26 Jul 26
The chair I fixed four times
Three of those fixes were wrong and one of them was wrong in a way that took a year to show up. What I should have done on the first evening, written down so I stop doing it.
Things We Keep
Writes Things We Keep
Tom
Carpenter, twenty-two years of it. I write the Things We Keep entries, which are about fixing and making and about the fact that most broken things are only broken in one place. Anna edits them, which is why they have full stops. I write when something in this house has gone wrong and I have an opinion about why, so there are fewer of mine and they arrive irregularly.
5 entriesThings We Keep
Writes about: furniture repair, hand tools, household appliances, domestic heating, sharpening. Not an expert in any of it — see what this site is.
24 May 26
Three tools fix nine things out of ten
People ask me what to buy and expect a list of twenty. It’s three, plus a torch, and the money is better spent on one decent version of each than on a set of forty in a plastic case.
Things We Keep
7 Dec 25
The washing machine wasn’t broken
It wouldn’t drain, it was eleven years old, and we’d already looked at new ones. Then I took the filter out. There was a 2p, a hair clip and something I have chosen not to identify.
Things We Keep
30 Nov 25
The radiator that was cold at the top
Cold at the top, hot at the bottom. Anna had put a jumper on and mentioned it twice and I had said I’d look at it, twice, over about five weeks. It took four minutes and a fifty-pence key.
Things We Keep
15 Jun 25
Sharpening things
Anna had been cutting tomatoes with a knife that could not cut a tomato, and had adapted by pressing harder, which is how people cut themselves. Ten minutes on a stone and it is a different knife.
Things We Keep