A street's worth of tools, already in your neighbours' cupboards.

A terrace house. No shed. No garage. A long list of jobs.

I'd just moved into a Victorian terrace in Leeds. Lovely house, decent street, friendly enough neighbours — and absolutely nowhere to keep anything. No shed. No garage. The under-stair cupboard already had the hoover, the boiler and an Argos drying rack having a polite argument.

Of course, the house also came with a list of jobs: skirting to replace, fence panels to swap, a wonky stair tread to take up. Each one wanted a different tool I didn't own — and had absolutely nowhere to put. Talking to people on the street, I quickly realised half the houses on our terrace had the same problem.

Before the move, I'd always had a shortcut: a mate called Scott who works in construction. Between his work van and his garage, Scott had more kit than a small hire shop — angle grinders, SDS drills, a scaffold tower, you name it. I'd been quietly borrowing from him for years. But Scott was in Doncaster. I'd just moved to Leeds. That fallback was gone.

What struck me later was that Scott never really thought of those tools as earning anything. They just sat in the van between jobs. He had serious kit, a neighbour or two who could've used it, and no easy way to put either together. That was the other half of the idea — it wasn't just about people who needed tools. It was about people like Scott who already owned them and weren't getting anything back.

I bought a circular saw. Then my neighbour needed one too.

One weekend I needed to cut some old joists down. So on the Friday I bought a circular saw. Used it Saturday. By Sunday morning it was back in its box, sat on the kitchen counter — because it didn't fit anywhere else, and I knew I wouldn't use it again for months.

Monday morning I bumped into the neighbour two doors down. He mentioned, almost in passing, that he was about to drive forty minutes to a hire shop. For a circular saw. The exact saw he needed was, right then, sitting on my kitchen counter. We were two doors apart and there was no way for him to have known.

“That was the bit that stuck with me — not the cost, the not-knowing. Tools on this one street that could've helped someone three doors down, and no one had any way to find each other.”

— the moment handi started being a real thought

Roof ladders. Cement mixers. The odd circular saw.

handi launched quietly a few weeks ago. We started in Doncaster — that's where the strongest early demand showed up and where we had the best base of tools to work with. So far roof ladders have gone out, a cement mixer or two, a couple of circular saws, and a handful of smaller things I genuinely wasn't expecting people to want. Owners have had their first payouts. It feels right.

We're growing on purpose-slowly. Yorkshire only, for now — adding tools to one town before we open the next. The whole point is for the people in a given postcode to actually know each other a little before handi gets bigger than that.

“I'd rather have one street where handi works properly than ten where it sort of does.”

— pinned above the kettle