The Cost of Convenience

Our car is a trouper. It's a 2002 Toyota Sienna and it's brought us across the country several times and thankfully has given us very little trouble.

As we are about to embark on another one of these crazy adventures tomorrow, we decided that we should get some of our lingering annoyances with the car taken care of--the broken sliding doors and the shaking brakes. So we took it into the Toyota dealership to see what they could do.
We were a little shell-shocked when they called with the estimates, so we decided that although it would end up being a much more painful (and long) process that we needed to try to take it to separate auto shops to see if we could save some precious bucks.

First we took it to the body shop for the doors. Since our driveway is so sloped BOTH of our door handles had broken off and we were growing weary of kids climbing in and out of the front seats all the time. Toyota had quoted us $760 to get them back in working order. Pope's auto body shop did it in $261.

The next day we took it to Costco to get new tires where we saved another $130.

Then we were off to the brake shop where $125 savings wasn't too shabby.

Summary:

$738 more in our bank account.

So we did we do with all the money we saved?

Something long overdue! We got a DVD player installed! Yay!

(I probably won't be able to post much while on vacation, but I hope to have lots of fun photos and stories when we're back!)