Jenny and I have both been suffering from a number of muscular and back pain problems lately. We initially put it down to our lack of exercise and generally unhealthy lifestyle, and while that’s all too true, we eventually discovered that the mattress was the main culprit.

The one that we have was the one we bought when we first got married, so we didn’t skimp, and got a fairly expensive model with a pillow top. This seemed like a good idea at first: it was comfortable, had good support, etc.

Fast forward a few years and the pillow top was showing distinct signs of the many hours we’ve spent asleep. There were two body-shaped cavities caused by the sagging foam; these shapes were not “contoured to the shape of our bodies to maximise support, blah blah blah” but horribly uncomfortable averages of all of our sleeping positions over the years. We found that we’d be constantly be sleeping slanted no matter how we positioned ourselves on the thing, not to mention the hill in the middle. 10 year warranty? Bleh. Not covered.

As a bargain hunter, my natural instinct was to go shopping for a new mattress. It’s then that I discovered the sad truth that almost all mattresses come with pillow-tops now – the manufacturers have got this scam down to a fine art (several sales people admitted as much to me).

We went to several places and tried many mattresses, but after several such failed expeditions I decided to take matters into my own hands. Going from advice that I found through Google, I decided to remove the pillow-top foam layer. Here’s a brief description of the process:

1. Unstitch the edge – relatively straightforward because it’s easy to see where the layers are, since the thing is literally just an extra layer sewn on top of the mattress. We tried to unstitch as little as possible but still ended up doing 2 adjacent sides.
2. Detach the foam layer – our model used long thin plastic thingies to keep the layers in place. Y’know, like those things that hold tags onto clothes in the shops with a wide bit at either end and a stringy part in the middle. Yeah, that. I just used a hobby knife to cut them all.
3. Remove the foam layer – this is a lot harder than it sounds. The friction between the layers meant that it wasn’t simply a matter of yanking it out. That’s why we had to unstitch half the top, so that we could separate the layers as much as possible so it would be easier to pull.
4. Sew the top back on – in theory you could just toss the whole thing and just buy a new mattress topper, pad or overlay to replace it, but on ours, the top layer had some foam cells and a thinner foam layer glued directly underneath. These probably wouldn’t have contributed much (if anything) to the sag, so we decided to keep it.

End result: an almost good-as-new (firm) mattress, and anywere between $700 – $1500+ saved. Let’s be realistic about the results though. It’s not as if the springs themselves hadn’t sagged in 5 years – the middle still has some height to it, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was with the foam.

Recently, while moving some pillows around, I knocked over my alarm clock and broke it. I’ve had this clock for almost as long as I can remember. My earliest memory about it is finding the detached head of a Transformers “Bumblebee” toy and taking it home and sticking it onto the face with blutac, where it remains to this day.

It’s more than just a clock: when my family bought a puppy and we were told by the breeder to put a small alarm clock near its bed to help it sleep since it would remind it of its mother’s heartbeat. I always set it 10 mins faster than the actual time, and even though I’m aware of that in my head, it still somehow helps me to remain punctual.

Then of course I had to go and be a klutz.

I could’ve seen this as a good opportunity to finally get a new clock, one with integrated iPhone dock for instance, but I’m a sentimental creature and I couldn’t bear to throw away one of the oldest things I own. That, and how terrible it is to think that we live in a society where things cost so little that we throw way stuff that could be repaired, because it’d be cheaper and more convenient to just buy a new one.

It was an odd break, because while the external casing was intact one of the internal battery connects snapped, but it turned out to be an easy fix. Step one: unscrew. Step two: apply superglue. Step three: put it all back together, wait for the glue to dry, and voila. Working clock again!

In light of the above, the theme of this post is “repair”, with a list of basics that you should keep around the house so that you can fix things instead of contributing to rampant consumerism and increasing landfill.

Tools
I can’t imagine a household that doesn’t have at least a couple of tools. At the bare minimum, you should have 2 screwdrivers (one Phillips head, one flat head) and a hammer. This is sufficient for a sizeable proportion of all handyman tasks, including build-your-own furniture à la IKEA. Speaking of which, IKEA sell a kit that includes just that, in addition to a pair of pliers and a wrench.

Superglue
Because when something’s broken, the fix most times involves joining the broken pieces back together as firmly as possible.

Multimeter
You can get a basic unit for $20 from Dick Smiths. Fantastic for checking whether your batteries are flat, or diagnosing other electrical or electronic devices. It sounds more daunting than it really is – here’s a video on Multimeter basics.

The Internet
I could probably carry on for a whole other post on just this point alone. Youtube alone is a source of almost infinite knowledge on how to disassemble, diagnose and doctor any kind of thing you can think of, plus a number of other sites like FixYa dedicated to the ars restituo. The Web is also an excellent way to source spare parts, whether direct from the manufacturer, making a request on specialist discussion forums, or just searching on eBay – there’s a world of junk collectors out there and if you can’t find the part that you’re looking for it’s more likely that you haven’t looked hard enough.

What else do you keep around the house for repairs?

