I'm Christine Sir Cleette.

I'm Kyra Blackwell.

I'm Rosie Garren.

And you're listening to the Wire Cutter Show.

Hey y'all, it's Kyra. A few days ago, we released an episode with actor, writer, and woodworker, the famous Nick Offerman.

It really is a fantastic conversation and if you haven't listened to it yet, you should definitely go find it.

We talked with Nick about the tools he likes and the woodworking projects he thinks are good to start with, especially with kids.

But here at Wire Cutter, our tool expertise goes way beyond just woodworking.

We have a team of home improvement writers who cover everything from power tools to simple hand tools to the best way to store tools.

So, in light of our episode with Nick Offerman, we thought it'd be helpful to bring you some more in-depth information on how to build a basic toolbox.

Whether you're starting from scratch or a couple steps above scratch, today we'll chat with senior staff writer Doug Mahoney.

Doug has joined us on the podcast many times before to chat about everything from fire safety to pest control, and he's also been using tools professionally and writing about them for years.

In a minute, Doug tells us what tools you really need to start being handy, what you can expect to spend, and what you don't need to invest in as a beginner.

Be right back.

Welcome back. With us now is Doug Mahoney, who is a senior staff writer on the home improvement team who specializes in hand tools and power tools.

He also covers home improvement topics, outdoor power equipment, and pest control, which y'all probably already know.

And Doug owns a hobby farm in the woods of New Hampshire where he's constantly fixing up something in his own home. Doug, welcome back.

Hi. How is everybody?

We're great. And we're so happy to have you back. So Doug, you are someone that I think anyone would consider a classic handyman. Um, I hope you weren't offended by that term, but

I'm not.

You know, you've remodeled your home, you've worked as a carpenter, you review tools for a living, but the level of handiness that you have achieved is beyond what most listeners would probably feel comfortable with. Tell us why you think most people listening to this should become handier in their own home.

For one, obviously, it saves you money.

It's also it's empowering. It sort of shifts your relationship with your home.

you start to see your home as something that you can really kind of adapt to your needs. It's not sort of a static thing anymore.

And you also you don't have to rely on other people to fix things.

Like say if there's a plumbing issue with your faucet, you may have to wait a few days or a week for a plumber to show up.

Whereas if uh you have, you know, a little bit of knowhow and confidence to do it, you can just dive right in and speed the timet up.

So, even if somebody doesn't consider themselves super handy, what are the types of things anyone can do with a really basic toolkit?

Well, first, I mean, you can start just uh if you're really starting with no knowledge as far as any of this stuff, I think painting a room is a great place to start.

It starts to kind of shift how you look at your house.

You obviously every house has like loose wobbly hinges or handles, things like that you can tighten.

Another pretty interesting thing, you could just swap out the hardware on your kitchen cabinets, which is a, you know, very simple process, but it can really change the look of your kitchen.

What if somebody has zero tools in their home right now? Where should they even start?

What I tell people is they're sort of like, it's almost like this trifecta of tools to start with.

A screwdriver is a great starting tool, a hammer, and a tape measure.

Those are three pretty essential tools that you can really do a lot of little things in your house with.

You can tighten hinges. You can hang pictures.

Okay. I have two out of three of those, I think. What about um like a pre-made kit? I've seen a lot of those at like Home Depot.

Yeah, the pre-made kits, they're okay.

They're they're very very limited as far as I'm concerned.

They cost more than what they're worth. They usually seem to be about $40 or so.

I think they're probably worth more like 20.

They are pretty poor quality tools.

To me, they're perfect for if like you're sending a a kid off to college and you want them to just have something.

It's a place to potentially start, but I think that if you're approaching this work with any seriousness, you're going to bump up against the limitations of those tools very, very quickly.

So, I think that I would just recommend getting the individual tools.

Get yourself a nice screwdriver, a nice hammer, nice tape measure, good utility knife, pliers, things like that.

