Sam Clarke
While putting the finishing touches on this January issue, we heard about the Lafayette Tool Library. As the name suggests, this non-profit initiative enables Lafayette residents to check out tools to use in repair and maintenance projects, with a mission of making home ownership more affordable for families of modest income. In the context of an issue devoted to the theme “Good Deeds,” this seemed like a project worth learning about. So, I gave the Tool Library a call and had the lovely, if slightly disorienting, experience of hearing an Australian accent floating back up the line. Turns out that, like me, Tool Library co-founder Anna Kojevnikov is an Australian expat who moved to Louisiana for love. Unlike me, Anna settled in Lafayette, where her husband is a professor at ULL, and where she and her co-founder, Allison Nederveld, have thrown themselves into community building projects like the Tool Library. You can read more about this simple, brilliant idea on page 8, although sadly, you can’t take advantage of it unless you’re a Lafayette resident. Anna explained that, while hundreds of tool libraries operate in other parts of the country, in Louisiana the challenge of getting insurance coverage for an operation that entails loaning saws, ladders, and other potentially injurious equipment to the general public proved almost insurmountable. In fact, the only other Louisiana-based service is the New Orleans ToolBank; a similar effort in Baton Rouge ceased operations a while ago. This is a real pity, since it leaves people in other parts of the state gazing at their lengthening to-do lists and gnashing their teeth at the injustice of it all. This is especially true at the beginning of a new year, with ambitious home handypeople from Shreveport to Port Sulphur on the verge of resolving to make good on the home-improvement project they’ve been talking about for ages. As someone who inhabits an old, high-maintenance family home in a rural area, I certainly wish there was a tool library in St. Francisville. My wife does, too, since this would increase the odds that 2025 will be the year when she finally gets the she-shed of her dreams.
"Still, in the context of the old farm that our place once was, this barn has a certain stocky dignity that whispers sweet nothings to the aspirational carpenter in me. All that stands in the way is a lack of the right tools to get the job done."
To be fair, the need is not small. The structure that my wife has been using to store her fantastical array of garden tools, pots, fertilizers, and soil amendment potions is an extremely dilapidated pole barn that has been gradually falling down since at least the 1930s. During that time, it has housed horses and chickens, and somewhere we have a black-and-white photograph showing turkeys being slaughtered there when this place was still a working farm. In the decades since it sheltered anything other than mice, this structure has been getting gradually shorter as termites make progress on its pole uprights. So, viewed from certain angles, it now leans haphazardly enough to make careful visitors think twice about stepping inside on windy days. Still, in the context of the old farm that our place once was, this barn has a certain stocky dignity that whispers sweet nothings to the aspirational carpenter in me. All that stands in the way is a lack of the right tools to get the job done.
Well, that and my own distorted notions about how much can be done on any given weekend. In fact, regular readers might recall having heard about this resolution to build a she-shed before. It’s true, I did, but then in 2024 life intervened. Somehow, here we stand on the threshold of another year with the termites a bit better fed, the pole barn a little shorter, and the prospect of a winter weekend’s (okay, maybe three weekends’) construction project still to come. So, until St. Francisville gets a tool library of its own, I’ll resolve again to build the thing this year using my own meagre tool selection. After putting up with being the subject of this column all these years, it’s the least my wife deserves. Shame on me if you open the January, 2026 issue of Country Roads and read about this again.
