When Life Gives You Lemons...

We admit. We bought a lemon. Despite how fun our life was sharing a car 6 months ago, it was getting too complicated. We looked and looked and finally found a car (a Rav4) that was in our price range and that would last us forever. Or so we thought. Had we known it would be a lemon, we wouldn’t have bought it. But we didn’t, so we excitedly became a 2-car family. It had its perks…I could drive to work, pick up furniture projects and run errands. The flexibility was great. But as for the car, it was terrible! It had non-stop problems starting 3 days after we bought it.

The dealer wouldn’t do anything, so every few weeks, we dumped money into it thinking (and hoping) that once we fixed that, all of our problems would be gone. And then a few weeks later, we would do the same thing. Mechanic after mechanic could not pinpoint the exact problem and so we continually dumped money into the money-sucking car without any improved functionality.

There didn’t seem to be an end, so we decided to finally just trade it in and get whatever we could out of it. Yes, we lost some money. Yes, we learned a lot of lessons. And yes, we are back to being a 1-car family until we find a good, quality car that can be in the family for a long time. It is such a relief to have it gone, but I have to say that car shopping does not bring out the best in our relationship. Trying to find the perfect car can be so exhausting and stressful!

But for now, we’ll enjoy (?) the extra hour we get in the car with each other as we take turns dropping each other off at work and then commuting to the opposite end of the valley for our own jobs.

The lemon itself that caused us so much stress...