For those of you who don’t know, we’ve been a one car family since last December when I was rear-ended and my car was totaled. Pretty much within a month after that, the truck started having issues. Issues that would come and go and we never really knew what the true problem was, let alone how to fix it.
Well, in July the truck had more issues and we asked my brother, who works for AAA, to take a look-see. He concluded we’d need a new clutch in a few months. Well, the day Teresa got married, the truck died on us en route to Wal-mart to buy her a wedding card. We ended up having to get Trina to take us to the wedding and immediately bought a bike for me. We biked to work the next week and luckily, my brother had a car he’d been fixing up for Ann, his wife, and so we bought that off of him and got it running.
Well, when you buy a car from someone else, you are supposed to get new tags under your name. We were planning on getting new tags anyways, they were expiring in September and so we had to, but we had no idea that driving under someone else’s tags was illegal. Oops.
Even worse, we didn’t have a Bill of Sale so we couldn’t take the tags off for fear of being accused of stealing the car, even though we had the title. It was a complicated mess. Well, here in Rutherford county you must take your car through an emissions test and pass before being able to get new tags. At first we were worried it wouldn’t pass because of a check engine light being on and so we got it fixed. Turns out, it didn’t pass because the hydrocarbon emissions were too high. We needed a new catalytic converter. Gray ordered one online and it arrived this past week, so we took the car in on Thursday afternoon to a local shop and paid them to put the part in for us.
At the same time, Wednesday we finally had some extra money from loans and decided to go car shopping. We ended up buying a car (Honda Accord) that day and traded in the truck. I was praying the whole time that the truck wouldn’t die and that it would pass inspection. It did, thankfully! So we had a new vehicle that was working and just needed the other car to pass emissions.
The new catalytic converter worked like a charm and the Grand Am finally passed the test and Gray was able to go and get a new license plate and tags for it without any problems. My boss has had several issues with getting stuff done in that category and had basically freaked me out, thinking that I would have the same problems. Thankfully we didn’t, and now we have two working vehicles which is such a blessing after nearly ten months with only one car!
We’re hoping the grand am holds out for another year and then when Gray gets a real world job we’ll probably get him a new car. I’m just thankful to close this chapter on our yucky car mess history.
Related Posts
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
It's nice to have one less thing to worry about! :)
@Mel, Yes it is!