Those workshop tools, much like automotive equipment, yard tools, or kitchen supplies, do not fit neatly in a Marie Kondo de-cluttering "Get rid of it if you haven't used it in 6 months" model. You may not have used a 60mm hole saw, ball joint press spacer, trenching spade, or the coarse insert for your cheese grater in 6 months, but that doesn't mean you should get rid of that item. Instead, I think of it more as the capacity to do arbitrary tasks with those tool sets. Each task will require a random assortment of sub-components, and getting any single task done efficiently is likely to require a pretty well-stocked workshop.
One way to solve this problem is by delegating it to tradesmen, but I personally think that cooking, home repair, gardening, and (to an increasingly smaller extent) automotive maintenance are things that well-rounded homeowners should be able to do the basics (which requires having the tools) by themselves.
I do wish that our society did a better job of sharing these supplies - we've got what I consider to be a good relationship with our neighbors, and yet everyone on my street has their own cordless drill, their own lawnmower, their own Kitchenaid, their own wrenches, and so on, even though the vast majority of these objects are only used for at most a few hours per month. All of them are taking up space, all of them are slowly deteriorating due to entropy/rust/general obsolesence, all of them cost money...and yet each household must to have their own.
The tragedy of the commons... If you keep tools for several families to use... when you need one of them, it either cannot be found or is broken. This is often because lack of maintenance, administration, knowledge and willingness to read the manual.
> and (to an increasingly smaller extent) automotive maintenance
I disagree, with the cost of maintenance these days. The cheapest shops in my area (large city, Canada) charge $110/h, reputable (and/or German) charge $125-$150/h, and dealerships start there and go up. I know people paying $100 for a seasonal tire change (swapping rims, not dismount/remount), plus storage for your off-season tires. A good jack and stand set is $180 ish, and you can either buy a breaker bar for $30 or an impact for $100, along with a torque wrench for $40, and be set for life for tire changes. The tools will pay for themselves in a year and then save you every year thereafter. And you now have the basics to do the easy-to-get-to stuff like brakes and suspension components, saving you even more.
Of all the trades, automotive is one of the easiest (and cheapest) to start doing yourself, aside from maybe plumbing. Especially if you have a second car to rely on in case you’re not confident in your ability to get a job done on time.
One way to solve this problem is by delegating it to tradesmen, but I personally think that cooking, home repair, gardening, and (to an increasingly smaller extent) automotive maintenance are things that well-rounded homeowners should be able to do the basics (which requires having the tools) by themselves.
I do wish that our society did a better job of sharing these supplies - we've got what I consider to be a good relationship with our neighbors, and yet everyone on my street has their own cordless drill, their own lawnmower, their own Kitchenaid, their own wrenches, and so on, even though the vast majority of these objects are only used for at most a few hours per month. All of them are taking up space, all of them are slowly deteriorating due to entropy/rust/general obsolesence, all of them cost money...and yet each household must to have their own.