New Life To Old Things At Repair Café

From bookends to teddy bears – The Repair Café in Timaru sees a whole host of items through its doors.

“It’s really the same principle as the Repair Shop,” says volunteer and trustee of the Sustainable South Canterbury Trust, Rhys Taylor, referring to the popular UK reality television series.

Staffed by a team of volunteers and located at the Eco Centre in Redruth, the Repair Café is held on the second Sunday of the month. The volunteers donate their time and considerable skills – there is a retired electrician, a plumber, engineers and people who can sew and stitch. Together their skill set enables them to repair a whole range of items.

In a recent repair café session, they fixed heads on garden tool handles, re-cabled a sandwich maker, fixed an umbrella and made sewing repairs to some soft toys.

Many of the issues with items tend to be mechanical. Rhys recounts how someone came along with a DVD player that had a disc jammed in it. The team were able to dismantle the player, unjam the disc and get it all working again.

People come to the Repair Café because they simply want to get something working again for practical reasons or they don’t want to throw something away just because of a small problem. But they also bring along things that have fallen into disrepair over time – or things that have been in a family for a long time and they simply want to try and preserve.

A recent example is a child’s pedal car that had been gathering rust – the team at the Repair Café created a new seat for it and made sure the mechanicals were working. Then the owner stripped down the old paint and rust and repainted it. With this the pedal car was given a new lease of life. The process brought a smile to many faces and now it will hopefully go on to make others happy too.

However, not everything can be fixed. “We’re always willing to have a look but we do turn away some things people bring in,” says Rhys. He gives the recent example of a leaking water blaster that the team didn’t have the material or equipment to reinstate and a smashed desk lamp that that they couldn’t fix.

And, the reality is, some things are not made to be repaired. This is particularly true of electronics – things like LCD TV screens, phones and the less expensive household appliances like refrigerators and heaters. They are either overly complicated, parts are not available or modern manufacturing methods make them harder to repair – for example plastic casing that is glued together rather than screwed.

But many items can be given new life and when that happens it brings so many positives. So whether it’s a favourite chair with a broken leg or a garden rake that has lost its handle – head along to Timaru’s Repair Café to see if they can help.

The Repair Café is open on the 2nd Sunday of every month from 10am to 12.30pm at the Eco Centre, 55c Redruth St Timaru 7910

The Repair Café receives sufficient donations from happy customers to cover refreshments for volunteers and visitors. The Sustainable South Canterbury Trust provides the venue free and acknowledges support for its work from local government and the Community Trust.