Ottawa organization offers free item repairs with “Repair Cafes”

You might not have to throw out that broken item sitting in your basement. The Ottawa Tool Library (OTL) is hosting several free “Repair Cafes” in the coming months, with the goal of fixing broken appliances, furniture, or any other item in need of repair.

On Sunday, the OTL held a Repair Cafe in a seminar room at Lee Valley Tools, welcoming attendees with coffee, cookies, and volunteer “fixers” ready to repair various appliances.

Repair Cafes first originated in the Netherlands nearly a decade ago, according to a report from the New York Times. The trend has spread to other parts of the world in an effort to help fix broken items, instead of throwing items away and contributing to landfills.

Bettina Vollmerhausen, co-founder of the OTL, said the organization began hosting Repair Cafes in Ottawa in 2017. Since then, more than 400 people have shown up to have their items repaired.

“It’s often small things and people can’t go anywhere to get them fixed,” she said. “The majority is appliances and electronics, so that makes up about 49 per cent combined. To the rest, it’s furniture, clothing, toys, instruments, you name it.”

The volunteers in charge of helping fix items come from a variety of backgrounds – from engineers to seamstresses.

Mark Edwards, a volunteer fixer with a background in electrical engineering, said he’s been volunteering with Repair Cafes in Ottawa for about a year.

“I was brought up by my dad to always fix things, you know, whether it be the car or just things around the house,” he said. “I just find it an interesting challenge to come here because you get presented with… dehumidifiers, I’ve been given toy robots that one guy found in his parents’ basement from when he was a kid, hairdryers, kettles, all sorts of different things.”

At this month’s Repair Cafe, Edwards said he was tasked with repairing someone’s 53-year-old toaster.

“I took this thing apart, and being an electronics guy, it’s all mechanical, and I’m going ‘not sure how this works,’” he said. “But I saw that some of the contacts on it were corroded. So I cleaned them up, put it all back together, and it worked.”

Each Repair Cafe is free and only requires registration – provided you register in time.

Vollmerhausen said this particular Repair Cafe was at full capacity within eight hours of posting the event. The OTL has hosted larger Repair Cafes before, but Lee Valley Tools offers a smaller space, meaning less room for registration.

The next batch of Repair Cafes hosted by the OTL are also being held at Lee Valley Tools over the course of the next few months.

Vollmerhausen said she wants to partner with more Ottawa organizations to provide more space for Repair Cafes. Ideally, she said, every neighbourhood would have a tool library and Repair Cafe, and they would be funded by the city.

“I’ve talked to every single councillor. I’ve had meetings with them all, they all love the idea and think it’s great,” she said. However, after applying for several grants over the past few years, the city has rejected funding for Repair Cafes, according to Vollmerhausen.

“If [Repair Cafes were] accessible, more readily – let’s say there was funding from the city, from the government. If there were policies around that, essentially it’s waste reduction,” she said.