The Five Tools That Handle Ninety Percent of Home Repairs

Every hardware shop sells a large plastic case containing 120 tools, of which you will use six. The case is heavy, the tools are soft metal, and the sockets round off the first time you lean on them.

Buy these five instead. Between them they cover the overwhelming majority of household jobs.

1. A cordless combi drill

Not a drill driver — a combi, meaning it has a hammer setting for masonry. In most homes at least one wall you want to hang something on is brick or concrete, and a plain drill driver will polish a shiny circle into it for ten minutes without making a hole.

What matters: an 18V battery, a keyless chuck, and an adjustable clutch. What does not matter: the number of accessories in the box.

2. A decent screwdriver set

Not one multi-bit driver with a wobbly magnetic tip. A set of proper individual drivers, or a driver with a solid chuck and hardened bits.

The reason is torque. A cheap bit twists and rounds out the screw head, and a rounded screw head turns a two-minute job into an hour with a drill and an extractor. Hardened S2 steel bits cost slightly more and last years.

3. An adjustable spanner and a pair of water pump pliers

These two together handle nearly all plumbing and furniture assembly. The adjustable spanner gives flat, parallel grip on nuts. The water pump pliers open wide enough to grip a tap body, a waste trap, or a radiator valve.

4. A spirit level, at least 600mm

Small levels lie. On a short body, a level reads a tiny local bump rather than the overall line, so a shelf that reads perfect over 200mm can be visibly sloping over a metre.

Six hundred millimetres is the shortest genuinely useful length. A metre is better if you have somewhere to store it. A laser level is a luxury, not a substitute — you still want a physical straight edge.

5. A utility knife with replaceable blades

Underrated and endlessly useful. Cutting sealant, trimming carpet, opening packaging, scoring plasterboard, cleaning up paint edges.

The trick is changing the blade far more often than feels necessary. A blade costs pennies. A blunt blade slips, and a slipping blade is how people end up in A&E.

The things you can leave out

• A hammer — you will want one eventually, but genuinely less often than the list above.
• A socket set — useful for cars and flat-pack furniture, rarely for the house.
• A tape measure — you need one, but it comes free with almost everything and any of them work.
• A stud finder — helpful, but a magnet on a string finds the screws in a plasterboard wall for almost nothing.

How to buy them

Buy the drill new, from a brand with a battery platform you can expand. Buy everything else secondhand if you can. Hand tools from the 1980s are usually better steel than anything at the same price today, and car boot sales are full of them.

The total cost of this list, buying carefully, is roughly what one plumber's callout charge would be. It pays for itself the first weekend.