At the end of a previous post, I mentioned that our car was in the shop. This is Paul’s car – the ’97 Intrepid that I bought a few years ago and gave to Paul when we got the Corolla (I’m so nice). :-)

When our office moves to a new building in July, I will be close enough to walk and that has been my plan. We realized that after I’m able to do that, we really don’t NEED two cars. We had played around with the idea of selling the Intrepid in order to save on insurance, gas, maintenance, etc. We could put all the money we save towards getting a new car and not having to take out a car loan.

However, a last week, Paul started having trouble with his car overheating. So we took it to the shop and had them look at it. They gave us an estimate of $1100 – with the priciest repair being a new radiator. Sigh. So the past few days we’ve been talking about what our options are. The short of it, unless we take the money from savings, we just don’t have enough to fix it right now. Also, we’re not sure we want to continue pouring money into this car since we are already planning to sell it. The problem is aside from the mechanical difficulties, the car is in REALLY good shape – the upholstery is in great shape which we deep-cleaned only a few months ago, all four new tires 6 months ago, all the little buttons and gadgets in the car work fine (except for the trunk release button in the glove compartment). We were really hoping to be able to get $1500 by selling it. But, if we don’t fix the problems, then we can’t sell it. And if we do fix the problems then we probably will just break even – which seems a little pointless, although it would give us a working car for a little while.

The biggest problem is that while in a month and a half I will be able to walk to work, right now I cannot. (And public transportation is out of the question since I work in a different county than I live. Atlanta is like that.) So sharing a car means a lot of waking up early and having to leave work to go pick up people. It’s just annoying, mostly on my end. Today Paul walked from the train station to my work – about 2 miles, and it took him 35 minutes. Poor guy. I don’t want to ask him to do that very often. Perhaps we could get a bicycle?

Anyways, that’s where we are. We aren’t entirely sure what to do with the car right now. I’m pretty sure we’re not going to fix it, but it would be awesome to somehow get some money for it since it does have value! It’s not a scrap metal car by any means. Just a stupid radiator problem, among other things (if that’s even the whole issue). Maybe I could convince my boss to let me work 7:00-4:00? I would love that, but I know it’s not going to happen! I could ask though.

So yeah. That’s what’s going on. Hooray that the Corolla works well. Pray that it doesn’t have any issues! This is a first for us; we’ve each had a car ever since we graduated. It will be quite a challenge to get used to the transportation limitations. Maybe I’ll start walking to the grocery store after all! I wonder how fast I can run across a 6 lane road with a bag of groceries?