Return of the Master Tinkerer

Way back in 2011, I dubbed Brian the Master Tinkerer after he successfully fixed up three items around our house using mostly materials we already had. In the 14 years since, apparently, his skill has not deserted him. Just in the past month, he's repaired three items that were so badly broken any normal person would just have thrown them away—all using only the materials we had on hand.

Repair #1: Toilet brush handle

The toilet brushes from IKEA seem, in principle, like such a good idea. They come in three pieces: a sturdy metal handle, a separate brush attachment, and a nice-looking metal container to hold it. That way, when the brush part wears out, you can just remove it and swap in a new one, rather than having to replace the whole thing. 

But in practice, this system tends to break down—literally. The first IKEA toilet brush we had, the LILLHOLMEN, became unusable when the store stopped carrying the inserts for it. When we tried replacing ours with the store's newer brush model, it worked for only a few uses before snapping off. Our attempt to repair it with Sugru (a moldable adhesive) didn't hold up, and we ended up springing for one of IKEA's newer toiler brush systems that would work with the new inserts. And that worked okay until a couple of months ago, when the handle of the newer one came off too.

In this case, though, it wasn't the plastic piece that had broken. The problem was with the handle, which was designed to snap into place over the brush insert and hold it in place by friction. See that tiny dimple there in the photo? That's the part that was supposed to hold the brush, and over time it had simply lost its grippiness. We could put a new brush insert into the handle, but it wouldn't stay put. Both the brush and the metal collar that fits over it would simply slip out.

Brian initially tried to solve this problem by wrapping the end of the brush insert in plumber's tape. He hoped that little bit of extra volume would be enough to keep it wedged into place. This sort of worked for one use, after which the brush came loose again. So he tried a new tack: He took the handle down to his workbench, lined up his center punch over the metal dimples, and banged on it with a hammer. This expanded them just enough to keep them snapped in place on the metal collar. The brush assembly now feels slightly wobbly, but it's usable. And if it comes loose again, he can simply apply the same fix at no cost.

Repair #2: Toaster oven door

Our toaster oven is an old trooper. We don't know exactly how old it is because Brian inherited it from his grandfather, and we don't know how long it had belonged to him before his death. But it's clearly old enough to qualify as "vintage." 

Despite its advanced age, this toaster oven never gave us a single problem until this month, when the door hinge stopped working. The door would still open and close, but it wouldn't stay closed. Brian assumed the spring had given out, but to replace it he'd have to take the whole toaster apart, a time-consuming job that would have to wait for a free weekend. So for a couple of weeks, we made our toast by propping the door shut—first with a heavy pot, then with a long-handled wooden spoon jammed through the door handle.

When Brian finally got the sides off the toaster and took a look at it, he was pleased to discover that the spring itself was actually fine. What had broken was a thin piece of bent metal that connected the spring to the door. Unlike the actual spring, this was something he figured he could easily cobble together from scratch. After a little trial and error with different types of wire, he found that a heavy-duty paper clip made the perfect substitute: flexible enough to bend into just the right shape, thin enough to fit through the holes, and strong enough to hold the door open. With this new part in place, the toaster oven is just as good as new—or perhaps I should say just as good as old.

Repair #3: Headphone cable

Brian owns two pairs of over-the-ear headphones, and until this week, neither of them was usable. The culprit in both cases was the same: the wire that connects the earpieces to the main cable, which had lost its outer insulation. Without it, the wire kept kinking and sound wouldn't come through clearly. He'd tried wrapping the wire in electrical tape, but it always slipped off. He wasn't too bothered about losing the use of the cheaper set of headphones, but the other pair was a nice Sennheiser model that he hated to discard over such a trivial problem. 

I did a little research and found that there's an inexpensive fix for this problem called heat-shrink tubing. You slip it over the wire, then heat it up with a lighter, heat gun, or blow dryer, causing the plastic to shrink until it fits snugly in place. Brian thought this sounded like the simplest solution, so he picked up a small package of this stuff for $3 at Lowe's. However, when he attempted to use it, he quickly realized there was a problem: the place where the cord was stripped was above the point where it split into two separate ear wires. He couldn't feed the wire into the tubing without detaching it from the earpiece, and he wasn't confident of his ability to reattach it.

So, instead, he decided to try the electrical wire again, but with a twist: instead of wrapping it around the wire horizontally, he'd do it vertically. He cut a piece long enough to cover the bare section, laid the wire down on top of it, carefully folded it over to enclose the wire, and trimmed off the excess. Then he reinforced the seam with a line of hot glue to keep it from unfolding. This jury-rigged solution isn't exactly pretty, but it seems to be secure. When you plug in the headphones now, you get clear sound in both ears, rather than fuzzy crackling.  

