My car is black.
Or, was black I should say. Now it’s more black and silver! It looks like a skunk. Funny, yes. Was it worth $200 extra to have it painted? My car is 10+ years old and has over 180K on it, so I chose not to do that.
My car was completely black on Wednesday…Thursday was quite the interesting day!
My friend Lyn came in from Philly on late Wednesday. We got up early and began apartment hunting for her. We’d already seen a bunch of places and it was about noon- we were starving by then and decided to grab some lunch after our last appointment.
I was backing out of a parking spot, had looked to make sure no one was behind me, had already backed up to the point that I was completely straight. A young guy, about the age of 18 named Joe (not really) either didn’t see me or didn’t look and backed into me…or we backed into each other. I had the right of way but either way we had a nice crash. Everyone was fine, his car had only a tiny scratch but my back window completely shattered, probably due to my bike or bike rack. My bike has a bent back wheel but other than that, all good.
The kicker came when I went to Safelite later that afternoon to replace the window. First of all, my window looked like this…
You can see the rust…now imagine that about tenfold once the window is taken off. Anyway, so that’s how the window looked. We shook off some of the broken bits that were hanging by a thread but had to travel about 15 miles on the highway to get to Safelife. I was praying and crossing my fingers the entire time that we wouldn’t be spotted by any policemen!!!! I actually DID see a police car but luckily I think 1) he wasn’t paying attention to me and 2) I was hidden by a big 18-wheeler. Whew.
Once we arrived at Safelife, I was quickly ushered in to talk to the Safelite guys. They said, “Hey, tell us what happened…we’re pretty sure we know but we want to hear it from you..” so when I told them about the accident, they were surprised. LOL! They thought it was actually a combination of the rust being so bad and the heat of the day that the window had just gone *ka-poot!* and shattered!
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Regardless, they couldn’t replace the window over the rust. If they did, it would just fall off again. They suggested I talk to junkyards and try to find a whole DOOR! For the time being they put a huge sheet of plastic over the window area and said it was safe to drive around with, at least for a few weeks. At this point, I did have a slight freak out. My mind kept running over the fact that I needed a new trunk DOOR, and oh my gosh how much would THAT cost, and maybe I should somehow just look into buying a whole new CAR?! Was this worth it?!?! etc…
Thursday and Friday, I drove around with the back of my car looking like this- hey it was better than the glass! You can probably see the rust pretty well here
On Friday, I literally called over 40 junkyards in the area. As it turns out, most of them are on the same strip of road on the south east side of town. I’d never been down there before! On Saturday morning, Lyn and I headed down and only had to go to two junkyards to find my new door. There were a total of 8 that I found, but only 3 were ones that I could look at as the others had to be shipped in from other states/towns.
And so, by noon yesterday, I had a new door! I found a guy who could put it on fairly cheaply and I’m good to go again…
do you like my skunk car? Haha! I do know it looks a bit silly, but really….does color matter? I live close enough to West Virginia that perhaps I’ll fit in just fine ;-)