This but slightly more organized is pretty much the standard answer for anti-hoarding: put all your stuff away, keep track of what you actually use over the next week/month/year, and get rid of anything that hasn't been touched.
A screwdriver costs less than $5 and takes a minimal amount of space to store. Yes, the slippery slope is when you have a thousand tools falling out of your closet, but again, thought and moderation.
The "if I haven't used it in the past year" rule is a great idea overall, but it's not appropriate for this example. Now if we're talking about a ball-bearing extractor, yeah rent/borrow that unless your livelihood depends on it.
If there's no cost, great. Keep everything. If there is a cost, that once-a-year item might not make the cut.
- the item takes up a negligible amount of space (fractions of pennies), and its usefulness is huge when you need it. Also, factor in the value of immediate access (e.g. fire extinguisher).
- some things you don't use, but are required to have (birth certificates)
Again, my main point was thoughtfulness with ownership. And it doesn't always require breaking out an Excel spreadsheet and amortizing costs and calculating expected values.
Cellphone camera good enough? Ditch your actual camera.
There's a point where it becomes very hard to reduce item count without greatly increasing the frequency that the task at hand can't be performed with the existing set of items.
Do these things exist in urban areas? Seems useful for apartment dwellers who don't have the space for anything more than a tiny toolkit anyhow
A while back I rented a nice hammer drill for $30 instead of buying a shit one from the same store for $50. For a more niche tool like that, it works out great not to have a bunch of money invested in nicer tools or a bunch of crap lying around.
Strikes me as an idiotic waste of resources that a street of a hundred houses would have 50, say, power drills. Most likely they're inferior for costs purposes, they break because they're designed to (capitalism FTW), they're unnecessary duplication and so waste resources.
We've seriously missed the mark with design of our communities/society.
If you take an object that I use less frequently, say a small tack hammer, I still need it when I need it. I need it for maybe 1 minute or less. I'm supposed to do what? Take my project down to the library, hit it with the hammer, haul it back home? Go borrow the hammer and take it back? Now I've cost myself more in time & effort than it would have cost to just own & store the hammer.
Does your solution only apply to more expensive items? More specialized? How does it account for discrepancies of usage patterns?
What if I need the work-light but I'll interrupt someone's project?
No, I think I'll just have my own set of tools, thanks.
I would be okay with a "library for [tools, whatever]" for people who don't often need a screwdriver or corkscrew or something, I guess--but I'm not going to use it. We have an approximation, with maker spaces, companies that loan tools (auto zone etc), neighbors, and tool rentals. (I don't use those either.)
FWIW it sounds like a good place for community members to access tools would be at the house you live in.
Jokes aside, are there really places you can rent a screwdriver for a day? And is that really the appropriate solution?
There's places where you can buy them and return them a day later for a full refund.
Autozone is one example, offering this service for things like bearing presses and radiator pressurizers and so forth. They don't make any money on the tool in this case; the play is, if you have access to <expensive special tool> you'll do the work yourself and buy parts & consumables from them.
BUT, you're totally right about the time & gas, and there's also the issue where you always discover you need tool X right after removing the engine.
> The Oakland Tool Lending Library currently offers over 5,000 tools available for loan, as well as books and how-to videos and DVDs. The tools can be used for a variety of purposes, including home improvement, remodeling and repairs, gardening and landscaping and seismic retrofit. This is a free service to Oakland, Emeryville, and Piedmont residents and property owners.
Cheese on salad and tacos, corkscrew when friends came over (it's part of a multi-use tool, anyhow), and potato masher all the time, lately on potatoes from my own garden!