The drill

This summer my husband bought a corded drill. I think from a yard sale. A few weeks later he found a cordless drill at the thrift store for $15. He was thrilled, and purchased it. Two drills should be good right? Yes. If your rabbit doesn't eat through the cord for the cordless drill. And if the second drill isn't left outside in the rain two would be peachy. All the sudden we needed a new drill. Our first move was to price new ones online. Why? For two reasons. Thrift stores and pawn shops don't have an online inventory. Second we needed a baseline to know if the used drill was a good buy or not. Sometimes used stuff is not much cheaper then new. In that case we usually buy new. FYI sometimes renting tools isn't a good deal either. It would have cost us $55 a day to rent a pressure washer. We spent $90 on a new one. Used it for two days on the house, and have found several other uses for it. We did watch for one all summer in the used market but had no luck. Which brings me to our next move. We posted a wanted ad in www.craigslist.org that brought us several replies(best to do this as soon as possible so you get more replies) but no good deals. Our craigslist ad had brought us prices of $20-$45. In fact the man with the $20 drill bought is for $25 and wanted to resell it at a $5 loss? That's outrageous for a used tool! In the online retail ads We found the best drill deal right now for a new drill was $100 for a drill, saw, and other tool stuff in a set. More then we wanted to spend. Next we hit thrift stores, we came up empty. A trip to the local pawn shop reveled cordless (hubby wanted cordless, corded drills are cheaper) went from $20-$200! However hubby found an add on craigslist for a cordless drill for $7. It was a half an hour each way to pick it up. We figured even with gas it would save us $7 off the cheapest pawnshop drill. If you were pressed for time, low on gas, or don't enjoy driving then the cheap pawnshop drill might have been the right choice for you. Everyone is different. The lady we purchased the drill from also sold us a big garage light for $7 so our trip was defiantly worthwhile.

There was another option. We looked up a new power cord for our drill. It was $12 and took several days to ship. Not an option. That would have bought the drill to $27 for a bottom level drill. I would rather wait and get a good drill for a good price.

The drill we bought is not very powerful but suits our current needs just fine. We weren't able to wait for a better drill at a good price, so we went with the cheapest we could find while we look for a better one. If you have time to wait in a used purchase you can generally find a better price. We didn't. Even so we looked for a pressure washer all summer, and finally bought a brand new one in the fall.