Beyond Repairs Meet the dedicated fixers who mend and make over broken household items, and are teaching others to do the same.
Don’t ditch it, fix it. A growing band of Australians is rediscovering the rewards and satisfaction that come from mending household items, writes
We recently bought a new washing machine. This may not sound too exciting to you, but it was quite a big deal in our house. Our old machine was purchased second-hand and had been on its last legs for awhile. Every so often, something would blow a small but important component of the motor and, when it did, my partner Shaun would mutter a curse, order a new part online, grab a screwdriver and fix the blasted thing. He did this not once, not twice, but at least six times, until we eventually decided it was time to upgrade.
He also repaired the slow cooker, gluing the top of the ceramic pot carefully back together with Araldite after I dropped it on the kitchen floor. I used it like that for years. And once, when the plastic shelf in our fridge door shattered, he fashioned a new one. To this day, we may be the only family in the world to have had a timber shelf in their fridge. It’s not a trend I see taking off, but it did the job and cost us nothing.
Shaun is not a handyman or a tradie; he’s a business journalist who sets off to the Sydney CBD in a suit five days a week. He’s also, without realising it, part of a groundswell of Australians adopting a ‘don’t replace it, repair it’ mindset and who’ll mend or make do instead of automatically buying anew.
Repair cafes, where volunteers gather to help people fix household items, are springing up across Australia. A multitude of small businesses have been built on the notion of upcycling, where old or discarded materials are transformed into useful, appealing items. Mending groups gather in living rooms to give new life to old clothes and Men’s Sheds around the country are keeping all manner of fixing skills alive.
That we actually need to work at retaining this know-how makes quite a statement about the times we live in. I bet your parents and grandparents, and every generation before them, fixed things when they broke. When I was a kid in the 1980s, my parents fixed everything. My mum would let down hems and patch our clothes, and my dad, well, he takes fixing stuff to the next level. No job has ever been too small for him. My mum recently found him collecting broken pegs so he could repair them. Never mind that a whole new pack costs less than a coffee.
It was during the 1980s that society lost its way a little, and rampant consumerism began to rear its head. Manufacturing advancements, mass production and a flood of imported goods presented Australians with more choice and cheaper prices for everything from furniture to fashion. It set us on the path we’re travelling today, where I’d be unlikely to patch my son’s shorts when a chain store can sell me a new pair for $5.
Prior to the ’80s, the handful of televisions on the market all came with service manuals. Can you imagine that scenario in 2017? Today, complex electronic and digital components inhabit just about all our appliances. Powerboards and sensors have replaced dials and switches. That’s not a bad thing – appliances perform better because of them – but I can’t imagine Shaun or myself repairing our new, electronically controlled washing machine.
I only realise how defeatist this sounds when I have the opportunity to speak to Kyle Wiens, the founder of iFixit, an online “repair guide for everything”. “If something’s not working, what do you have to lose by opening it up and at least seeing if you can solve the problem?” he asks me. Kyle insists there’s
The process of repairing something pleases the problem-solving part of the brain.
no need to be daunted. Technology may have made household items more complicated but, he says, it has also opened the floodgates to an incredible (and free) wealth of information. Want to have a go at repairing something? Jump online and search through iFixit, Instructables or YouTube, or pose a question to a forum or Facebook group. I can almost guarantee that someone, somewhere can help. Need a part for your 20-year-old camera? It may well be on eBay.
If you put a finger to the wind, you’ll sense a shift in our attitudes to wastefulness. There’s growing unease with the fact that, in Australia, we generate an average of two tonnes of waste per person annually. Coupled with this, inadequate political action on climate change has led many of us to think harder about what we do at an individual level. We’re challenging our default setting of buying new because it’s the easiest thing to do; it makes us feel like we’re part of the solution, even if it’s in the smallest of ways.
The process of repairing something pleases the problem-solving part of the brain and, for those of us who work at a computer, it scratches that itch to do something useful with our hands. And, let’s be honest, there’s immense satisfaction to be had in saving a buck or two. The motivation may vary, but the feeling of accomplishment is the same.
When you strip it back, mending something for another person is an act of kindness, one that tells someone how much you care about them. I think of the times Shaun repaired the lawnmower of a single-parent friend of ours and got our elderly neighbour’s outdoor light working again. For me and our kids, he’ll have a go at anything. I constantly have my head in a book, so Shaun turned an old wooden crate into a street library where neighbours can take and leave books. Now I’m never short of something to read.
One day I mentioned in passing that, while I loved my street library, the books would turn over faster if people could look inside to see what was there. Next thing I know, Shaun was in his shed measuring and cutting and drilling. He had found a piece of perspex and fixed my street library so it now has a transparent door. And if that’s not the way to a book-loving girl’s heart, then I don’t know what is.