Fire Ruined My Husband’s Woodshop. Everything In His Milwaukee Packout Survived.

This is a story about sacrifice and marriage, growing up and growing old, an accidental fire and a manmade flood. But mostly it’s a story about a toolbox.

When my husband, Jamie, and I got engaged 22 years ago, he moved from rural Pennsylvania to live with me in New York City. The only things he brought were his cat, his hockey equipment, his golf clubs, a tangle of small power tools, and a humanities PhD that proved to be relatively useless in the East Village.

While Jamie sent CVs out into the void, he filled his time with small home-improvement projects in our rental. He customized a closet, built bookshelves, and even renovated our tiny kitchen. When someone at my work was looking to have a wall unit built, I recommended him, and he got the job. Then he got another job in the same building. And then a third. Over the course of his first summer in the city, he accidentally became a cabinetmaker, tapping the skills he had picked up as a kid and honed on summer jobs during college and grad school.

He found a workshop in Brooklyn and started building his little business. (Fun fact: For a time, Ron Swanson was a shopmate!) As Jamie’s jobs got bigger, he amassed more tools and supplies. Early on in our marriage, I got him a heavy-duty backpack for Christmas so he could carry his jobsite essentials.

Over time, that backpack became overloaded — with specialized chisels, tools, handsaws, and jars filled with screws. Stitches blew out on the straps. It became comically heavy: Whenever I tried to move it, I imagined my arm just shearing off at the shoulder, like in that old Saturday Night Live skit.

A starter kit for an entire line of more than 70 products, this trio easily clicks together and smoothly hauls up to 250 pounds on its 9-inch wheels. Metal rails strengthen the corners, and interior trays help keep small items organized.

The weight of the backpack worried me. I was fairly certain that Jamie (and here he would strenuously disagree with me) was getting older, and hoisting and hefting that backpack would certainly take a toll on his shoulders, back, and knees. So for Christmas a few years ago, I got him a three-piece Milwaukee Packout — a modular, click-together toolbox on wheels.

The Packout’s appeal lies in its flexibility: Straight out of the box, the wheeled base container offers about 16 gallons of capacity and is just a large open container that allows for the jam-cram, wabi-sabi organizing style Jamie favors. The top two components have tray inserts for sorting smaller items, and all three bins have wide-mouthed hinged lids and meaty clasps. But that’s merely where the customization begins.

If you can dream it, Milwaukee probably makes it. For the Packout, the company sells click-ready specialized containers, socket sets, portable pint-sized work surfaces, kneeling pads, coolers, side-extenders, battery-charging docks, open-top tool bags, floodlights, and radios. This is what Wirecutter’s home-improvement writer Doug Mahoney likes most about the Packout — he appreciates that it “can be tailored to my mind.” He keeps a few smaller bins earmarked for specific repairs: One holds his plumbing hand tools, another contains his electrical-repair kit.

The never-ending possibilities made me swiftly realize that the Packout is a gift that I can keep giving, like an add-a-bead necklace for tradespeople, handymen, puttering dads, and DIYers everywhere.

Indeed, since I gave Jamie the initial gift, his Packout has expanded to include three more organizing bins, a soft-sided duffel, and a mini wet/dry vac. It’s indispensable on jobsites, obviously, but it also became storage for hand and power tools and an organizer for fasteners and replacement blades in his shop.

Jamie’s Packout was going on year seven when a five-alarm fire tore through his shop in September. Jamie woke up one morning assuming he’d go to work like usual but instead saw the blaze on the local news: His workspace for the past 20 years, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of table saws, CNC machines, and other big equipment, up in smoke! Then extinguished with a deluge of harbor water!

For the first week, as the fire still burned, Jamie assumed that everything — the roof, the floor, every last brass tack — was lost. However, as the weeks wore on, he discovered that the floor hadn’t burned, that the roof had only partially collapsed, and that the fire department would allow tenants into their spaces in scheduled time slots to see what they could salvage.

Three weeks after the fire, Jamie zipped himself into a Tyvek hazmat suit and got into his shop to find buckled floors, blown-out windows, rust-corroded table saws and planers, five of his six drills ruined … and all of his Packout components arrayed right where he’d left them, with everything inside safe and dry. The rigid boxes are IP65-rated, which means that when they’re locked, they’re dustproof and protected from low-pressure water jets. Even though the fire was fought with much more pressure than that, not a drop got into Jamie’s boxes, and his tools — even the battery-powered ones — were totally fine. (That said, the rigid plastic cases may smell like smoke forever.)

Jamie was also able to haul out several boxes of other equipment (various clamps and spray-gun parts, mostly), but it was the intact Packout that set him on the post-traumatic path back to normal: Just as he had more than two decades ago, he moved all his tools into our apartment, and he resumed taking small local jobs that he could pull off without shop space. The entire stacked kit lived just inside our front door, and he could simply snap components on and off as needed as he headed out.

About two months after the fire, Jamie found another space to rent — just an empty bay in a larger workshop, without so much as a workbench. But as soon as he wheeled the Packout in, he was back in business.

This article was edited by Hannah Rimm and Maxine Builder.