Doug, if I'm standing in Home Depot in front of a wall of hand tools, it can be overwhelming to know which ones to buy.

What is the difference between, for instance, a mediocre hammer or a screwdriver and really good ones? Why would you want to spend more for hand tools versus getting the cheaper thing?

Yeah. So, the thing with tools is that the cheapest thing usually does still work, but it's just not going to be a very good experience.

A better tool, you're going to notice it's just feels better in the hand.

The grip is going to be much better. The overall design will be better.

Like, like a really nice set of wire cutters will cut with much more power than a cheaper set.

The jaws might be designed differently to give a cleaner cut.

Things like screwdrivers are going to be made of much better steel so they don't become mush and become unusable.

So, it's just going to make your work a lot easier and it's definitely more of an investment.

You know, you'll probably be paying anywhere from 15 up to say $30 per tool if you're buying the tools individually, but they're going to turn into lifetime tools.

I think it's worth leveling up to the good stuff.

So, once someone has the core tools, what other tools would you recommend they consider adding over time?

So, if you're doing this ad hoc, what are you adding to your collection as you move forward?

Once you have those basics, I would then sort of move on to the plier wrench category.

So, adjustable pliers, adjustable wrench, those are great for, you know, adjusting bike seats and tightening faucet.

They're obviously they're very good um plumbing tools.

Then you have locking pliers, which are vice grips.

Stud finder, that's a pretty basic one, especially if you're hanging like a heavy mirror on the wall, things like that.

Okay, so level stud finder could be potentially helpful. What else?

Allen wrenches are good.

They're another one used, especially if you have kids who have bikes.

Seems like half the adjustments on bikes are with Allen wrenches.

I think a headlamp is is really good, especially if you have a basement, if you have a nasty crawl space like I do.

Headlamps are pretty helpful to be able to work hands-free and still get some light on what you're doing.

And then if you get into any electrical work or you start figuring out your electrical system in your house, a non-cont voltage tester is a good one.

And what you do is you can place the tip of it against a wire and it will tell you if that wire is live.

You can also stick them into an outlet to see if an outlet is live.

So it's a good troubleshooting thing like, okay, my lamp doesn't work. I've changed the bulb.

And then you can take a non-cont voltage tester and you can test the outlet to see if the outlet's working.

This sounds both incredibly handy and advanced. I think I'd be scared to be like, "Oh, here's a wire. Let me just see if it's let me stick this thing in a live outlet, maybe."

Well, it's a non-cont thing, so you can do it.

When do you think it's worth graduating from hand tools into power tools?

Things like an electric drill or a power sander or a saw.

Well, getting into those tools, that's when you really start taking on a proactive approach.

You're not really just reacting to the loose handle or the the jiggly towel bar.

That's when you're like, I'm going to fix this rotted deck board.

I want to maybe put in a screen door, things like that.

If you're a renter, you may not need to.

Although, I think a cordless drill is probably essential for anybody who's interested in taking on this kind of work.

From there, you can graduate up into saws.

Circular saw, jigsaw.

You can get pretty much everything you need done with those two tools as far as cutting goes.

And then an orbital sander after that.

That would be kind of like the first basic kit, I think, of power tools to get.

So, you said earlier most people should have a power drill. What does that unlock?

What can you do that you couldn't do if you don't have one?

Well, first it can save a lot of time even from what a screwdiving task is.

Like if you're putting in a door hinge instead of sitting there screw screw screw screw screw.

You can get it done in like less than a second and you're not really relying on hand strength.

You're not exhausting your hand.

And secondly, you can start really like putting things together.

Like you can drill holes, you can drive screws.

So So you can start to like replace the deck board.

You could um as far as drilling holes, anything from like a birdhouse opening to drilling the holes you need to put in a curtain rod or a knife rack. It really opens up a huge huge arena of things you can do.

What is our top pick?

