Kingston’s Repair Cafe is back and adapted for the pandemic

As the adage goes: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. But if it, is you can always bring it to the Repair Cafe.

Well, unable to host any in-person repair sessions during the now year-long pandemic, the visionary behind the repair cafe says the time is now to adapt to the pandemic-life.

“I just wanted to keep the profile up,” Repair Cafe founder Brian Weir said. “Like everything else, we just don’t know when it’ll be reasonable to have it again.”

So, after being approached by Sustainable Kingston, Weir will host the first-ever Repair Cafe webinar on March 24th at noon. A recording of the webinar will be made available to watch online later for those unable to attend.

Knowing the dynamics of the ‘Cafe’ have changed from collaboration to performance, Weir has been hard at work preparing for the virtual appearance.

“I’ve got a broken chair, I have done a dry run of that,” Weir explained during a zoom call from his Kingston home office.

“I like it, I really like it,” Weir said of the performance element to the new-and-improved Repair Cafe. “I even try to work in a little comedy here and there.”

Weir adds he’s borrowed some tricks of the trade to help make the process run more smoothly, like having some of the work done ahead of time to reference, much like you’d see on televised cooking segments.

“I’ll be drilling out a broken dowel, but there’s four of them,” Weir said of the chair he’s planning to fix. “So I’ll do three of them ahead of time to make sure that they fit.”

Weir adds he’ll be out scouring the local thrift stores for a lamp he can fix for the webinar too.

You can find out more on the webinar here.