The Best Basic Home Toolkit
The four drawer Kobalt 100-piece Household Tool Set looks impressive, but it’s lacking a hammer and tape measure. Same story for the Crescent 180 Piece Professional Tool Set.
The AmazonBasics 65-Piece Set only has a set of slip-joint pliers and lacks an adjustable wrench or a set of adjustable pleirs. The larger Amazon Basics 175-Piece General Household Home Repair Tool Kit covers the basics and adds a socket set and a set of combination wrenches. The price is closing in on $70, which is typically about $25 more than our pick. We don’t think the extra tools are worth the added cost.
The Stanley 65-piece Homeowner’s Tool Kit is lacking some key pieces. It has just a small and incomplete socket set (with no metric sizes) and slip-joint pliers for the nut-and-bolt situation. There is no adjustable wrench. The tools are built a little better than the Anvil tools, but not enough to make much of a difference for minor around-the-house work.
The Anvil 137-Piece Homeowner’s Tool Set is typically sold for almost $75. There are some high points, such as the 25-foot tape measure and the big adjustable wrench, but the rest of the tools are similar in quality to those of the less-expensive kits. This kit also has no utility knife, which is a big omission, and the folding plastic case is large and awkward to deal with.
The Apollo Precision Tools DT9408 53-Piece Household Tool Kit offers no utility knife, and you can do the nut-and-bolt combo with only a small adjustable wrench and a set of four combination wrenches that just barely go over half an inch in size. So it’s very limited. It does have a voltage tester, which is nice, but that one tool isn’t enough to lift the Apollo kit above the more-comprehensive Anvil kit.
We looked at but didn’t test a number of sets from the ever-shifting group of Amazon brands such as the VonHaus 100 Piece Tool Set, the Vastar 102 Piece Home Repair Tool Kit, the Dekopro 128 Piece Tool Set, and the Yaetek 100-Piece Home Tool Kit. But all were missing an element of the nut-and-bolt combination that our experts recommended. There are also other red flags, such as low-quality ratcheting screwdrivers and short, 10-foot tape measures. Even if these sets were top notch, it would be impossible to recommend one, seeing as the brands are constantly shifting what they offer and often disappearing without a trace.
Other kits that we looked at but didn’t test were missing basic tools that we considered must-haves. Apollo’s 39-piece General Tool Set has no level. The Olympia 80-787 67-Piece Tool Set doesn’t have a utility knife or a good nut/bolt combo.
We searched, but unfortunately no basic toolkit is offered by other prominent hand-tool manufacturers like Irwin, Channellock, DeWalt, or Milwaukee. So as it stands, there is simply no middle ground between these generally unimpressive kits and the tools that contractors use.
