Almost There!

If you look back to Sunday's post, you'll see this week's goals. I almost didn't post today, than remembered about that post...

If you recall, we purchased a used vehicle a week and half ago. It ran great on the test drive...and the owners chose not to divulge to us that it doesn't always start well.

I have put our daughter into her car seat and gone to start the car several times this week, only to have to flood it to get it going. My mechanic friend gave us some ideas of how to start off...first he wanted us to do a tune up (and while we were at it, we thought we might as well do an oil change).

Let me tell you--if you can learn to do these things on your own (or have a friend who will do them for you), you will save TONS! Our cars are somewhere where we buy quality parts not always the cheapest!

I do not know yet if my car is "fixed" because the problem only occurs on the first start up and is inconsistent. The inconsistency also makes it difficult to diagnose. However, here is the breakdown of price for everything we paid for for my car today.

5 quart jug of oil- $9.50
Oil Filter- $2.88
Rotor- $11.99
Distributor cap- $9.99
Spark Plugs (2 sets of two) $8.88 each (with the ones we purchased, we also should not need to purchase spark plugs for my car ever again)
Spark Plug wires- $32.99 (Lifetime guarantee too!)
Valve stem covers (discovered two were missing) $2.99
Lug Nuts (discovered one was missing) $5.99-they only came in a set of four, so we have three extra now.

The only thing that I paid extra for fun were is my valve stem covers-I paid an extra dollar to get colored metal ones vs the standard plastic.

So, today, my dad taught my husband how to do a tune-up. We found an old receipt from my husbands last tune up--he paid $60.00 just for the labor part, and each of his parts were more expensive!

My dad and husband got to create some new memories over my dad's favorite topic-cars, and we saved a decent chunk of change in car maintenance.

Next mission for the two of them? Fix my husband's breaks, starting with installing a new master cylinder.