About Smit and Repair Habit

My name is Smit Sharma. I write and edit most of what you read on Repair Habit.

The site is a place to put down what I know about fixing ordinary things: the boiler that clunks, the jumper with a hole in the elbow, the car that will not idle properly on a cold morning, the toaster that only browns one side. I did not train as a technician of anything. I picked up what I know the way most people used to, from other people, over time, with a lot of failed attempts in between.

Where this comes from

My father fixed everything in the flat that broke, rather than replacing it. Not because he was principled about waste, but because that is what people of his generation did. Kettles were descaled, chairs were glued, jumpers were mended, and toasters got a shake and another year of use. I watched him do it for the first eighteen years of my life and picked up more than I realised.

Two summers as an apprentice in a small electronics shop taught me how much of what looks broken is really just dust, corrosion, or one loose connection. Owning my own place taught me the rest: how to stop a drawer sticking, how to bleed a radiator without a mess, how to know when a repair is worth it and when a replacement is the honest answer.

None of that made me an expert. It made me a person who does not panic when something breaks, which is a different and, I have come to think, more useful thing.

What Repair Habit is

It is a small publication of practical repair and maintenance guides for the objects most households already own. Six categories cover the ground: appliances, furniture, clothing, devices, car care, and home care. Each guide is meant to answer one honest question with one honest answer, in the sort of language you might use if you were explaining the problem to a neighbour over the garden fence.

I do not think fixing your own things makes you a better person. I do not think it is a movement. I think it is often the sensible response to a small problem you would rather not spend two hundred pounds on. That is roughly all the philosophy the site carries.

How the guides get written

Every article on Repair Habit is written by someone who has actually done the repair on something they own, or something a family member owns, or something a friend rang up about at nine o’clock on a Sunday evening. I write the majority of it myself. When another contributor writes a piece, their name is on it. There are no invented authors, no ghost bylines, no articles pretending someone did the work when nobody did.

I try to be honest about the parts that were awkward, the tools I did not have and had to borrow, and the mistakes I made the first time. That last part matters. Most of the useful knowledge about repair sits in the mistakes.

What the site will not do

• It will not tell you a repair is simple when it is not. If a job is fiddly, expensive, or genuinely dangerous, I say so and I often suggest ringing a professional instead.
• It will not pretend to have tested a product I have never touched. Where I mention gear, it is because I have actually used it, and I will say roughly what it cost me.
• It will not run sponsored placements, paid reviews, or articles that were quietly commissioned by a brand. Advertising on this site is display advertising, chosen by an algorithm, not by me.
• It will not fabricate case studies or invent readers writing in. If a reader story appears, they wrote it, they saw the final version, and they said yes.

Getting in touch

If you have a question, a correction, or a repair story that might help other people, the contact form is the fastest way. I read the messages myself. Replies can take a few days, especially in the middle of a proper piece of work, but they do arrive.