One thing that definitely is secure, though: Brian's Master Tinkerer status. With these three low-cost fixes, he's proven yet again that he is worthy of the title. 

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Harvest Home

The fall equinox is one of the few dates in the year that has a traditional agricultural holiday associated with it: Harvest Home, marking the end of the grain harvest. I kept the name for my Gardeners' Holiday because normally, this is a time of year when our garden is producing at its peak. In previous years, we've celebrated it with buckets of tomatoes, peppers, and raspberries, eked out by the first few French beans and winter squash and the dregs of the summer's zucchini and basil.

But over the past few years, that pattern has started to break down. More often than not, when the fall equinox rolls around, it seems to coincide with a lull in our harvest. This year is a case in point. Our tomatoes have been reasonably productive this year (4 big Pineapples, 54 Premios, 32 San Marzanos, and 121 Sun Golds to date), and our trusty Carmen pepper plants have yielded 26 juicy peppers. But just at the moment, none of the plants has a single fruit on it ready to harvest. The raspberry canes are still popping out ripe, juicy berries, but it's a trickle, not a flood: maybe a quarter-cup to a half-cup per day. 

We did have our zucchini plant surprise us this week with a massive "stealth zucchini," which cunningly hid itself among the leaves until it had grown to a whopping four pounds—large enough that the Brits would call it a marrow rather than a courgette—and we've still got about half of it left. But it seems to have expended all its resources on that one, because right now there's nothing on the vine larger than a fingerling. So tonight's table will feature only two homegrown items: the thyme in a mushroom tourtiere, and the fresh green beans that will accompany it. 

Fortunately, this pause in production appears to be only temporary. There are plenty of green tomatoes on the vines, ready to be picked as soon as they blush. There are young peppers on the pepper plants that we can expect to grow bigger and riper in the coming weeks. There are only six winter squash on the vines, but two of them are absolute giants, so the crop shouldn't be much below par in terms of poundage. And the winter lettuce I planted last month has already sent up several tiny shoots that are set to turn into mature heads. So while we may not be gleaning much right now, we can look ahead to a good harvest in the season to come.

Recipe of the Month: Spiced Healthy Broccoli Soup

We're in the middle of another busy weekend. Between the library book sale this morning, my Citizen's Climate Lobby meeting and a series of errands this afternoon, and a dance performance tomorrow, this evening is just about the only time I have free to dash off a blog entry. So this post is just going to be a quickie to tell you about our Recipe of the Month for September.

Like so many of these Recipe of the Month selections, this one came about because Brian had a bunch of things he needed to use up—a head of broccoli, a few mushrooms, a tomato—and went hunting for a recipe to do that. The one he found on this occasion was the Spiced Healthy Broccoli Soup from Beauty Bites, which billed itself as "not your regular, average, broccoli soup" (sic). Instead of blending the broccoli with milk or cream and topping it with cheese, it leaves it in chunks and surrounds it with lots of other chunky ingredients (onion, mushroom, chick peas, tomato) in a well-spiced broth loaded with garlic, cumin, mint, paprika, and red pepper.

As usual, Brian made a few minor modifications to this recipe. To accommodate my wussy palate, he cut the red pepper flakes from a full teaspoon to a mere eighth-teaspoon. He didn't have a bell pepper, so he used a couple of our Carmen frying peppers, which he diced finely rather than grating them as the recipe instructed. He didn't have any dried mint, so he substituted roughly triple the amount of fresh mint from our herb bed. And finally, after tasting the finished soup, he decided to throw in a tablespoon of nutritional yeast and some extra salt to punch up the flavor. He served it with extra mint on the side and a batch of half-white, half-whole-wheat biscuits.

The end product didn't look much like a typical broccoli soup. It was visibly chunky and predominantly orange in color, speckled with red from the bell pepper and green from the mint. Yet the odd-sounding combination of ingredients proved surprisingly harmonious. After a few mouthfuls, we both figured out why: it tasted more or less like a bowl of chili. Take Brian's usual vegan chili recipe and swap in chick peas for kidney beans, broccoli for eggplant, and mint for oregano, and you'd end up with a rough approximation of this dish. 

While these aren't major changes, they made this soup feel different enough to be a nice change of pace from our usual chili. And it was certainly handy for its intended purpose, using up the extra veggies left over in the bin. So, all in all, we think it'll make a useful addition to our soup repertoire as the chilly weather sets in.

Why buy when you can rent, borrow, and share?

