The Balsall Heath Repair Cafe is a community initiative based at The Old Print Works. On the 13th June we'll be setting up shop in MAC's Terrace Gallery!

The Repair Café wants to help people to prolong the life of their possessions, saving money and preventing repairable items to go into landfill. Our repairers have different levels of knowledge and skills in different areas – from hobby fixer to expert/professional. We understand what we offer as similar to the idea of helping a friend asking for help. Our assistance is free and not the same, nor do we want to compete with professional, especially local service organisations.

We’ll turn our hand to all sorts of things, so if you have something you’d like someone to look at, please bring it along. Sometimes the mender will guide you on skills, techniques and tools to show you how you can mend your item – for example, the webbing on an old chair/recovering an old chair seat/mending a hole in a clothing item/mending problems with your bicycle. At other mender ‘stations’ the mender will repair the item if possible – this might be the sharpening of old kitchen implements and scissors/a simple bike repair/small electrical items (when this can be done in an electrically safe way)/jewellery repair/a small rip in a piece of upholstery.

We want the repairs to be available to anybody, regardless of their financial status. So all repairs are carried out on a voluntary donation basis. All menders time is provided on a voluntary and unpaid basis. Some of our menders also professionally repair/make/mend larger items – the Repair Cafe would not be able to replace these professional services. Neither are menders going to say that you need to use their professional service for larger repairs. If your repair is outside of the scope of the Repair Cafe, the mender will advise you that a professional repair needs to be done – but will not specify that you need to use their professional service. If the repair requires a ‘part’ to complete, we will just ask you to cover the cost of the ‘part’. This might mean that you will bring an item that needs a part to be bought before the repair can be done, and you can then buy the part and bring it back next month. Any money received from donations will be used just to cover the running costs and insurance for the Repair Cafe – any surplus would be donated onto to local community projects.