Kait Labbate, Centretown News
Jim Potter volunteers as a tool doctor at the Ottawa Tool Library. Bettina Vollmerhausen’s toolbox holds well over 500 gizmos and gadgets – from hammers to hacksaws. And she’s happy to share them with fellow do-it-yourselfers.
Vollmerhausen co-founded the Ottawa Tool Library – a first for the city – which opened last month at 250 City Centre Ave. She says with a $50 yearly membership at the library, Centretown residents can now borrow hundreds of donated gardening, power, kitchen and hand tools right in their backyard.
That means people in tight downtown living quarters, who don’t have room to store chainsaws and chisels, or low-income Centretown dwellers, who can’t afford brand new power tools, will have somewhere to access equipment they need, she says.
The new library also focuses on sustainability and saves tools from collecting dust in garages or ending up in landfills.
“In the lifetime of a drill, it gets used, what, 12 minutes?” she says. “It’s sad. I mean we don’t all need to own a drill. We need to start sharing.”
Canada’s first tool library opened in Vancouver in 2011.
The idea for an Ottawa tool library – the country’s 13th – took shape last November, when Vollmerhausen says fellow library co-founder Frederic Sune bought a tool for a home renovation and “knew full well that when he had done the project it was going to sit in his basement.”
Since then, she says, she and her team have hammered away at making the tool library a reality.
“We’ve talked to other tool libraries and they go, ‘Oh my god, that’s amazing. You must have worked insane hours.’ And we have,” she says.
“I look back and I think, ‘Wow, we really did accomplish a lot,’ ” she says.
The Ottawa Tool Library is the newest addition to the city’s growing sharing economy, which has seen the success of other sharing enterprises such as VRTUCAR and Student CarShare.
“It’s the idea that people come to the realization that they can’t do it alone,” says Michael Mulvey, an assistant marketing professor at the University of Ottawa.
“It’s a bit of a grassroots movement, the idea of moving more towards community and that if we move towards the common use of shared resources, then we can all benefit.”
Mulvey says higher living costs in cities such as Ottawa give momentum to sharing economy services, which typically offer high-cost goods or services for rent at a fraction of what it would cost to own them. At the tool library, a non-profit, membership fees are all people need to pay to share tools and equipment.
But James Chan, the director of civic innovation at HUB Ottawa, an office-sharing business and another sharing economy success story in Centretown, says the sharing sector also offers valuable social and learning experiences.
Chan says: “For people who have a great idea and need a little bit of help to get that idea into reality, this kind of place is amazing.”