I had a knifing accident the other day – I was attempting to cut an onion using my Global chef’s knife when it slid sideways down the curved surface and took a neat slice out of my finger instead. Without wanting to sound like an infomercial, these knives are renown for their awesome sharpness and one naturally tends to blame the knife for the accident. But if you watch Jamie Oliver or any of the prolific number of cooking shows around, you be familiar with the refrain that it’s blunt knives that hurt people. In my case, if the knife had been sharper it would’ve sliced through the onion, instead of slipping and cutting me.

Today’s THRIFTerrific home hint: keep your knives sharp.

A quick anecdote: my mum came to visit with us a few weeks ago and cooked for us. She was really impressed with our knives – she commented on how they helped reduce time and effort, but at the same time came away little scared about how dangerous they could potentially be as well.

When she got home she decided to replace her cheap, blunt, ancient jobs. For whatever reason a very young sales boy at the department store decided that it’d be a good idea to take one of the knives out of the box and test the blade with his finger, resulting in a bad gash and loads of blood. After a fair amount of fuss, locating band-aids and whatever, he asked my horrified mother whether she was still interested in buying. The outcome of that expedition should come as no surprise, but it’s incidents like these that put people off having the proper equipment.

Be keen about knife maintenance:

I won’t go into the specifics of knife maintenance; this is just a very rough overview that’s intended to give you an idea on how to approach the task. In theory there’s nothing wrong with those electric sharpening gadgets, which are fine for your average supermarket job, but if you’re investing in an expensive set of knives then you should also be prepared to make the effort to maintain them. As with anything it’s possible to go overboard (especially these days where “advice” from extremophiles can be found all over the Web and on Youtube) – for the average person a 2-step method should be sufficient:

1. a “coarse” stage such as a grinding stone, to get the general shape of the edge and to remove the larger imperfections such as chips and dents
2. a  “fine” stage such as those ceramic sharpening sticks, to refine and hone the edge by removing the microscopic “jaggies”

You’ll find no shortage of tutorials on the Web although I found this guy to be generally good value – just don’t let the borderline-psycho-killer potential implied by the collection in the background put you off:

That’s all for this post. Stay sharp, folks!

I’m no eco-warrior but I do give the occasional nod towards being mindful of the environment. Having had my brother visit from interstate recently, I had to do five loads of washing this past weekend. Even though it was mostly sheets, that’s getting into baby territory as far as number of washes go.

I live in an apartment where it’s forbidden to hang washing out on the balcony, but everybody ignores it. If you’ve ever been to Asia or Europe, you’ll have seen good reasons why they came up with the rule in the first place – looking at other peoples’ laundry can be a real eyesore. I try to be as discreet as possible, hanging delicates on the inner lines and towels and sheets on the outside ones so that it doesn’t look so messy.

But when the only alternative is to use an electric dryer, then the debate over aesthetics vs. practicality starts to get a bit hairy. Consider this: the most energy efficient dryer on the market (as rated by Energy Star) uses 128kWh of electricity if used once per week. In Australia, our electricity sources are largely coal-based, which means that each kWh generated results in just under 1kg of CO₂. That’s for a machine with a 6-star rating. The one in my laundry? 2 stars (546kWh per year).

Aside from the planet, there’s also my home environment to consider. Drying drastically increases the humidity inside the apartment, exacerbating the problems that I already have with the air quality.

NSW and WA are the only states where there are rules specifically around hanging laundry on balconies, but in NSW at least, that’s possibly about to change. The Department of Fair Trading is about to introduce a change to the law that if passed, will mean environmentally conscious folks everywhere will be able to hang their laundry out on the balcony with a clear conscience.

In case you’re wondering how I dried five loads without using a dryer. Well firstly the fine weather helped immensely – what I put out in the morning was dry by late afternoon, and secondly, I have a Mrs Pegg’s Handy Line which is big enough to hold a couple of loads. I can’t understand how other people use those dinky little rack things. Granted, it did cost me nearly $200 though.

What do you do with your laundry? Do you think this new law will turn Sydney apartments into a visual slum, or is your inner environmentalist jumping for joy?

Pump packs are the work of the devil. Not only are they a waste of metal and plastic, when it’s finished there’s always a load of product at the bottom that gets chucked out along with the bottle ‘coz it’s just too much hassle to try and tap it through the (often skinny) bottleneck. Don’t you hate that spluttering noise when the stuff runs out, the deliberately* short straw is no longer immersed in liquid, and it’s just sucking up air like some kind of demented fish gasping for breath?

The companies that make these products flog “refill packs” supposedly to address the problem of packaging waste, but of course all they’re doing is selling more product. Another bugbear of mine is when they make the bottles out of opaque plastic so that you can’t even see how much is is left (and how much is going to waste!)

Pump packs are also entirely useless in showers, where there is rarely a solid surface at a decent height to allow you to apply the pressure needed to operate the pump. The amount that you get is also entirely determined by the pumping mechanism’s ability (or lack of ability). Hands particularly dirty and you need a lot of soap? Sorry mate, keep pumping.

Gargh! Do you see why I’m annoyed by pump packs?

I reckon that for liquids of sufficient viscosity – which is pretty much everything that’s currently available in pump packs – soaps, gels, etc. – the “upside down” bottles, or the ones with the flip-top lids (like the picture on the left) should be standard.

For those of you out there that like pump packs, please help me to understand why…

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* Well, I can’t prove anything really, but take a look at your nearest pump pack and see if it gets anywhere near to touching the bottom…