A New Ride

As most of you know, 2007 wasn't so much a "year of plenty" for me as a Residential Appraiser. I spent most of the year living off my savings from a sweet 2006, waiting for the market to pick back up. Well, here we are in 2008 with a recovering, but still dead, housing market. That left me no choice but to cut some costs and look for some other sources of income. I got a job at Best Buy, in the home Theater Department, and I love it. The only downside is that they can barely give me part-time hours. So now I really need to cut some costs so I can heal the wound rather than just applying pressure to stop the bleeding. It didn't take me more than 2 seconds to nominate my 2001 Mitsubishi Montero Sport for the guillotine.

Not only do I have a loan it, I'm locked into a crappy interest rate that takes most the $$$ from my payment amount. Plus it doesn't get the best gas mileage and my insurance payment is high: $132 a month. Yeah, You feel me. So what did I get to replace the Montero? I'll describe it and see how fast you can guess it. I own it, so the price of the car was pretty cheap. It's a lot of fun to drive. When parents see it they usually say that they "used to see a ton of those when I was a kid but you don't really see them now." It's really easy and cheap to work on. It's German made. Got it yet?? It's a 1966 VW Bug!! BUT, it's not just any bug! No, no. It's a Baja Bug! Oh yeah!

(this pic is from the other night. There are some guard rails that go on the side but they are being sandblasted so I can paint them white to match the rims and the decal. The front bumper is next)

It's got a fairly new performance engine that cost the guy $2,200 and it's had a ton of mechanical work done on it. So mechanically, it's sound. Looks on the outside: not bad. Looks on the inside: eh, ok. But I'm Mark The Man. I don't do "ok". So I've been going through the interior and re-doing it.

I took it down to the bare metal and cleaned it all up and pulled a lot of junk out of it. I'm making custom door panels out of tweed, I'm replacing the headliner, I got custom door handles and custom window roller handles too. I'm going to make a custom dash that will be covered in vinyl and will have my speedometer and some other gauges that I am adding like a tach (tells you what RPM's your engine is at). Next on the line up is some new gray carpet, new seats, and seat belts. It needs a new steering wheel too. Eventually the outside will get some attention in the form of some new tail lights and a new paint job. I was playing with Photoshop the other night and gave my car some different clothes to see what it would look like. All and all, I'm pretty happy with it.

(maybe Red?)

(Maybe Blue?)