Experiences In Car Repair

As many of you know, we had a rough time getting from our previous duty station to our new one here in Florida. Packing out was a breeze. It was once out stuff was gone that we started having traveling woes.

Our car broke down twice in the space of a week, the first incident was the day we were to pull out of town and the second incident happened the same day we got our car back after it was fixed. In the end we found ourselves shelling out ungodly amounts of money, purchasing a new 12 passenger van – not the wisest of ideas we’ve ever had, but we had to get to Florida and our Suburban would not have held our entire family after this coming January when our seventh is due anyway. The car dealer was great at working out a deal with the place that repaired our Suburban.  We wouldn’t eat the entire repair costs for the suburban - repair costs for a job that didn’t hold anyway.

The entire experience was one I would not wish on an enemy. Well, maybe a really awful enemy if I had one. But it did show my husband and me that we could go through a really annoying situation and not eat each other’s faces off.  Which is a big deal when you have six children with a seventh on the way and one of you feels ill and huge and the other one is a man. 
We still talk about how amazing it was that we could be so completely irritated and not take it out on one another or the kids. It was definitely a lesson in patience and I believe we passed with flying colors!

In hind-site, there was probably a better ways for us to have handled the actual car repair. At first, though, we had no internet access available to research any types of car repair prices or auto repair shops at a knowledgeable website like RepairPal. We did, however, remember to keep our our phone book and were able to find a transmission repair shop in the yellow pages. We liked the owner immediately but found his repair job to be a little too temporary for our liking.  Like 7 hours temporary.

So that is how we end up with the giant white beast of a van we have now. My husband would like to paint it to match B.A.’s van on the A-Team.  I must play reasonable one in this situation, I guess.

Now that we have a new vehicle that we want to pay off and keep until forever, we will have to be vigilant about maintenance to keep it running smooth for as long as possible so we don’t end up in the same situation we just got ourselves out of. Although my husband is mechanically inclined, sometimes a little too mechanically inclined, it is helpful to have a site like RepairPal with an Auto Repair Encyclopedia readily available in case we have a question.
Another plus to RepairPal is that you can easily find out how much a specific repair should cost on your car. Say you have a Honda Accord repair that you want done but you don’t want to get taken. You can look up what that repair should cost for your Accord on RepairPal. This will give you a little knowledge before you talk to a mechanic! For anybody who doesn’t have a thorough knowledge of cars this website can be extremely beneficial.

RepairPal could have made our car repair experience a little easier. Now that we have the Jeep homeschooling project for the kids, I am sure RepairPal will be checked out now and again as we dive deeper into teaching them about old car maintenance and the restoring of Biscuit (the name we gave our Jeep).

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