Write five entries about one object and stop: how it arrived, the job it does now, what has kept it working, what has been changed, and what would have to be true for it to stay in use. Age is not the interesting part of the answer. The Open Repair Alliance's 2024 report puts the average age of projectors brought to community repair events at 28 years and hi-fi integrated systems at 18, while mobile phones arrive at under five, so the objects that last are not the ones that were built most recently. The condition that changes the record is ownership: the owner decides what goes in it and where it stops.

Five entries, in this order

Arrival comes first because it is the entry people answer easily: bought, inherited, made, found or given, with a decade rather than a date when the date has gone. Then the job it does now, described as a situation rather than as "useful" — the tin that holds the sewing kit, the coat worn for the school run.

Care is the third entry and the one worth the most, because it is the knowledge that disappears with the person. A routine that is actually followed, not one that ought to be. Change is fourth: repairs, alterations, replaced parts, and who did them if the owner wants that recorded. Future is last, and it is a condition rather than a wish: what would have to be true, in fit, condition or access to help, for this to stay in use.

Keep observation apart from inference in every entry. "There is a stitched patch on the left sleeve" is an entry. "This must have been expensive" is a guess, and guesses in a record harden into facts within a year.

What the repair movement already knows about old things

Two figures put the record in context. The EEA counted 20.6 kg of electrical and electronic goods put on the EU market per person in 2017, of which 11.8 kg was made inside the EU and 8.8 kg imported, and found that all four product groups it examined had a designed or desired lifetime at least 2.3 years longer than the life they actually got. Objects are not usually retired because they are finished.

The repair data says the same thing from the other end. The 2025 release from the Open Repair Alliance gives sewing machines the highest success rate of any electrical category at 71%, ahead of lamps at 70% and hair dryers at 64%, and textiles the highest of all at 88%. The objects people write biographies of are, on the whole, the objects that can be fixed.

Example: a sewing machine on its second household

An example. A sewing machine that arrived in the 1970s and moved house twice. Arrival: bought new, decade certain, receipt long gone. Job now: taking up trousers and mending bags, perhaps six times a year. Care: oiled at the two points marked on the plate, cover on when not in use, serviced once in the 1990s. Change: the foot pedal cable was replaced, by whom is not known. Future: it stays in use while the pedal works and someone in the house can thread it.

That last entry is the one that does the work, because it names two conditions and one of them is a skill rather than a part. The owner talks and decides; the other person writes, reads the plate for the model number and asks the question the owner has not been asked before. With a 71% success rate for this category at community repair events, "the pedal is intermittent" is a question for a repairer rather than the end of the story.

When the honest entry is nothing needs doing

A record can end with no action, and often should. An object can matter and have no current job; keeping it as a memory is a decision, and it is not the same as a saved purchase. Storage is not reuse, and the biography is more honest if it says which one is happening.

Where the entry is a repair question, the object has a route. Repair Café International counts over 2,500 Repair Cafés worldwide, free meeting places where visitors work on their own belongings alongside volunteers with repair skills; the first was held in Amsterdam on 18 October 2009 and the foundation has supported new groups since 2011. That same page is clear that the point is the owner keeping the thing, not the volunteers taking it away.

If two people each write a biography, compare the conditions rather than the objects: storage, the job, access to parts, and what each was able to buy at the time. The transferable detail is usually small, such as a cover that keeps a book intact in a bag or a note of a part number that makes the next enquiry short. Turn that note into the first line of a repair question written without taking anything apart, take the object itself to a first repair café visit with someone new, and if the honest answer is that it is useful but not to this house, offer it on a shared shelf of things to borrow.

Sources