Bye-bye, Elder Woolley

When Nathan and I were dating, the car I was driving died and I got a "new" one, a '95 Buick LeSabre named Elder Woolley.  Don and Kelly Woolley were the senior missionary couple in my mission in charge of the missionary apartments and cars.  He was very strict about how we should treat "the Lord's car," so we washed and waxed on a regular schedule.  Once, when we narrowly avoided being slammed into by another driver, my companion and I shouted "ELDER WOOLLEY!" Both of us had immediately thought--with dread--of having to face Elder Woolley if we'd wrecked the car!  So when I got this pretty blue thing, I decided to name him Elder Woolley.  We have been through a lot with our old friend.  Who could forget changing a tire on a snowy mountain pass with the help of the snowplow driver when we were on our way to visit Nathan's parents for New Years?  (I swear, that rock I hit looked just like a large piece of slush!)  It took us on our honeymoon to Jackson Hole.

It brought us home from the hospital with our first little baby. (This is me, hardly able to walk after surgery.)

Well, now we have three babies, and they have been getting pretty crowded in the back seat!  We finally bought a van (woo hoo! more on that later) and it was time to say good-bye to Elder Woolley.

But first, we needed to fix one little thing.  Recently, I was backing out of the garage, paying attention to kid mayhem in the back seat, and I took the driver's side mirror off.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of it, but just imagine the ghetto-ness of what was left of the broken plastic housing duct taped to the window and door.  Awful.  So I order two black mirrors online and watched a Youtube video and figured, "Hey, I could do this."

Weeeeeeell, it turns out that the video I watched was for a '99, which had the mirror in an awesome place above the door.  All you had to do was pop out a little panel and take off the screws holding the mirror on.  Great update to the LeSabre.  We soon found out why it was so great.  Nathan started taking out screws to remove the panel...

...and it turned into a nightmare from there.  (Our friend MacKenzy came to help.) We removed the door panel, the plastic, the door latch, the window motor, etc. See where MacKenzy's head is almost touching the curved top of the door?  The access to the screws is INSIDE that, which is to say, there was no access.  We each reached and twisted and scraped our wrists up trying to get to the screws.  There was hardly enough room for a hand in there, and certainly not enough room to work a wrench or other tool.  At one point we were stumped and I feared I would have to take the car to a shop just to get it put back together.  But we all prayed and then Nathan went and bought a ratchet extender and suddenly we started making progress.  It took two days and a sacrifice of blood (from Nathan's wrists and forearms) but they got it on!  (I had long-since gone inside to keep kids out of their hair, after they started walking away with screws and tools.)

                        Ta-da!

It's so nice to have such a determined handy man!

I wish we could have fixed the broken fenders, too. This one happened in a parking lot in a snowstorm one year right before Christmas.  The one on the driver's side is the one I blogged about recently.  Yikes!  All these accidents make me feel like a bad driver!  But only the mirror was from inattention.  The other two were nearly-unavoidable because of ice.

We found a good home for Elder Woolley.  I know he will treat them well.  And I love my new van!