South King Tool Library’s Repair Cafe shows the power of fixing stuff
Published 5:30 am Saturday, April 4, 2026
187 items were repaired by volunteers at the latest Repair Cafe hosted by the South King Tool Library on March 28.
The South King Tool Library is located at 1700 S. 340th Place in Federal Way and used the next-door Pyramid Masonic Center building to help community members fix a variety of items. These included:
• Getting clothes functional by asking for help mending or hemming them.
• Helping volunteers fix their broken lamps, milk frothers, drawers, power snow shovels, air mattresses and more.
• Repairing and handing off knives and tools to be sharpened.
While they can’t fix every single item, this latest Repair Cafe had a 90% success rate and helped 87 total people — all for free.
The cafe has multiple impacts, from keeping fixable items out of the landfill and saving community members money in a tough economic environment to building community connections.
Overall, one goal is to help shift people’s relationship with the items they own and empower them to try fixing or transforming things before throwing them away and buying a new one.
Second chances
Volunteer Tony Crivellone spent his Saturday helping triage items at the check-in desk at the Repair Cafe. While the skills of making repairs weren’t part of his professional life as the VP of a moving and storage company, he said he grew up around tools and learning to fix things.
He learned much about fixing things from his father, who was machinist in the Navy, and kept up the skills throughout his life.
With small appliances, often the issue with an item comes down to a loose part inside or a frayed wire. Sometimes all it takes is a bit of cleaning or maintenance to get something working again.
“It’s not complicated, you just need to know where to look,” Crivellone said.
When there is no Repair Cafe, he spends that volunteer shift maintaining the tool library’s inventory or tinkering with newly donated items.
“It’s a little bit of a lost art … we live in a disposable society now where things are not made to last,” Crivellone said.
Because of planned obsolescence (where companies manufacture items with intentional poor quality to drive repeat purchases), fixing an item at the Repair Cafe might not make it last forever, but it will at least give it a little more time.
Volunteering at the tool library and the Repair Cafe go along with his perspective on life: “Whether it’s a tool or a person, everyone deserves a second chance.”
Executive Director of the South King Tool Library Amanda Miller said they’ve been doing Repair Cafes in Federal Way since about 2017, and the number is at least over 30.
“It’s a really great opportunity to think about what you can have repaired instead of replacing, or just get to know your purchases a little bit better,” Miller said of the Repair Cafe, adding that “we have a bad cultural problem [thinking] that replacing it is easier than fixing it.”
To address this problem, the tool library tries to incorporate “everything from just community and sharing to skill sharing.”
There are many volunteers who show up to be the fixers at these events, some of whom are retired engineers, or with a variety of other backgrounds, who fix things “for a hobby, for fun” and “love sharing and teaching other people about what they are passionate about,” Miller said.
At a Repair Cafe, the guests are not just passively dropping off items. Instead they stay with their items as they are being worked on and often end up being a second set of hands and actually helping to fix it.
“Folks get to participate in that, they get to see how things operate, which we are frankly very detached from,” Miller said.
