Repair Cafe aims to breathe new life into broken items

Feb 16, 2019 | 7:31 AM

KAMLOOPS — Do you have a pile of broken appliance or household items cluttering up your life?

Are you waiting for that someday to maybe have them repaired?

Well, this Saturday could be that someday, as co-founder of Kamloops Makerspace, Nicholas Adams says they’ll be working in partnership with Transition Kamloops to hold their 3rd Repair Cafe at the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store.

“One thing we’ve done with Makerspace is we’re really involved with the repair movement, and the right to repair things, and educating people about it,” He explains, “We wanted to do a repair cafe for some time, but we just never had the time to do it. And when Transition Kamloops came around and said, ‘We’d like to do that’, we said, ‘This is a really great fit.’”

Adams says one of the main tenets of the organization is the Right to Repair, which encourages people to fix broken items instead of discarding them.

“It really is a dying culture. If you look back at the Depression, that people really were buying things for their durability. We often look back and say, ‘They don’t make things like they used to’, and that’s probably because we looked at something that’s made to be mended. If you look at something that you really treasure that has stood the test of time, it’s probably been repaired a number of times.”

Experts from the Kamloops Makerspace will not only help you repair the items back to working condition, but they’ll also teach you how you can make those repairs yourself.

Folks with broken items can bring them to the Restore today for the free event from 10 a.m to 3 p.m, with donations given going towards Transition Kamloops.