The entrance is easy to miss: a basement door beneath a flower shop, a hand-painted sign with a hammer and a book, and a short flight of steps down into a room that smells of machine oil and coffee. On a Saturday morning it is busy. A young couple is collecting a tile cutter. A pensioner is returning a hedge trimmer, cleaned and oiled. A student is asking, with some embarrassment, how exactly a spirit level works.
This is the tool library. It holds around four hundred tools, from screwdrivers to a pressure washer, and it lends them to anyone with a membership card. The card costs less than a good drill bit.
How it started
The library was founded by three neighbours who noticed that every house on their street owned a drill, and that none of the drills were used very often. One of them had read a figure, repeated so often in the sharing movement that nobody is quite sure where it came from, that the average drill spends thirteen minutes of its life actually drilling. True or not, it felt right. They put a notice in the local newsletter asking for donations.
The first delivery was a garden rake, a box of spanners and a very old circular saw that nobody dared to use. Within a year they had a hundred tools and a basement lent by the flower shop above. Within five years, they had a waiting list for volunteers.
The counter
Behind the counter, a volunteer named Farida checks tools in and out using a battered laptop and an even more battered logbook. Every tool has a number and a tag. When something comes back, she tests it: the drill is run, the sander is switched on, the blades are checked for chips. Broken tools go to a shelf marked hospital, where a retired mechanic called Gerrit repairs them on Wednesday evenings.
People come for the tools, Farida says, but they stay for the advice. A surprising number of members have never used the tool they are borrowing. So the volunteers explain, and sometimes demonstrate on a scrap of wood, and occasionally talk someone out of a job altogether. You do not need a jigsaw for that, she tells one man. You need a saw and ten minutes.
What gets borrowed
The most borrowed item last year was a wallpaper steamer, which tells you a great deal about the housing stock in the neighbourhood. After that come ladders, drills, carpet cleaners and a set of camping chairs that is somehow always out. The least borrowed item is a professional plastering hawk, donated by a builder who retired, which has been lent exactly once.
Some objects have developed reputations. The tile cutter is known to be temperamental and comes with a handwritten note of warnings. The hedge trimmer is so popular in May that there is a queue. The pressure washer has its own booking calendar and a list of streets where it has cleaned the paving.
More than tools
Spend a morning here and you notice that the tools are almost an excuse. People linger. They ask each other about projects. A woman returning a sander stays to help a man choose the right sandpaper. Two strangers discover they live in the same building and arrange to share a van for a trip to the tip.
The library keeps no figures on this, but Farida has a theory. When you own something, she says, you keep it in a cupboard. When you borrow something, you have to bring it back. And when you bring it back, you talk to someone. She shrugs. It is a library for tools. It is also a library for neighbours.
“A drill spends thirteen minutes of its life actually drilling.”
