A year of mending instead of replacing

In January I decided that for a year I would not replace anything that could be mended, and I would count. It is now December and the count is: nineteen things mended, seven things replaced anyway, two things ruined by attempting to mend them.

The nineteen

Mostly clothes, which is unglamorous and is where the real volume is. Eleven items of clothing: four jumper elbows, three seams, two zips (one of which took three attempts), a coat lining, and a pair of work trousers that have now been repaired so many times they have a sort of visible history down the left leg.

Then: a chair rung reglued, a lamp rewired, a bike wheel trued at the shop on Marlow Road for six pounds, a bread bin hinge, a garden fork handle, a laptop charger cable with heatshrink, and the tap in the bathroom that dripped for four years and turned out to need a washer costing thirty pence.

That tap is the one I think about. Four years. I looked at it every single day, I mentally filed it as a plumber-shaped problem, and it was thirty pence and nine minutes.

The seven replacements

The electric kettle, which I did not replace with a kettle but with a slower one. A pair of boots where the sole had separated from the upper across the whole width and the cobbler said, kindly, no. A phone battery, which is a repair the manufacturer has decided is a replacement. Two saucepans with warped bases. A mattress. And a pair of glasses I sat on.

I do not consider these failures. The point was never to never buy anything. It was to make repair the first question rather than an unusual one.

The two disasters

I tried to fix a stuck drawer in a chest of drawers by planing the runner and took off far too much, so it now rattles, and every time I open it I am reminded of my own confidence. And I superglued a ceramic bowl badly enough that the glue line is grey and proud of the surface. It is on a high shelf where the glue line faces the wall.

What it cost, roughly

About seventy pounds in materials and paid repairs, against maybe eight hundred in things not bought. But the money is the least interesting part of it. The interesting part is that after a year, objects in the house have stopped being disposable in my head, and that changed what I buy. I now stand in shops turning things over looking for screws instead of glue, and it has stopped me buying about half of what I would have.

Next year

I am keeping it, without the counting. The counting was useful for one year because it made the thing visible. Another year of counting would turn it into a metric, which is the trap I complained about in February's essay, so the spreadsheet is closing.