Thrifty Me

Ok, so remember my blog post about my car "Jenny" and how I was super proud to have paid her off and legally owned a car for once in my life? Yup, selling her. I figure I'm leaving and I don't want to pay full price for car insurance and I don't want Andrew burdened by another car if the Army tells him he has to move while I'm gone, so, selling her. It's one of those things where Jenny always could have used a little more cleaning and time paid towards maintenance (like new tires) but I never got around to it. Well now I have to do it all at once. 

One thing that's needed taking care of is the back seat. This car was originally my ex-husband's and he used to throw all his junk and dirty bags for work in the back seat, therefore the seat and vinyl seat belts got filthy. FILTHY. The straps were a dark brown color when they should have been silver, and well as the seat (which was originally light gray so you could see all the nastiness). He told me he'd get the car professionally cleaned before the car swap we had but when I had gone to pick up my car at the dealership and he had already taken mine I realized that I had been had. I tried cleaning it myself but to no avail so I kind of let it go for awhile.

Fast forward to yesterday.

I went to the dealership to get a regularly scheduled maintenance as well as have them get their guy who details car's to come in as well as the paint guy who tried (and failed) to spot paint an area of my car that got hit by a shopping cart. The maintenance itself is like $330. With everything else he estimated it to be a total of $700. $700??? Nope. Nope. Nope. I'm trying to get rid of this thing, NOT invest in it some more. I Googled all morning how to get those stains out of the seat belts and what to do to clean the seats. $14 later my seat belts are relatively clean, my seats are freaking sparkling AND to avoid paying a paint guy who literally cannot match paint colors to save his life (I have an alabaster white car and he used a beige color to cover up the spot so it looks terrible) I found a company online who sells paint pens for any type of car so that I can just do it myself. Take that stupid Mercedes dealership.

I also re-opened my Etsy shop with some new items. When I did the Sketchbook Project I had never worked with color-pencils and I really wanted to give that a try so that was the medium I chose to explore and with that I incorporated animals. Before I sent the book out I scanned the images and I re-worked them a little in Photoshop as well as drew new ones in my spare time. I thought these were cute little drawings.

                                                                Bonnie and Clyde

                                                                           Larry

                                                                Ricardo and Maria

                                                                     Woodpecker

                                                                        Tree Frog

The last 2 don't have names because I just couldn't think of anything that seemed appropriate. They are really cute (to me, hah) and I hope they sell alright on Etsy. Lord knows I haven't had much luck there. 

I'm so sleepy so I'm going to relax and snuggle my dogs :)