Sunday, May 24, 2009

Hoopty Shopping

Saturday was a whipping.

We decided it was time to get a "new" 3rd car.  If one of our daily drivers break down, it gives us a back-up until Handy Hubby can get it fixed.  Plus, Surly Teenager is going to summer school.  And just to be inconvenient it is not at her home campus, because it is being rebuilt this summer.  And they are not offering bus service.  So she needed a way to get to school.

So we decided to get a throw away, hoopty car; one that we don't care if Surly Teenager accidently squishes parts of it.  And because she wanted to have some say as to what kind of car we got, and she wanted to be allowed driving time, she chipped in her entire savings account.

We started Friday night and then almost all day Saturday driving around looking at one piece of shit after the other.  I don't know if my expectations were too high or what, but man oh man, we saw some trash.  And we were looking in the $1200 - 1700 range.  

Then when we were just about to give up for the weekend, we saw an ad for the PERFECT car.  It was slightly more than what we were originally planning to spend, but after all of the hooptiness we had seen, we were willing to up our budget a bit.   Only it lived over an hour away.  The ad had only been up for 2 hours.  Hubby called and the guy said he had received about 7 calls already, but no one had shown up.  Hubby said we are on our way with cash in hand.  He told the guy how far we were coming, and told him he didn't expect him to hold it for us, but he gave the guy our cell phone number and asked him to please call us if it sold before we got there, so we could at least turn around.  I don't know if he actually did hold it for us, or if no one else happened to call, but it was there when we got there.

And it was just as nice as we hoped it would be:



Its one big boo-boo:
It has other minor scrapes and dings too, but over all it is in great condition.  It is a 2001 Ford Escort, with 81,043 miles on it.  It is an automatic - that was one of Surly Teenagers conditions because she is not interested in learning stick shift - manual locks and windows.  Nice clean interior.

All for only $2000.


2 comments:

Donna Lyn said...

Chance and we doing the same thing this past couple of days, but haven't found anything that we can afford. He is wanting a small pickup, but we didn't have any luck with even seeing a small truck. I told him the more he saved the nicer truck/car could be, but remember you have to help with insurance too. Glad ya'll found you a car.

Anonymous said...

Nice wheels! It goes with her hair too ~ ~ Grandpa