The New Homeowner's Tool Guide: What to Borrow Before You Buy

You just closed on a house and now everything needs fixing, installing, or painting. The temptation is to fill a cart at Home Depot. Do not do that. Most first-year projects are one-time jobs. Borrow the expensive tools, own the cheap daily-use stuff, and save hundreds of dollars for the things your house actually needs.

Year One Reality

In the first year of homeownership, your project list will be long and varied: hang curtains, swap light fixtures, patch drywall, paint rooms, fix a running toilet, maybe replace a faucet. Each of these projects uses specific tools that you will not touch again for months or years.

A circular saw costs $150 to $300. If you use it once to cut trim boards and then it sits on a shelf for 18 months, that is an expensive shelf decoration. Borrowing it from a friend or neighbor costs nothing and takes five minutes to arrange.

The math is simple: borrow anything you will use fewer than three times in the next year. Own anything you will reach for weekly or monthly.

The Core 5: Own These on Day One

These tools are cheap, used constantly, and not worth the coordination of borrowing. Buy them before your first weekend in the new house.

• Drill/driver — you will use this every single week for months. Hanging shelves, assembling furniture, installing hardware, tightening loose screws everywhere. A basic 20V cordless kit runs $80 to $120 and is the single most useful tool in any home. Read our cordless drill guide.
• Stud finder — every shelf, TV mount, and heavy mirror needs to hit a stud. A $25 electronic stud finder saves you from pulling anchors out of crumbled drywall.
• Tape measure (25-foot) — you will measure windows for blinds, walls for furniture placement, rooms for flooring quotes, and doorways for delivery clearance. Keep one in your kitchen drawer.
• Level (24-inch) — shelves, picture frames, curtain rods, towel bars. If it goes on a wall, you need a level. A $15 bubble level works perfectly.
• Utility knife — opening boxes, scoring drywall, trimming carpet edges, cutting caulk tubes. A retractable utility knife with a few spare blades lives in your junk drawer forever.

Total cost for all five: about $150 to $200. You will use every one of them in the first month.

The Next 10: Borrow, Do Not Buy

These tools are expensive, often heavy, and needed for specific projects that most new homeowners do once in the first year and then rarely again. Borrow them from someone who already owns one.

• Circular saw — needed for cutting plywood, deck boards, or trim lumber. One project every year or two for most homeowners. Circular saw guide.
• Reciprocating saw — demo day hero. Cutting out old framing, removing a section of pipe, pruning thick branches. You need it badly for one weekend, then not again for a year. Reciprocating saw guide.
• Pressure washer — driveway, deck, siding, patio. Most people pressure wash once in spring. One machine covers an entire block if everyone takes turns.
• Miter saw — crown molding, baseboard installation, deck railing cuts. Incredibly useful for trim work, then it takes up 3 square feet of garage space for the other 50 weeks. Miter saw guide.
• Pipe wrench — replacing a faucet, tightening supply lines, working on a water heater. Plumbing projects happen a few times and then you do not touch a pipe wrench for years.
• Air compressor — nail guns for trim, inflating tires, blowing out sprinkler lines in fall. Useful but not often enough to justify owning unless you do a lot of finish carpentry.
• Table saw — ripping plywood, making repeated precise cuts, building shelving. If you are not doing a full renovation, you probably need this for one project.
• Jigsaw — cutting curves in countertops, making sink cutouts, trimming laminate. Needed for very specific cuts that come up once or twice.
• Router — rounding edges on shelving, cutting dadoes, decorative trim profiles. A specialized woodworking tool that most homeowners need once per year at most.
• Rotary hammer — drilling into concrete for anchors, mounting posts to a patio, installing a garage storage system. You either need one badly for a day or not at all.

When to Buy

The borrow-then-buy rule is simple: if you have borrowed a specific tool three or more times, you own the problem. At that point, the coordination cost of borrowing exceeds the cost of just having it on your shelf.

For most new homeowners, the first tool to graduate from "borrow" to "own" is the circular saw. If you are doing ongoing projects like building shelves, replacing fence boards, or working on a deck, you will reach for it often enough that owning makes sense.

The second is usually an orbital sander. Refinishing furniture, prepping trim for paint, smoothing filler patches. If you paint more than one room, you will want one of your own. Random orbit sander guide.

Everything else on the borrow list stays borrowed for most people. A pressure washer once a year, a miter saw for that one trim project, a rotary hammer for the pergola anchors. These never cross the three-use threshold.

A Note on Battery Platforms

When you do decide to buy, try to stay on one battery platform. If your drill is DeWalt 20V, your next purchase should also be DeWalt 20V so you can share batteries and chargers. This matters less for borrowed tools since you will return them with their own battery, but it matters a lot for the tools you keep permanently.

See our borrow-or-buy guides for deeper breakdowns of specific tool categories and when ownership makes financial sense.

How to Start Borrowing

If you already know someone who owns tools, just ask them. If you want to make it easier to track who has what and when things are due back, create a FriendsWithTools account and invite the people you would borrow from. You can see what they have available, request specific tools, and both of you get reminders when things are due.

The first year in a new house is expensive enough. Do not add $1,500 in tools you will barely use to the pile.