The sharing economy appears to be having a bit of a moment. Within the past few weeks, my inbox has presented me with two articles on ways to get things without buying them. The first was part of the NEw York Times' 50 States, 50 Fixes series, which highlights small-scale projects to benefit the environment from all across the U.S. The August 20 story focused on the town of Brunswick, Maine, where the second floor of the local library hosts a 1,500-plus-item "library of things" for residents to borrow. The collection includes kitchen and garden tools, toys, musical instruments, sporting goods, electronics, and an actual loom. In the past year, residents borrowed from it more than 3,700 times.

Although Brunswick's library of things is only seven years old, it's been such a hit that the idea has already spread to other towns in Maine: South Portland, Cumberland, Windham. It's easy to see the appeal, because there are loads of things that are really handy to have just once in a while. The most popular items in Brunswick's library of things include a grain mill, a blueberry rake, and a tool for gathering nuts—all things you're only likely to need a couple of times a year. Even more frequently needed tools, like an electric lawn mower, only see an hour or so of use each week, so it makes all kinds of sense to share just one with your neighbors instead of shelling out cash and devoting space in your shed to one of your own. Other items, like the musical instruments, are things you might want to own, but you can't be sure until you've tried them. By checking out a mandolin or a ukulele (both available from the collection) and playing with it for a couple of weeks, you can figure out if it's the instrument for you before investing a minimum of $50 in a new one. 

Ever since I read this article to Brian, we've been speculating about whether it would be feasible to start a library of things here in Highland Park. We personally have several seldom-used tools we'd be happy to contribute to such a collection. The tamping tool we bought for our patio project, the tile cutter we used for our downstairs bathroom renovation, the frozen dessert maker I took a flier on at our neighbor's yard sale: we wouldn't really need to own any of these if we could borrow them whenever we happened to have a use for them. There are all kinds of tools and resources available online for starting a library of things from scratch; the problem is where to put it. Our local library is far to small to host it, and we couldn't think of any other public building that would have the space. And while there are plenty of unused storefronts in town, they'd cost far too much to rent.

Fortunately, this isn't the only way to get stuff without buying it. A second article, from One5C (currently available only to folks who shell out at least $54 a year for membership), lists several other alternatives:

• Social sharing apps. The article recommends two of these, though neither one is for sharing per se. Olio, which started out as a tool for curbing food waste, is similar to Freecycle: you list your unwanted stuff for others to request. Yoodlize is more like Airbnb, but for renting out all the stuff in your house rather than the house itself. (The app supports itself by taking a small cut of all rental fees.)
• Freebie marketplaces. The article names Freecycle, Buy Nothing, Facebook Marketplace, and Nextdoor as places to give away or get secondhand items for free. One site it doesn't mention is Craigslist groups, which often have a "free" section.
• Rental services. The bulk of the article is devoted to these. It recommends FunFlicks and Guitar Center for AV gear; Rent a Bike Now for bicycles; Boatsetter and GetMyBoat for watercraft; Lens Rentals for camera gear and electronics; Rent the Runway, Armoire, Nuuly, Tulerie, and Nova Octo for clothing; CORT and AFR Furniture Rental for furniture; Lindrs, Lowe's, and Home Depot for tools; and REI, Kit Lender, XScape Pod, Lower Gear Outdoors, and Outdoors Geek for camping and outdoor sports equipment.

All this is potentially useful, but not what we were really hoping for: a platform to actually share stuff with our neighbors, not just rent it. Something kind of like the magical Share Spray in this old video from Center for a New American Dream. Is there an app for that?

As far as I can tell, there isn't—but there's about to be. An app called LendLo, supposedly launching "soon," promises to help you borrow and lend stuff within your community. The website says the app will let you list items, browse and request things you need, arrange for pickup, and keep track of who has what. If we got enough people in town signed up on this app, we could create something like a library of things, only the collection would be distributed across all our homes instead of in one central location. So we wouldn't just be sharing the items, we'd also be sharing the storage space for the items.

I've put my name on the mailing list, so I guess that means I'll be one of the first to hear whenever the app becomes available. Then we can download it, check it out, and if it looks useful, start touting it to everyone we know in Highland Park. Who knows—we might just end up building our own library of things the easy way.

Shedding deadweight

Over the past year, Brian has been slowly collecting shipping pallets and odd bits of lumber from various spots around town. He didn't have any particular use in mind for them, but he knew they could come in handy for projects like our DIY compost bin, so whenever he happened to spot a piece in good condition, he'd just grab it and stow it away in our shed. All these new acquisitions sat snuggled up against the top from our old patio table, which Brian had also squirreled away "just in case" after we replaced the patio set last summer. Since the shed isn't very big and already contained quite a lot of stuff, useful and otherwise, it gradually became harder and harder to get around in there.

