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Wednesday, October 08, 2025
The 23 Home Improvement Best Tools You Can Buy on Amazon
www.esquire.com: You put on your Carhartts and lug-sole boots and all all of a sudden you're staring at a cabinet pull that you've always detested or a light fixture that your landlord steadfastly refuses to swap thinking, I can do this myself.
6 comments:
Max A
said...
The multi bit screwdriver will actually save you so much effort. Very good investment. The multitool? I wouldn’t say you need a leatherman brand, they’re needlessly expensive and an off-brand dupe will do the exact same thing. Tool kit? For a homeowner, it doesn't have to be DeWalt specifically. I may hate Ryobi, but it’s literally half the price and does an okay job, so it’s sufficient for homeowners. Box knife: YES, although the ones you have to twist a knob to release are kind of annoying. Paintbrush with ROLLER and POLE (it will save your back and time). Wire strippers and voltage testers…? I get the sense that messing around with electrics as a beginner is probably a bad idea, but maybe that’s just me. A lot of this article felt almost-sponsored (we don’t need the brand names when there are cheaper options), but very useful and well-put together! Maybe I should consult it if I ever manage to get a house.
One of the things about tools is you need to know where to buy the good ones. A ton of professional grade tools are not even sold at home depot, Lowes or your common hardware store. So I found it interesting to see the depth of tools available through amazon and the 2nd observation is the quality. Some of these tools I feel you'd end up just running to the store to buy them because most of the time when you need a calk gun you need to have it so waiting 24 hours to 48 for the tool would in turn put the project behind on that timeline. But knowing that there are quality common tools on Amazon may provide opportunities to save us on needing a particular tool when it's not available locally. But I find that very unlikely to not find anything on this list at your local hardware store.
When it comes to lists like this, I usually overlook the sourcing point and look more towards the content of the list. While this list specifically mentions Amazon, I would imagine that most of these tools could be sourced at a hardware store arguably much closer, easier to get too, and faster than the minimum 24 hours that it would take an Amazon package to arrive. I will say growing up in a “do it, build it, fix it yourself household” that these tools aren’t revolutionary to me at any point. I may be missing the key information of how hard it is to find these specific brands and the quality difference between a Vaughan Professional Rip Hammer and a Rip Hammer that you find at Home Depot. I know that in some respects you are simply paying for the brand name and in other areas you’re paying for the quality.
Having an assortment of tools lying around is definitely incredibly useful. I find myself reaching for a screwdriver more often than I would expect, and I’m always relieved that I have a couple of basic hand tools. I think this list has a pretty solid assortment of tools that can cover basically all bases for standard day-to-day needs. This article does reek pretty aggressively of Amazon affiliate links, and I think the push of “just buy these on Amazon” is more to just try and receive some level of commission rather than any real reason to purchase these on Amazon. Using this article as a list of tools to have when going to the hardware store before selecting whichever brand is in your budget is probably a better move than just clicking links, but this article is definitely a solid resource for when one makes the tragic discovery that even just building Ikea furniture requires you to have some of your own tools.
I love learning about new tools that make MY job easier. I love a good screwdriver and a RATCHETING screwdriver is genius. I really liked the leatherman and I still need to get one, so to see which one they suggest is pretty helpful. I thought the safety glasses suggestion was interesting especially since I had looked at an article about safety glasses last week and these are not nearly as nice as the glasses in that article. I swear I’ve seen Sean West use something like the Bucket boss but only for screws and I think it’s kind of funny that it’s only used for screws. I thought it was really funny getting to the bottom of the article and there being a bottle opener in the tool suggestion list and that they said it was the most important step. I love that they have that at the end just for something funny.
My roommate has the ratcheting screw driver and it is pretty awesome. For lighting majors I can especially see how this would be useful in the light lab working with equipment. In our shop I see them as slightly less useful because we don’t often use screw drivers and when we do it’s for little things that a ratcheting one wouldn’t save a lot of time with. Everything else on here is cool but also very basic in that you could find almost everything immediately in a store in person without having to add the element of being wasteful with Amazon transportation. I think Amazon is great for items you cannot find in stores but as for essential home improvement tools I think there are better ways to acquire those items. The bottle opener at the bottom mildly took me out not only because like two other things on that list had built-in bottle openers as just a part of the tool’s design, but also because it feeds into this idea that everything can come from Amazon as a “must have” that truly nobody needs a new version of.
