It's tool time! This library wants to lend you saws, drills ... and beer-making kits?

Paul Faget believes that to make a hole in your wall, you don’t necessarily need to own a drill.

The same goes for the tile cutter that helped replaced the backsplash in your kitchen, the eight-foot ladder you used to paint your living room, and even the large drink dispenser that served punch to 30 people at that baby shower you hosted.

Very few homeowners need a shed, a closet or a cellar full of tools when so many of the things people store are only used for one project or on rare occasions.

That’s where the Louisville Tool Library at 1227 Logan St. comes in. The new Shelby Park-based nonprofit challenges modern consumerism by encouraging a borrowing economy. Just as people should have access to the culture of books and movies through traditional public libraries, this tool library creates the opportunity to repair and maintain your home without emptying your wallet, draining resources or clogging your storage space.

When you want to read a book, you don’t need to buy it, finish it and let it collect dust on your shelf.

As far as Faget and the other founding volunteers are concerned, there’s no reason you can’t apply that concept to straight edges, paint rollers, mallets, chainsaws and plumbing snakes, too.

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Four days had passed since thenonprofit's grand opening when Faget, along with co-founding volunteers Shelby Rodeffer, Lou Lepping and John Cooper, welcomed me into the tool library. For a $120 annual membership — or a sliding scale of 0.1% of your income — you can rent out as many as 10 hand tools and two power tools each week. If you need more tools for a specific project, the volunteers are willing to bend that rule, and they’ll also renew the rental after a week as long as someone hasn’t put their name on the waitlist for it.

“First priority is making sure anyone that wants to be here can be here, and the second priority is keeping the roof over our head,” Rodeffer said.

The community has donated a few hundred tools to their cause since the nonprofit first took over the space this spring. As I toured the library last week, I saw the hammers, drills, staple guns, handsaws, rakes, shovels and hoses I expected to see, and plenty of other oddities I didn’t. Think InstaPots, beer brewing kits, sewing machines, LED selfie rings, cornhole boards, folding tables and outdoor picnic sets.

Lending tool libraries aren't a new concept, and there are more than 50 that are active in the United States, according to localtools.org, a nonprofit that tracks them. In the month or so since these local volunteers introduced their concept to Louisville, they've encountered extreme generosity as people have made donations to their stock, but also questions ― mostly about how they’re so sure they’ll see all of these rentals again.

Quite frankly, they’re not.

Some things are going to disappear, and some things are going to break. That's just how the world works.

But that doesn’t mean that they should focus on that potential loss, or that they can’t do a lot of good in between.

“You have to unlearn a lot of stuff to get into the borrowing economic mindset,” Rodeffer explained. “You have to reframe your mind to be in a generous mindset and believe that when you put something out that someone gets something out of ― that they will put something into it, too.”

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It helps that the community they’re serving is the one that’s been adding donations to the collection.

“All of this came from the community,” Faget said, who donated 40 of his own tools to the library. “It is a lot easier for us to look at this collection and say ‘if something breaks and if something doesn’t come back, it’s not the end of the world.’”

They’ve already checked out a handful of tools and started dreaming up a wishlist for what they might need in the future.

One woman came in with a photo on her phone, unsure of what she needed to put something together, and they were able to give her the right Allen wrench. A few neighbors had talked about wanting to do drywall patching, and one was interested in upholstery work, and they were able to piece together rentals for those projects.

Another guest wondered if they had scaffolding to help replace the vinyl on a historic home. That’s not something they have in stock yet, but it was the type of request that got the group thinking about what voids they can fill in the long run.

There are a lot of them and many go beyond the idea of construction. They're eager to supply tools for clean-up events and construction projects hosted by other nonprofits. They stock seeds from Louisville Seed Bank that library members can take and grow.

High on the priority list is turning the library into a space for the community. Right now, because they function on volunteers entirely, they’re only open to the public on Wednesday evenings and mid-day on Saturdays. Even so, they’ve set up a puzzle table in the back and they’ve got a selection of books that people can borrow or read on site. They want the library to be a “third space,” which is a place outside of your home or work where you can participate in the community. They’re hopeful by the end of the year, they can hire a full-time librarian to run the operation, and they’re eager to host classes on how to use the tools they have. They want to be a resource where people can learn to tackle minor plumbing and electric work.

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The group is also highly aware that many people who need access to tools may have transportation barriers. Once the library is more established, they’d like to have drop-off days where they bring rentals to neighborhoods in south and west Louisville. Eventually, Rodeffer hopes they have enough local support to have branches in other parts of the community.

The team makes a point of being community-focused and local business-focused. They’re not trying to replace local hardware stores, and when their members need materials, they refer them to Keith’s Hardware at 1201 Bardstown Road in the Highlands or to Oscar’s Germantown Hardware at 1515 S. Shelby St.

Overall, though, the library’s mission is to reduce waste, offer education, provide resources and build community.

That's what any lending library should do, they say. Having a space like this creates the freedom to discover in a way that’s not necessarily encouraged in a traditional retail store.

They’re not worried about a profit. They’re focused on helping people help themselves.

“Somebody can try something without so many stakes involved and so much cost,” Cooper said. “The benefit of a library is the freedom to browse and to gain answers, that’s the freedom of any library. I do hope that people come here with the comfortability to browse.”

Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4053. Follow along on Instagram and Twitter @MaggieMenderski. 

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville Tool Library: How to join the lending community