sgoldmark

I guess it's a question of how much time and/or money you are willing to invest in it. It's true that some things are just not fixable...Ideally, those items would be able to be broken down into component parts and materials, and used in making new items. Repair is just one step in the whole cycle, after all... I personally do sometimes decide that something isn't fixable. I can't fix it all :)

PS - One of the items most likely to be un-fixable was printers. Total disaster.

Except for the time we opened one up and found an Uno card and a handful of bobby pins. Once we took those out it worked fine :)

So many...One of my favorites was the Christmas Reindeer. He danced and sang (or was supposed to). His owner really loved him, and we had a really tough time fixing him. But we managed some stuffed reindeer open-heart surgery and got him going, at least for a while. We spent a LONG time working on him, way more than we could charge for. It felt like a really nice Christmas gift to get him back to his owner. A little Christmas miracle :)

Thanks for reposting! It takes a village to fix a broken AMA I guess :)

I do think anyone can learn to fix, just like anyone can learn to draw or play the piano. While we might not all be Michelangelo or Beethoven (who is the Michelangelo of repair I wonder? Def. not me ;), we can all learn to fix.

Though, yes, it's good to be careful about fixing things that are actually dangerous!

We came across TONS of stuff that was beyond repair :)

I guess all my biggest takeaways are in the book!

But overall, I realized that stuff is just like food: something we harvest from the earth, transform with our labor, and bring into our homes (or bodies, in the case of food). It affects our health and our happiness, and the health of those who make it. And like food, stuff is a blessing and a source of joy (or can be). And therefore, we can and should do it better.

Repair is just one part of a much bigger cycle.