6 comments:
The multi bit screwdriver will actually save you so much effort. Very good investment. The multitool? I wouldn’t say you need a leatherman brand, they’re needlessly expensive and an off-brand dupe will do the exact same thing. Tool kit? For a homeowner, it doesn't have to be DeWalt specifically. I may hate Ryobi, but it’s literally half the price and does an okay job, so it’s sufficient for homeowners. Box knife: YES, although the ones you have to twist a knob to release are kind of annoying. Paintbrush with ROLLER and POLE (it will save your back and time). Wire strippers and voltage testers…? I get the sense that messing around with electrics as a beginner is probably a bad idea, but maybe that’s just me. A lot of this article felt almost-sponsored (we don’t need the brand names when there are cheaper options), but very useful and well-put together! Maybe I should consult it if I ever manage to get a house.
One of the things about tools is you need to know where to buy the good ones. A ton of professional grade tools are not even sold at home depot, Lowes or your common hardware store. So I found it interesting to see the depth of tools available through amazon and the 2nd observation is the quality. Some of these tools I feel you'd end up just running to the store to buy them because most of the time when you need a calk gun you need to have it so waiting 24 hours to 48 for the tool would in turn put the project behind on that timeline. But knowing that there are quality common tools on Amazon may provide opportunities to save us on needing a particular tool when it's not available locally. But I find that very unlikely to not find anything on this list at your local hardware store.
When it comes to lists like this, I usually overlook the sourcing point and look more towards the content of the list. While this list specifically mentions Amazon, I would imagine that most of these tools could be sourced at a hardware store arguably much closer, easier to get too, and faster than the minimum 24 hours that it would take an Amazon package to arrive. I will say growing up in a “do it, build it, fix it yourself household” that these tools aren’t revolutionary to me at any point. I may be missing the key information of how hard it is to find these specific brands and the quality difference between a Vaughan Professional Rip Hammer and a Rip Hammer that you find at Home Depot. I know that in some respects you are simply paying for the brand name and in other areas you’re paying for the quality.
Having an assortment of tools lying around is definitely incredibly useful. I find myself reaching for a screwdriver more often than I would expect, and I’m always relieved that I have a couple of basic hand tools. I think this list has a pretty solid assortment of tools that can cover basically all bases for standard day-to-day needs. This article does reek pretty aggressively of Amazon affiliate links, and I think the push of “just buy these on Amazon” is more to just try and receive some level of commission rather than any real reason to purchase these on Amazon. Using this article as a list of tools to have when going to the hardware store before selecting whichever brand is in your budget is probably a better move than just clicking links, but this article is definitely a solid resource for when one makes the tragic discovery that even just building Ikea furniture requires you to have some of your own tools.
I love learning about new tools that make MY job easier. I love a good screwdriver and a RATCHETING screwdriver is genius. I really liked the leatherman and I still need to get one, so to see which one they suggest is pretty helpful. I thought the safety glasses suggestion was interesting especially since I had looked at an article about safety glasses last week and these are not nearly as nice as the glasses in that article. I swear I’ve seen Sean West use something like the Bucket boss but only for screws and I think it’s kind of funny that it’s only used for screws. I thought it was really funny getting to the bottom of the article and there being a bottle opener in the tool suggestion list and that they said it was the most important step. I love that they have that at the end just for something funny.
My roommate has the ratcheting screw driver and it is pretty awesome. For lighting majors I can especially see how this would be useful in the light lab working with equipment. In our shop I see them as slightly less useful because we don’t often use screw drivers and when we do it’s for little things that a ratcheting one wouldn’t save a lot of time with. Everything else on here is cool but also very basic in that you could find almost everything immediately in a store in person without having to add the element of being wasteful with Amazon transportation. I think Amazon is great for items you cannot find in stores but as for essential home improvement tools I think there are better ways to acquire those items. The bottle opener at the bottom mildly took me out not only because like two other things on that list had built-in bottle openers as just a part of the tool’s design, but also because it feeds into this idea that everything can come from Amazon as a “must have” that truly nobody needs a new version of.
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