Our top pick is a little 12vt DeWalt.

And how much does it cost?

The 12vt drills usually go that's actually the smallest class of cordless drill.

They usually go for less than 150.

They're often on sale to about 100 which comes with a drill, two batteries, and the charger.

And at this point, we only recommend cordless drills, right? We don't really have any corded drills that we recommend.

No. No, definitely not. Corded tools are definitely on their way to becoming extinct at this point.

Battery technology has gotten just phenomenal.

So, there's really no point in in having a corded drill.

Let's say that you buy a really nice power drill and you're feeling emboldened.

Do you just jump right in and buy every power tool there is at once? Or the dreaded question, do you buy a kit?

Well, in the case of power tools, a kit is a great place to start, I think, unlike what we were just saying with hand tools.

So, for one, it's a way to get a lot of tools at a fairly low price.

So, the way to think about power tools is that, and this is certainly the way manufacturers think about it, is that you're buying their batteries, like you're buying into their battery system.

So, they want you to buy their tools because then you're going to be more likely to buy other of their tools which are compatible with the same battery.

Which which also makes sense from the consumer point of view, too, because once you have a couple DeWalt batteries, you can also buy another DeWalt tool as a bare tool.

Which means it's comes at a reduced price and it doesn't have a battery or it doesn't have a charger.

So, the kits are great.

Um, you can get a wide variety of tools.

Often they come with a drill, a circular saw, maybe reciprocating saw, oscillating multi-tool, which is a phenomenally useful tool, maybe a flashlight, and then you get two batteries and a charger.

And sometimes that's for as little as like $200, which is just a fantastic price.

It's a good place to get started.

You kind of get a little bit of everything. So you kind of have everything you you may need.

And an oscillating multi-tool, I have never heard of that before. What is it? What does it do?

Yeah, so oscillating multi-tools, they're pretty interesting.

So, for a long time, one company had the patent on this tool.

It's a company called Fine. It's a German company.

But what it does is it's you can put a lot of things on it.

You can put a blade on it. You can put a sander on it.

But what it does is it oscillates back and forth slightly.

So, there's a lot of benefits to that.

If you put a sanding pad on it, there's a triangular sanding pad, so you can get it right into like an inside corner.

If you have a saw blade on, and these saw blades, they're only like an inch wide, you can plunge cut like directly straight into a wall.

So, it's not like a circular saw, which is going to make a huge mess.

So, if you're cutting in for like an outlet or something like that, you can just kind of plunge in and then just make like a really tight nice little box.

There's also little heads on it, little grinder heads, so you can kind of clean out grout with them, too.

So, fine had it for a long time and then, I don't know, 10 years ago or so, their patent wore out.

And so then there's been a flood of of other companies.

So now everybody pretty much has one. They're really good.

They're definitely like a renovator's tool for sure.

Doug, do you have any final pieces of philosophical advice for people who are interested in becoming handy?

You've got to seriously think about safety with these tools, especially saws.

Just try not to get in over your head.

I mean, it's it's probably going to happen at some point and YouTube is a great resource, but make sure if you're have a project in mind, you're replacing your toilet, for instance.

Like, watch 10 videos on people replacing their toilets and not just one.

And and that way you can kind of get a sense of sort of what the truth is of the process, what kind of things everybody deals with, what kind of things you might run into.

If you have an old house, good luck to you.

It's um cuz everything goes sideways very quickly on an old house.

I know my house is 250 years old and nothing is to any standard, but keep a good attitude about it.

And don't let my brother-in-law always says this.

He says, "Don't let perfect get in the way of pretty good."

Well, thanks Doug. Always love having you here. It's the best. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Doug. It was fun to be here.

We'll drop links in our show notes to Wire Cutters top picks for hammers, screwdrivers, drills, and other tools.

And we'll also link to some safety equipment like eye protection and dust masks that you should use when you start getting handy.

That's it for us. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Thanks for listening.