So, Saturday morning, he decided it was time to haul out all that wood and "do something" with it. He hadn't actually figured out what he wanted to do with it, but he thought he'd retrieve it first and take it from there. But in order to haul out the wood, he had to first haul out all the other stuff in the shed that was blocking his path to it. And once he'd started doing that, he realized that some of the stuff in question was in pretty bad condition and really should be disposed of. So when I came down to join him, about 20 minutes after he'd gone out (saying vaguely that he'd "be outside"), I found the yard looking more or less like this and Brian in the process of breaking apart an old plastic trash barrel—which we'd somehow managed to get stuck inside another trash barrel—with his bare hands.  

Well, once I saw this project in progress, naturally I had to jump in. What started out as just a general notion of dealing with the wood pile turned into a full-scale clear-out and reorganization of the shed contents. Over the next few hours, we dragged out pretty much everything that was sitting on every horizontal surface in that shed—floor, table, shelves—and decided what was worth putting back and where it should go. (Since I'd come late to the party, I didn't manage to get a "before" picture of the shed in its cluttered state, but I took several of the "during" and "after.")

We kept the big pile of old birdseed bags that we use to haul bulk compost and mulch home from the Co-Op, but we discarded most of the smaller cat-food bags that were too small for this purpose. (We brought a few indoors to use as trash bags, and we kept a couple as material for tree bands to foil pests like squirrels and lanternflies.) We sorted out our tangled piles of rope and deer netting, removed the damaged ones, bundled the rest up neatly, and tucked them into one large bin together. We went through our huge collection of plant pots, removing any that were damaged and culling some of the ones in less useful sizes. (The remaining collection is still huge, but at least it's now been neatly sorted into stacks that won't fall over.) We tossed several items that had clearly ceased to be useful, such as torn gardening gloves and the aforementioned big trash barrel, which Brian divided into two large pieces so it could fit inside our even larger trash bin. And we swept off all the exposed surfaces, clearing away years' worth of accumulated dust, straw, and desiccated rat droppings (though, fortunately, no fresh ones).

Among the trash, we also found several items that were possibly useful to someone, just not to us. These included:

• A set of very nice garden tools (a fork and two trowels) that were still sitting unused in their original box. We'd received them as a gift and never used them because we were so used to our old ones. Fortunately, these quickly found a new home on Freecycle. 
• A grill basket too large to fit on our grill and a couple of other grilling tools (a long spatula and fork) that we'd picked up somewhere and never used. These will go on Freecycle as soon as we've cleaned some of the rust off them.
• The pan and funnel we used for changing the oil in our old Honda, which we haven't used in over 14 years. (The oil pan on our "new" car, bought in 2011, proved much harder to access, and we decided it wasn't worth the hassle.) These will also go on Freecycle.
• An old trowel that's not as nice as our three other trowels. This went out by the curb with our discarded plant pots, where it was quickly snapped up.
• An  unidentified electrical device that plugs into a car charger. Brian thought it was meant for defrosting a cold engine block, but when I searched "engine block heater" online I couldn't find anything that looks like it, and I hesitate to list it on Freecycle if I can't even put a name to it.
• An old rolling cart that had been sitting in the corner of the shed ever since we bought the place. When we dragged it out, we discovered that it was apparently meant to hold electrical appliances, because it had a crude power strip built into one side: a couple of small outlets connected to an ancient electrical cord with no grounding plug. That feature probably isn't useful anymore, but the cart itself could be, so we set it out on the curb as well. If that doesn't work, we'll try Freecycle.

Once all the junk was gone and the surfaces were clear, we could find better spots for the things we wanted to keep. Our Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluders, two useful but unwieldy chicken-wire constructions, found a new home on a high shelf with a couple of tarps and a spare garden hose. The PVC pipes we use to make cages for our honeyberry bushes got tucked away on a lower shelf behind some smaller pots and tools. A couple of tools that had previously sat on the floor got hung up on the wall, now that we had access to the wall to hang them.

The reorganized shed is much cleaner and airier than the cluttered space we started out with. We didn't actually get rid of that much stuff, but it all fits in much better, giving us much better access to the things we use regularly. And there's enough room left over to put away the charcoal grill and the patio chairs once winter comes.

Ironically, one thing that ended up going back into the shed was that big stack of pallets. We spent so long on the cleanup that, in the end, Brian didn't have the time or the energy to break them down. But at least they're out of the way now, tucked into the corner where that rolling cart used to be, so they're no longer impeding our movement.