. One of them will always be in the other room.
• A real screwdriver set. Phillips and flathead in a few sizes. The little four-in-one from a junk drawer will let you down on the one screw that matters.
• An adjustable wrench and a basic socket set for the bolts that turn up under sinks and on flat-pack furniture.
• A utility knife and a pack of spare blades. Boxes, caulk, carpet, clean paint lines — it's the tool you didn't know you'd use daily.
• A level. A two-foot one covers most of the house. Nothing announces "amateur" quite like a crooked shelf.
• A stud finder. Cheap, and it saves you from the specific regret of an anchorless hole in the drywall.
• A step ladder — the folding six-foot kind. You'll change a smoke detector battery at 11pm and be glad it's there.

That's most of it. None of it is glamorous, all of it pays rent.

The expensive stuff you should borrow

This is where people overspend. These tools are genuinely great — for the one weekend a year you need them. The other 360 days they sit in the garage depreciating and eating space you're paying a mortgage on.

• Pressure washer. Rents for $49–$104 a day at the big box, and you need it maybe twice a year — deck season, and the annual siding shame. Borrow it.
• The tall extension ladder. Own the step ladder; borrow the 24-footer for the gutters. It's pricey, miserable to store, and the cheap ones are honestly a little scary.
• Wet/dry shop vac, for the flooded-basement weekend or the post-reno cleanup.
• Tile saw. Nobody who has tiled exactly one bathroom has ever needed their tile saw again.
• Miter saw, for trim or deck boards. If you frame and trim for fun, sure, buy it. Most people don't.
• Post-hole digger or auger, for the fence you'll build exactly once.
• Carpet cleaner. A four-hour job, not a permanent closet resident.

The pattern's obvious once you see it: high cost, low frequency, big footprint. That's the borrow list.

The maybe pile

A few tools live in the middle — a circular saw, an orbital sander, an impact driver. Borrow them the first couple of times. If you keep coming back to the same one, that's the market telling you to buy it. If you don't, you just dodged a purchase and saved a shelf.

Where the borrowing actually comes from

All of this assumes you have somewhere to borrow from, which is the part most people are missing — not the willingness, just the setup. A group of neighbors, friends, or family who've each listed what they own turns "I need a pressure washer this weekend" into a two-minute text instead of a trip to the rental counter.

That's the whole idea behind FriendsWithTools: a private group where you can see who has what, ask to borrow it, and keep track of who's got your stuff. No marketplace, no strangers — just the people you'd already lend to anyway.