Hello everybody!
We run the Repair Café in Central Portugal, between Ourém and Tomar. Once a month we have a collective repair session where everyone is welcome to bring broken items and/or get involved in the repair process themselves.
Our workshop is 3⨯5 metres, contains quite a lot tools and is far too big to use just for us. We love to help, are super keen to learn more, and also want to share the knowledge we have acquired. Especially today, networking is more valuable than ever. That’s why we have decided to start a monthly repair event.
In addition to the workshop, we also have an inner courtyard where we can work on bicycles, for example. Our large kitchen offers many other possibilities.
There is no guarantee that everything will be fixed.
It is even possible that something will be damaged permanently when we try to repair it.
Everything happens at your own risk. Therefore, please think first about the top three items you would like to bring.
If the items are expensive or large, it is best to email us beforehand.
If spare parts are needed for the repair, such as brake pads, please get them in advance if possible.
We don’t have a warehouse.
If you like to repair on your own and would like to help, please let us know as soon as possible. This way we can take your potential into account when processing requests.
If you like to cook, you are also very welcome. It can take time to get things done... and the hunger comes sooner or later.
We cannot take care of children’s safety and our house is not a playground.
It’s best to arrange that someone else looks after the kids.
We don’t want children between heavy tools under any circumstances.
The same applies to pets - especially in a pet-free house.
We open our workshop, courtyard, toilet as well as the kitchen. Please respect our privacy in the rest of the house. We don’t want to clean and tidy the whole house beforehand or afterwards.
I’m the owner here.
I helped my dad, trained as an engineer, was a technician on deep-sea ships where, “it has to fixed it, whatever!”
I’ve owned several houses, in times when I could not pay to get it fixed. So now I can usually find a way, being a “jack of all trades”, though master of none!
I am Kathi, globetrotter on a bicycle.
Initially, I learned/studied/worked software development. At the same time I was active in many initiatives and contact person at several sustainability fairs. Later I flourished in social and personal development.
2½ years of Euro cycling in chaotic times and without much money hardened me. Besides bike repairing and upcycling, I learned countless other practical things for life.
The building was a typical local farmhouse, 7⨯7 metre square, random stone and rammed earth (“taipa”), 60 cm thick on the ground floor. Downstairs would have been a barn for animals, first floor for people. We don’t know how old. Looking around, it seems the oldest in the village. The building where they made and stored wine, in the garden, may be even older. There’s a plaque on the wall dated in the 1950s. Probably when it was turned into a taberna.
It was a grocer shop, bar and barber shop, until the Portuguese Revolution, mid 1970s. Then derelict, for decades. Roofs on the lean-tos collapsed. The ground floor flooded every Winter. The roof on the barn behind began to give way.
Then builders bought it, put concrete and tile roofs in the lean-tos, extended the one upstairs the far side of the back stairs. Botched-up an upstairs bathroom when an English couple offered to buy it.
An English couple dismantled the barn roof, burned the rafters to keep warm in Winter. She painted everything. They moved back to the UK, separately.
The owner heard of it via friend, and bought it. He took six years, finishing others’ work, repairing the damage from neglect, and reshaping it to his vision. We’ve seen estimates of huge costs doing it the conventional way, quickly; a nonsense costing many times what the place could sell for.
So we’re doing it our way, on a shoestring. To enjoy the process, sharing it with friends from now on, now it’s almost habitable. Not postpone our lives until it is finished!
We’d like someone fluent in both Portuguese and English, to help us talk to neighbours to learn more about its history.