Lending Tools & Equipment To Others

In my lifetime, I don't think I have ever borrowed a tool or any power equipment from someone else. If I needed something, I bought it or I have done without. Now, I'm not saying that it's wrong to borrow something, necessarily, but I've always figured that if I needed something once, I'll probably need it again, so I would buy it.

We have a guy who we hire to do things around the house sometimes, because there are times when it's hard for me to do certain things and, of course, there are things that I am just not good at. He often borrows my tools for things he's doing around the house, and I don't mind that because it's my house and I need it done.

However, over that same period of time, I have lost a lot of tools. I don't know if this guy is doing it on purpose or if he is even responsible for everything that I can't find, since my wife tends to move things to places where I would never think of looking for them sometimes, but I saw him putting a hammer that I had just bought (because I couldn't find any of the, perhaps half dozen, other hammers that I have bought since I've been here) in his tool box.

I said, "I think that's my hammer," although I was actually one hundred percent sure that it was my hammer, and he made an excuse that he had one just like it. That's quite likely because there aren't a lot of places to buy hammers in Millinocket but still, it seemed strange that he would have had an obviously new one, which still had the label sticker on it.

Most of what I seem to be missing are saws, hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, and a drill bit set that I had never used and, as I've said, some of them might show up eventually. He claims to be a Christian, and I'd like to believe that he's not stealing any of this stuff.

Yesterday, he asked to borrow my new snowblower and, put on the spot, I said yes, and immediately regretted it, particularly after I learned that he was going to use my snowblower to clear my neighbor's driveway and sidewalk, for which he was being paid.

In return, he blew out my driveway and sidewalks since we had had a little bit of snow the previous night, but that's something I would have preferred to do myself anyhow since I enjoy using my snowblower.

I would happily clear my neighbor's driveway and sidewalk too, and wouldn't charge him anything for it but he's not like my other two neighbors. He moved in only recently, and isn't particularly sociable. A couple of weeks after he moved in, I noticed that his lawn was getting very long so, as my other two neighbors and I do for one another on a regular basis, I mowed it for him, figuring that he hadn't gotten around to buying a lawn mower yet.

He acted kind of strange about that, and insisted on paying me, and didn't seem to understand that I wasn't looking for a job.

Anyhow, so now I am concerned that this guy (the handyman, not the neighbor) is going to ask to use my snowblower every time there is a snowstorm, since it's obviously a lot easier than shoveling, and I will have to go through the uncomfortable situation of telling him no to something that I would think he should be able to figure out for himself.

Am I wrong? He charges us a lot of money for whatever he does around the house, and isn't particularly reliable. We're not friends, and I'm sure he is charging our neighbor (whom I don't especially like) a lot of money for something he will be doing with my snowblower. It's a new snowblower and, like everything else, it will have a lifespan that I'd rather be in control of.

 

I have had this same problem before when we lived out in the country and had to hire work done around the house or property. Simple tools like hammers, shovels and rakes always disappeared, and of course, when I confronted someone and said that was mine, they insisted it looked just like theirs.
Since we needed to be able to hire someone for some of these jobs, I had to find a different way to save the tools. What I ended up doing was getting a can of neon pink spray paint, and I sprayed some on every single hand tool we had. It not only made it esier for me to find the shovel if I laid it down somewhere; but it was easy for me to identify which tools belonged to us, and a lot harder for the handyman to claim it looked "just like his".
I think that it does not sound wise to let this guy start borrowing the snow blower. He probably will be over to see you any time he needs some equipment that he doesn't own, and will not replace it if he breaks it .
Maybe, since it is equipment, you can say that your insurance won't cover it if someone else gets hurt using it ? That is probably the truth, and even if no one gets hurt, but he damages someone's house or vehicle, they might try to collect from you since it was your snowblower that caused the damage.

 

It's funny you should mention that because I have already bought a can of spray paint for that purpose. Not pink, though. I couldn't quite bring myself to choose pink.

 

Having never considered doing some of the things that people want to do, I have a hard time understanding it. A couple of years ago, we were having a plumbing problem. Since we couldn't get a plumber out here, we hired someone who claimed to be able to do plumbing work, and he did seem to know what he was doing. But he needed a piece of electrical equipment that had to be rented for $100 a day, and we had to rent it. That was fine. Since we knew he wasn't a licensed plumber, we didn't expect him to have all of his own equipment. But after he was done, he said that he would return the equipment for us. Since we had rented it and put a deposit on it, I told him I would bring it back myself, and it turned out that he had intended to use it on someone else's house since the rental was for twenty-four hours.

So, as he would have it, we would pay the full cost of renting the equipment, plus pay him the hourly rate he was asking for, and then he was going to use equipment that we had paid for to do another job, without even an offer of sharing the rental costs with us. No doubt, he would have charged the other person a hundred dollars for the rental that we had paid for. Yet he seemed to think that made sense because, after all, the rental was for twenty-four hours, and it wasn't going to cost us any more whether we returned it in the morning or in the afternoon. I just don't understand scam thinking, particularly when they so often don't even seem to be able to acknowledge that it's a scam. Of course, we didn't let him since it was rented in our name, and we were responsible for it. But, in his mind, we were the ones who were being unreasonable.