Car going in for repairs
After 3 years of driving our Impreza, it is going into the garage for some badly needed body work.
We are looking at replacing the back bumper, repainting the front bumper, and repairing the rear fender and door. It's said that Japanese streets are narrow, but you never really get a good hint of that until you consider how much body damage a car takes in just three short years. In the 5 years I owned my Mazda Protege in Seattle, I only had one scratch and that was because I merged into someone sitting in my blindspot up near the Bellevue bus depot.
The front bumper looks terrible, but it is not really that worse for wear. The paint is mostly scratched off and there is some plastic peeling off where the corner was scraped against a wall. This damage will be repaired and repainted. Cheap as we are, we decided to go with repair rather than replacement to save about 300 dollars.
The back bumper is generally a mess. There's the scrapes on the passenger side where I drove the car too close to a wall. There's the bumper damage where my wife backed into a hard rubber bumper on a wall at the Post Office. There's a bunch of dings and scratches from other things that just happened (no explanation!). But the biggest scratch happened just recently and actually starts from the fender.
The fender and part of the door on the driver's side is dented in and scraped badly. My wife was putting the car into a very tight parking space and just as she had put it in, she noticed a much wider space opening up just across the lot. Pulling out, she turned the wheel too far and ran the back door right against the metal pole dividing the spaces. The scratches pushed in the metal and scraped off the paint, so repair is mandatory. I can live with a scratched bumper, but rusting metal is going to be trouble.
So we're not driving anywhere this week. And we'll be out a big chunk of change. But our car will return nice and new, and ready for us to drive it into walls again.
We are looking at replacing the back bumper, repainting the front bumper, and repairing the rear fender and door. It's said that Japanese streets are narrow, but you never really get a good hint of that until you consider how much body damage a car takes in just three short years. In the 5 years I owned my Mazda Protege in Seattle, I only had one scratch and that was because I merged into someone sitting in my blindspot up near the Bellevue bus depot.
The front bumper looks terrible, but it is not really that worse for wear. The paint is mostly scratched off and there is some plastic peeling off where the corner was scraped against a wall. This damage will be repaired and repainted. Cheap as we are, we decided to go with repair rather than replacement to save about 300 dollars.
The back bumper is generally a mess. There's the scrapes on the passenger side where I drove the car too close to a wall. There's the bumper damage where my wife backed into a hard rubber bumper on a wall at the Post Office. There's a bunch of dings and scratches from other things that just happened (no explanation!). But the biggest scratch happened just recently and actually starts from the fender.
The fender and part of the door on the driver's side is dented in and scraped badly. My wife was putting the car into a very tight parking space and just as she had put it in, she noticed a much wider space opening up just across the lot. Pulling out, she turned the wheel too far and ran the back door right against the metal pole dividing the spaces. The scratches pushed in the metal and scraped off the paint, so repair is mandatory. I can live with a scratched bumper, but rusting metal is going to be trouble.
So we're not driving anywhere this week. And we'll be out a big chunk of change. But our car will return nice and new, and ready for us to drive it into walls again.
posted by Lauren Smith at
2:27 PM
|
0 comments
