The tool library that started after a fire

Oakland’s Temescal branch library lends something you won’t find on most library shelves: tools. It started after a fire.

After the 1991 hills fire, the branch put together a small home resources collection to help neighbors with their rebuilding and repairs. In 2000 it grew into a real tool library: 325 tools in the branch basement, open three days a week, free to borrow from day one.

People kept coming back. One regular put it this way in 2011: “They know me by name, and I know most of theirs.”

That year the city budget put the libraries on the chopping block. A group of regulars, organized the year before as the Friends of the Tool Lending Library, rallied, and the new budget kept library services going.

Today it lends more than 5,000 tools. The Friends sell donated tools on the first and third Saturdays of the month, 10 to 2, on the lawn of the Temescal branch, to support it. Tools they can’t use go on to others, like the tool library in Concow, up in Butte County, a community the 2018 Camp Fire largely destroyed.

A collection that started after one fire now helps a community rebuilding after another.

If the roof and gutters are on your list, borrowing a tool is one way up. If you’d rather keep both feet on the ground, we’re happy to climb. Sunshine Gutters and Roofing – Let us shine on your rainy day.