The red metal toolbox in the garage has been sitting on the same shelf for years, and I finally pulled it down last month, mostly because I needed a specific size wrench and couldn’t find it anywhere else in the house.
Most of what’s in it was his, tools he’d collected over years of small projects around this house, and I hadn’t gone through it properly since he died, using it more like a grab bag when I needed something specific than as an actual organized collection I understood.
What I Found When I Actually Looked
There were three hammers of different weights, which seems excessive until you realize they’re actually for different jobs, something I only learned by asking someone at the hardware store to explain the difference. There was a level, several screwdrivers in sizes I still can’t always match correctly to a screw on the first try, and a coping saw I have never once used and don’t fully understand the purpose of.
There was also a small tin inside the box, separate from the tools, holding spare screws and nails sorted loosely by size, along with a few random hardware pieces that don’t seem to belong to anything I own, leftover bits from projects finished long before I ever thought to ask what they were for.
What I Use Regularly
I want to be honest that I don’t use most of what’s in that box. I use one screwdriver, the tape measure, and a hammer, the smallest of the three, for the handful of small repairs I handle myself around the house. The rest sits there, functional, presumably, but untouched by me for months or years at a stretch.
I’ve thought about whether that makes keeping the rest of it wasteful, taking up space in a garage that could hold other things, and I keep landing on the same answer, which is that I’m not ready to find out what it would feel like to not have it there, even the parts I never touch.
Learning What Some of It Even Is
I spent part of an afternoon looking up a few of the stranger tools online, trying to identify what they were actually for. The coping saw, it turns out, is for cutting curves into wood, useful for trim work, not something I’ve ever needed but apparently something he thought worth having on hand. There was also a small tool I still haven’t identified, a metal handle with an odd hooked end, that I’ve decided to just leave alone rather than force myself to solve.
Why I’m Not Calling This Sentimental
I don’t think of the toolbox as a shrine, and I don’t like when people assume that’s what it is when I mention I still have it. It’s genuinely useful, most weeks I go out there for something practical, a screw, a specific size wrench, and it’s there, organized well enough that I can usually find what I need within a minute or two. That practicality matters to me more than the sentiment does, if I’m honest, though I recognize the two aren’t entirely separate from each other either.
What I Added To It
I bought myself a cordless drill a couple of years ago, something he never owned, and it lives in that same garage now, though not inside the red box, sitting next to it instead on its own little shelf. It felt like an odd milestone at the time, adding my own tool to a collection that had otherwise stayed frozen exactly as he left it. I use the drill more than almost anything else out there now.
The Wrench, For the Record
I did find the wrench I was originally looking for, the reason I pulled the box down in the first place. It was exactly where a person who organized that box with real care would have put it, second row, third slot, sized correctly and ready to use. I fixed what I needed to fix, put the wrench back in its slot, and closed the lid, the way I imagine he did a hundred times before me.
Teaching Myself the Rest
I’ve started, slowly, trying to learn what the tools I don’t recognize are actually for, one at a time, instead of leaving them as mysteries indefinitely. I looked up the odd hooked handle I mentioned earlier and it turns out to be a seam ripper of some kind, more suited to upholstery work than anything I’d guessed, which explained nothing about why it ended up in a general toolbox rather than a sewing kit, but at least gave it a name.
I don’t know that I’ll ever use most of what’s in that box the way he did, with whatever specific knowledge he’d built up over years I wasn’t always paying attention to. But naming the tools, one by one, feels like its own small form of keeping something, less about the objects themselves and more about understanding a little more of what he actually knew that I never bothered to ask him about while I still could. It’s a slow project. I’m not in a hurry to finish it.
I asked a man at the hardware store about the seam ripper looking tool, mostly to confirm what I’d read online, and he seemed a little surprised anyone still had one of those around, said they used to come standard in certain older tool sets sold as general kits, more filler than function. That made me feel slightly better about never having used it. It wasn’t a gap in my own knowledge specifically, just an object that had outlived whatever original purpose justified its place in the box to begin with, the way plenty of things do if you keep them long enough.