Everyone in my life is familiar with my shit by now. I find things in back alleys and take them home. It’s a compulsion. I collect trash like a corvid. This time I brought home a broken snow shovel.

The place I recently moved into had no snow shovel. It’s the sort of thing I don’t really like to buy new, if possible. The world has enough snow shovels, and rather than buy something completely new for way too much money, it would be a better use of resources, more efficient, and more satisfying if I could just find a secondhand one. So I kept an eye out on my walks and commutes. I tend to pick routes that take me through back alleys.

I actually found two snow shovels. The first was boring and utilitarian. It just had a very worn out and ineffective plastic blade. I used it until I repaired this one, and then I left it in the alley until someone else took it.

What I hadn’t expected was that I’d find a snow shovel that was basically brand new. At least, the blade part of it was. It had no signs of wear, and the product sticker was even still attached. The shovel was pristine and unused, except for one major issue - the handle had been burned off.

I don’t know what happened. My best guess is that someone had a bonfire and the shovel fell in while it was unsupervised. When I picture it, I can only imagine the shovel’s owner, grimacing and groaning, pinching the bridge of his nose, bemoaning how he just bought that shovel. I can picture his wife or his housemates shaking their heads and saying there was nothing for it. It’s not like you can use it with half a handle.

The picture I imagine has him humming and hawing over it before he finally deciding to give it up for lost. But instead of destroying it, he left it leaning against his fence next to his trash bins in the back alley. A silent hope that someone with some extra time on their hands might, at the very least, prevent it from being a total waste.

That someone is me. Hello. Thank you for the gift.

I’m not going to pretend I’m handy or diligent. It was almost a year before I finally got around to repairing the shovel - like I said, I had a backup shovel that I also rescued from the trash. And it just wasn’t on my mind over the summer. But when autumn hit, the thought came back like a chill in the air. I would need a shovel soon.

I kept my eyes open for any wooden-handled shovels with worn out blades in the alley, but surprisingly, I found none that would work. Most seemed to be a newer design that uses a plastic handle and a little clip. Nothing I’d drive a bolt through.

In the meantime, I drilled out the bolt with a corded hand drill (Also found in the trash, funnily enough.) and took the thing to my parents place to use their table vise to separate the handle from the blade. It took a few tries but came out easily enough. I was hoping my family would have a spare handle - that seems to be the type of thing they would stockpile - but no such luck. I came back home defeated. (Though my dad did send me home with a D-handle and a fairly straight tree branch. Told me as a last resort I could try to rig that up. It didn’t look very promising.)

Defeated, I left the bare blade leaning up against the back fence for a few days, until one day I came home and found a perfectly-sized wooden handle with a D-handle already attached, leaning against the fence with a note. It was from my new upstair’s neighbour’s boyfriend, who said he just had it lying around. The note said it was all mine if I could use it!

I’ll be honest. This made me feel loved. What a simple and beautiful gesture.

The next step was to borrow a wood file from my dad. I don’t actually know what this tool is called. It’s like a cheese grater for wood. I figured it’d make it easy to taper the edge of whatever I ended up using as a handle. I was right - and the edge it produced was smooth enough that I didn’t feel like it even needed sanding.

Sadly I don’t own a vise, since such things are generally workbench-mounted, heavy, expensive, etc. I’m renting a little basement suite, and a good vise is homeowner taste. But what I did have is a new bicycle repair stand. (Thanks to all my friends - it was a lovely birthday gift that everyone pitched in for). It clamped nicely around the handle and let me work in my kitchen, over a tile floor where cleanup was easy.

The handle already had an old bolt bole, but it was 90 degrees offset from where I needed it. This was an unexpected boon - I needed my bolt to go through the handle a little further down, and the existing hole only made it easier to line up the handle with the blade.

Next, I had to get the blade properly situated. There wasn’t much of a method to this - I just mounted it vertically in the stand, took it outside, and wrenched on it, wiggling it left and right, until it was good and stuck. This took about half an hour, and I ended up taking a few breaks. What I didn’t expect was how loud it would be. Turns out squeezing a wooden handle into a metal clamp with a lot of force makes a ton of noise. Just creaking and squeaking at comedic volumes. I made sure to do it in the middle of a weekday, outside, so it would bother as few people as possible.

When I finally got it on deep enough, it was a pretty simple matter to drill a hole through with a corded hand drill and a wood drill bit. Then I was able to work a bolt through, tighten it down, and voila. A functional snowshovel.

Now, one of these shovels probably costs $50-$75 brand new. So I saved a little bit of money. But it took me hours of effort and seeking and waiting. It involved hunting down parts and letting bits and pieces of the project clutter up my life. It also might have only been possible because my neighbour’s boyfriend decided to be a little generous and give me a gift.

Which is, of course, why it was absolutely worth it. I’ve got a nice snow shovel now, and it’s one of a kind, and I have a relationship with it. It’s got a story.

And it’s nice to have relationships with your things. If everything around you is a transient and disposable object of pure utility, then the world is a grey and dreary place devoid of any kind of value that can’t be measured in dollars.

Repairing a shovel is a microcosm of the values of the DIY ethos. It’s a case study for a better way of living.

Better still, this shovel won’t last forever. But hey, maybe the blade will wear out before the handle does. And then I’ll be able to replace it, and answer the question of the ship of Theseus on a personal level.

I look forward to it.