The other night I went to turn on my daughters monitor when I realized it wouldn’t turn on. Upon closer inspection I realized that it was broken seemingly where the external wall AC charger plugs into the unit. God only knows what happened to it (she likes to pretend it’s a phone, carries it around, and is not very conscious of the fact that it is in fact an electronic…Moms fault for allowing it!).  I could hear a piece rattling around inside when I shook it just to confirm something internally had broken.

via https://www.flickr.com/photos/uscpsc/

My initial reaction was ”that sucks, we’ll have to buy a new one”. Then I realized if I’ve accepted it’s dead I mind as well do what I can to take the thing apart and see if I can fix it, and that’s exactly what I did. With the help of a #1 Philips I had the entire thing apart within a few minutes and realized what was broken was a small clip holding the female part of the charge port. With the help of a little electrical tape and patience dealing with tiny screws, I had it fixed within a few minutes. Had I replaced it without trying to fix it would have cost me $60.00 to buy new.

Sometimes things get to a point of no return though. Take our old VW Jetta. She was a great car logging over 300k km in her life but when my husband hit what he thought was going to be fluffy snow, and was actually rock solid ice, damaging the front body work we couldn’t afford to fix her. That winter beside the body damage we lost the heat, air conditioning, heated seat caught fire and we got a flat tire. Our car was now worth less than it would cost in repairs to fix. We accepted that putting the estimated $4,000 worth of work into her wasn’t worth the money and trader her in (sad day).

I grew up in a house where fixing something was always the first, and usually the only, option. I was constantly taking vacuum cleaners, microwaves, computers and even chairs apart to try to fix it. And almost always we  were successful. If we couldn’t do it (microwaves are complicated…) we always looked into having it fixed before replacing but I was the minority with my friends. I used to joke with a friend of mine that her family needed to buy stocks in a vacuum cleaner company because it seemed like every month there was a vacuum cleaner at the end of their driveway for garbage collection. Neither her mom or dad cared to fix basically anything and when something we wrong they just replaced it.

At the same time, my mother always drove used cars, though usually reliable and easy to fix (usually Toyota’s) after say five years of driving a car she bought when it was five years old, she would seemingly have mechanic bills every month. She would, in my opinion waste too much money on her cars trying to stretch them that extra year. She would sink more and more money into it before accepting it was time for a ”new” car when, had she bought the ”new car” even a year earlier, she would have more money in the bank.

Though I totally agree that things are not made with the same quality and care today then they used to be (for the most part) but that doesn’t mean things need to be as replaceable as our society makes things out to be.

Are you one to jump the gun and replace or do you try to fix something first?