The tools a first home actually needs

The twelve tools a home uses

A good household kit covers the first eight. The last four you add separately, and each is worth a page of its own: stud finders, drills, and the parts organizer is in tool boxes.

An apartment needs a different kit than a house

This distinction changes which kit to buy, and most guides collapse it.

• An apartment needs seven things: a screwdriver with bits, hex keys, a small hammer, pliers, a tape measure, adhesive picture-hanging strips and a parts organizer. About $45, and it fits in a kitchen drawer. The jobs are flat-pack furniture, picture hooks, battery changes and a loose cabinet handle — not renovation. Everything else is either a house’s problem or the landlord’s.
• A house adds a drill, a stud finder, a proper level, a 6-foot step ladder, a tool box and eventually a socket set. Call it $200 to $250, and it is the first time that what breaks is yours to fix.

A drill is worth owning in both cases, and for a renter the reason is furniture rather than walls — assembling a wardrobe or a bed frame by hand is genuinely miserable, and a drill with a clutch turns an afternoon into forty minutes.

The one drill feature that matters most

Every drill driver has a numbered collar behind the chuck — usually 1 to 11. That is the clutch, and it limits how much torque the drill applies before it slips and stops turning.

It is the feature that prevents the two mistakes everyone makes with their first drill: driving a screw straight through a cabinet panel, and stripping a screw head into a useless crater. Set it around 4 or 5 for furniture screws, 8 or above for long screws into framing, and clutch-off (the drill symbol) only for drilling holes.

It is also exactly what an impact driver lacks, which is why an impact driver is the wrong first tool despite being more powerful — see drill vs impact driver.

Renter-safe is a standing criterion here

Half of what gets written about home improvement assumes you own the walls. You may well not, so every guide in this section flags what is reversible and what is not.

The two things worth knowing up front:

1. Adhesive strips hold more than people think, and fail in specific ways. Large picture-hanging strips are rated at 15 pounds per pair. They fail on textured walls, on wallpaper, and — the one nobody knows — on paint less than about four weeks old, because the adhesive bonds to uncured paint and pulls it off. Remove them by pulling the tab straight down about 12 inches, never outward. Full detail in hanging things without damaging walls.
2. Filling a small hole is trivial, and fear of holes leads people to use adhesive where a screw is safer. A nail hole takes three minutes and $4 of spackle to make invisible, and a properly filled small hole is normally fair wear and tear. Anything over 50 pounds, or anything above a bed or sofa, should go into a stud regardless.

What to report rather than fix

This matters practically as well as legally: attempting a repair on a system can transfer liability to you for consequential damage, and can void the landlord’s obligation to fix it properly.

Systems are theirs; surfaces are yours. Report anything electrical beyond a bulb, anything plumbing beyond plunging a toilet, gas in any form, heating and air conditioning, supplied appliances, windows, exterior doors and locks, a broken extractor fan, pests, and anything structural including damp.

Report it in writing, with photographs and a date, even if you also phone. That record is what protects your deposit and establishes when the problem was raised. Full dividing line in renter-safe repairs you can do yourself.

Two safety items nobody buys

• Safety glasses, about $8. Drilling into masonry or cutting anything sends fragments upward. This is the cheapest insurance in the house and almost nobody owns a pair.
• A stud finder with AC live-wire detection, $15 to $40. It prevents the single most expensive and dangerous mistake available to a homeowner. Being wrong costs considerably more than the tool.

Beyond tools, a first home needs an extinguisher per floor, a kitchen-rated extinguisher or a fire blanket, working smoke and CO alarms, a first aid kit and furniture anchor straps — about $120, and where each one goes matters more than which one you buy. See home safety essentials.

Where you keep tools decides whether you use them

This affects outcomes more than anything on this page. A tool kit in a basement or a detached garage gets used roughly a third as often as one in a hall cupboard, which means small jobs do not get done and then become larger ones.

In an apartment, keep a compact kit in a kitchen drawer. In a house, keep the main box on your main living floor and a small kit in a drawer for the weekly things. And sort the fixings — screws, anchors and picture hooks in an $8 compartment organizer is genuinely the difference between a usable kit and a drawer of loose metal.