All Posts

This is the first question almost everyone asks me, and it's the right one. A library of things is a beautiful idea, but ideas don't pay rent. If you want yours to still be open in three years, you have to understand what it costs and where the money comes from. I'm not going to give you a single magic number, because anyone who does is lying to you. What it costs to run a sharing library in rural Iceland is not what it costs in central London or suburban Ontario. But I can t

I started a Library of Things by cold-calling one in Toronto and asking if I could sleep on their sofa. The director told me later that people email him all the time saying they'll come visit and learn, and almost nobody actually shows up. I showed up. I crashed on his couch for a week and watched how they ran the place: how they handled volunteers, how repairs worked, how items came in and went out. That week taught me more than months of reading had. So that's my first piec

We've dropped our prices. Both Mini and Standard, whether you pay setup upfront or roll it into your subscription. Same hardware, same software, same app, same support. You just pay less for it now. This is something we've wanted to do for a long time, and we finally can. Here's how we got there, because we think it's worth telling. We got better at building A CLN station runs on our own smart lock IoT and controllers, the thing that lets it sit in a building and run itself a

Buying secondhand feels good. That's exactly the problem. You walk into a charity shop or scroll a resale app, find something you like, and get a little hit of two things at once: the thing itself, and the sense that you did something responsible. You saved an item from landfill. You didn't buy new. Good for you. I understand the feeling. I just don't think it gets us where we need to go. Because if I'm honest, secondhand is often just another version of getting high on buyin

When I moved to Iceland in 2017, I couldn't put up a shelf. I needed a drill. I couldn't afford to buy one. The secondhand market here didn't really exist yet, and I didn't know about it anyway. So I looked into renting one, and that was too expensive too. I stood there with a shelf I couldn't hang, thinking, this is absurd. Then it wasn't just the drill. It was the projector I wanted for a movie night with friends, 90,000 króna to buy something I'd use twice a year. It was a

Tool Libraries and have existed for over 70 years, providing reliable access to tools and machinery for local communities. In fact, the first Tool Library (TL) started in the fall of 1943 as a project of the Boys’ Work Committee of the Grosse Pointe Rotary Club (1). A lot has changed since then. In most places, tools are easy to obtain as manufacturing has massively increased. After the turn of the century, Libraries of Things have gained popularity. In 2018 Circular Library

Recently, we held our first CLN introduction webinar and would like to thank everyone for participating. Our attendees included community...

For three weeks in March 2025, we participated in Batch 8 of the Circular Valley Accelerator , where we showcased the Circular Library...

We are thrilled to announce that pre-orders are now open on our website ! Explore our two options, the Valdís System and the IL System...