Getting your Toolbox right: The Bare Essentials
Whether you are living in a swanky new up-street apartment or your new villa in the woods, there are some indispensable tools you can’t just do without. A toolbox with mechanical tools like hammer, spanner and screw jack are such tools. Sure you can always call a mechanic or a plumber or an electrician, but availability might be an issue. Hence keeping these tools handy is the need of the hour. Let us look at the most important tools to have in your toolbox.
Hammer: The first one is pretty obvious. Whether you want to settle an uprooted plank or fix some piles into it or just brute force a nail into a wall, it is a versatile tool. Consider you want to hang a dream-catcher in front of your home’s entrance; a nail driven into the wall creates a perfect hook for it to cling onto.
Screwdrivers: While nails require blows to work, screws have windings and hence need to be rotated into place. A set of screwdrivers for various screw types and sizes is of great help to tighten those loose bolts which are creating nuisance in your home.
Pliers: While you may think pliers are only useful when you want to pull out something i.e. a nail maybe, consider this – your jewelry gets stuck in the drain pipe, you can easily use a plier to take it out without pulling the whole thing apart!Locking Pliers or vise-grips can be locked onto a position when you need it. Thus when you need to hold something tight for duration of time, these tools are life-savers – you just grip them, adjust how tight it is and lock it!
Measuring Tape: A very simple piece of plastic with markings in inch/foot and cm/meter but is of utmost importance. Anytime you are dealing with exact or near exact measurements, a measurement tape. Make sure you get one of those tapes that can be folded into a rim and can be extended and then locked to the required length. The auto rollback mechanisms allow you to just unlock it and it will roll back to the rim automatically.
Wrench: A very useful tool to tighten nuts and bolts. They are versatile in sense that you can purchase adjustable wrench to fit any size. Assembling furniture as big as a bed can be aided as well. If you can’t get hold of adjustable ones, make sure you have them for various sizes available.
Drills: A drill is a machine which makes driving a screw onto a wall or a plank easy and effortless especially if it is an electric drill. Manual drills though will take lot of efforts to make it work. Hence preference should be given to an electric drill.
Spare nails, nuts, bolts and screws: Yes, they can be life saver to replace broken ones or just when needed. Equipped with these basic tools in your toolbox, fixing a broken plank or tightening loose bolts or just driving a nail to hang a painting is dead easy. These tools are readily available in any hardware stores and do not require special craftsmanship to make them work.