The basic toolkit every home should have

Screwdrivers and a bit set

A single screwdriver is rarely the right one for the job in front of you. Estonian flats mix Phillips (PH), flathead, and increasingly Pozidriv (PZ) screws, especially in flat-pack furniture and newer fittings, so a driver handle with interchangeable bits covers far more ground than two or three fixed screwdrivers.

Buy a bit set with PH1, PH2, PZ1, PZ2 and a couple of flathead widths, plus a set of hex (Allen) bits, since these turn up constantly on furniture, radiator valves and door handles. A magnetic bit holder is worth the extra euro or two; it stops screws dropping into gaps in flooring or behind skirting.

A reasonable bit set with a driver handle costs somewhere around 10–20 €. It is the single most-used item in the whole kit, and the one thing to buy in slightly better quality than the rest, since cheap bits round off inside screw heads and then the screw itself becomes the problem.

A spirit level — why it is not a luxury

Shelves, curtain rails, mirrors and picture rows all look wrong if they are even slightly off, and the eye notices a few millimetres over a metre far more readily than people expect. A spirit level takes the guesswork out and takes seconds to use.

A 40–60 cm level is the practical size for household use: long enough to be accurate over a shelf or rail, short enough to fit in a drawer. Look for one with both a horizontal and a vertical bubble, since hanging things plumb (straight up and down) comes up almost as often as levelling them side to side.

A decent level costs around 10–15 €. It is a small outlay that prevents the most common visible mistake in home DIY, which is a shelf or rail that is subtly, permanently crooked.

An adjustable spanner and pliers

An adjustable spanner (sometimes called a monkey wrench, though that is technically a different tool) covers most nuts and bolts around the house without needing a full socket set: radiator connections, furniture bolts, the odd bit of plumbing hardware. One 200–250 mm spanner is enough for general use.

Combination pliers do a different job: gripping, bending and cutting light wire, pulling out a stuck nail, holding something steady while you work on it with the other hand. A separate pair of long-nose pliers is useful for anything fiddly, such as reaching into a tight gap behind a radiator or a cupboard hinge.

Together, a mid-range adjustable spanner and a pair of combination pliers cost around 15–25 €. These are tools you reach for more often than expected, well beyond the job you originally bought them for.

Hammer, tape measure, utility knife and a chisel — the small extras

A medium claw hammer (around 450–500 g head weight) handles both driving in nails and pulling them back out, which is the more common need in an already-furnished home. A 5-metre tape measure covers furniture, doorways and most rooms without needing to be re-hooked halfway through.

A retractable utility knife earns its place for opening boxes, trimming skirting board fillers, or cutting flooring underlay; buy one with replaceable blades rather than sharpening a fixed one. A single wood chisel, around 12–16 mm wide, is useful for small jobs such as trimming a door that sticks or cleaning out a hinge recess.

These four items together typically cost 25–35 €. None of them is essential on day one, but each earns its keep within the first year of owning or renting a place.

• Claw hammer, medium weight
• 5 m tape measure
• Retractable utility knife with spare blades
• One wood chisel, 12–16 mm

A stud and cable detector — before you drill

Before drilling into any wall in Estonia — whether the concrete panel walls typical of Soviet-era blocks, the plasterboard partitions in newer developments, or the timber-frame walls of older wooden houses in Kalamaja or Nõmme — it is worth knowing what is behind the surface. Electrical cables often run vertically or horizontally from switches and sockets, and hitting one with a drill bit is both dangerous and expensive to put right.

A basic stud and cable detector, held against the wall, gives a rough indication of cables, metal and, in stud walls, the timber studs themselves. It will not tell you exactly how deep something sits, so it is a warning tool, not a guarantee, and slow, careful drilling still matters.

A simple detector costs around 20–35 €. If you would rather not guess at all, particularly before drilling into a wall you know little about, this is one of the situations where calling in help for the specific job, rather than buying and learning the tool, is often the more sensible route.

How much a full set costs, and what to buy last

Put together, a sensible starter kit — bit driver and bits, spirit level, adjustable spanner, pliers, hammer, tape measure, utility knife, chisel and a basic detector — comes to roughly 100–150 € bought piece by piece, or sometimes less as a boxed household set, though boxed sets vary a lot in quality so it is worth checking the individual items rather than buying on the box alone.

Buy the driver and bits, tape measure and spirit level first; they get used the most and cost the least. The detector, chisel and long-nose pliers can wait until a specific job calls for them, since they are used less often and it is easy to overspend on tools that then sit in a drawer.

Skip, at least at first, anything power-tool related unless you already have a specific recurring job in mind — a cordless drill is genuinely useful, but it is a bigger outlay and a different category of tool from the hand tools above.

When to put the tools down and call someone

A hand-tool kit is for small, contained jobs: hanging a shelf, tightening a hinge, assembling furniture, fixing a curtain rail. It is not the right starting point for anything involving the electrical circuit itself, water pipes under pressure, or a wall that might be load-bearing — those situations call for someone qualified, and for structural walls specifically, always for a specialist assessment.

If a job turns out to need more than the toolkit above, or if a socket, switch or fitting needs opening up, that is electrical work and should go to a qualified electrician rather than being worked out with a screwdriver and hope. The same goes for anything to do with gas, which is outside what any general handyman service covers.

For furniture that will not go together cleanly, a shelf that needs fixing properly rather than balanced on hope, or a tap or pipe that has started leaking, it is often quicker and cheaper overall to call in help than to buy a new tool for a one-off job. Odd jobs and furniture assembly both start from 39 € per hour, and plumbing work from 45 € per hour, with a fixed quote given in advance for anything beyond an hour or two of straightforward work.