Goodbye Geertje, Helloooo __(fill in blank)__!

My beautiful green Geertje (pronounced "Geer-cha" with a hard guttural "g") is gone. Yep. I sold her on KSL.com. She was my trusty '97 Ford Taurus that got me through grad school and 5 moves.

She'll be missed, but think I'm pretty much over it. I found an awesome ice blue '04 Hyundai Accent(also on KSL) for uber-cheap, with only 48k miles. Now I just need a name for him/her.


We had been looking for a couple months for a car, what a blessing this deal was.

A Big Icy Blue Blessing
At first when I saw the ad for the car on KSL, I thought, "You're kidding. For that cheap? There's gotta be something wrong with it." So I called the number, and found out how the car came to be so inexpensive; it's kind of a fun story.

The previous owner of the car was cited for improper registration (apparently he never registered it after he bought it from someone else). He never showed up to his court date to pay the fee. So, the guys from the impound lot got a call to go tow the car, which they did. They submitted it to an auto auction, and no one bought it (again, I have no idea why). So, they brought it back to their impound lot and it sat in their lot for 3 months, until the lot worker decided to list it on KSL for the amount it cost to store the car on the lot for 3 months.

Before It Was Cleaned
It was not a pretty sight, though. It looked like the previous owner had lived in the car or something. The interior was probably the grossest thing I've ever seen. See the cigarette butt?


See that shiny brown blob with the rubber band stuck in it in the photo below? That was some kind of melted lollipop or hard candy. I tried to pick it off the carpet, but it was stuck. The other blobs melted into the carpet were other types of candy...probably some of his leftover Christmas candy that we found in the back.


I wanted to ask the previous owner, "Whatcha gonna do with all that junk? All that junk inside your trunk?" (Haha, sorry...I couldn't resist. I don't like that song, but it's a valid question!) Actually, the trunk wasn't very gross; just lots of stuff in it.


There was soda spilled on all the seats.


Every surface was brown and sticky. When we wiped down the steering wheel and door handles, our wet wipes came off brown.Ick.




Check out the glove compartment. Honestly, who really puts pop and candy in the glove box???:


When I test drove the thing, I was sitting on a pile of crumbs from who-knows-what. It was disgusting. Poor Nathan drove it 40 minutes all the way home when we got it. I don't want to know what those brown stains are from. Here was the driver's seat:


And the passenger seat:


Driver's seat floor:


Back seat:


When Nathan and I cleaned it out after we bought it, we found lots of cool stuff: cigarette butts all over the floor, broken lighters, a cell phone and its charger, a Redbox DVD, about a dozen half-full soda bottles, two baseball caps, one Seattle Marlins tie, a binder full of Smith's pays tubs and UPC stickers, a Christmas stocking full of melted candy, a small bag of unidentifiable pills (I thought about selling these on the street for some quick cash...hehe), nasty soiled clothes, a football-shaped piggy bank that counts the total as you insert coins , a screwdriver (which we kept), about $1 worth of pennies coated in soda (sitting in a suspicious-looking pile of white powder). We also found other things that were inappropriate to list on a blog...


Heck, there were probably enough pennies to pay for the detailing job we had to do (complete with more pop on them).


There were some scratches on the bumper, too.




Here's the grand total of what we cleaned out of the car when we were done:


And, what's even better, the car had new metal-studded snow tires on it! I changed those today for regular tires, but those will come in handy for the next few winters!
I've spent lots of money getting 4 new tires, getting a transmission flush and oil/filter change (I doubt the guy before me ever had it done), a new wiper, and the interior and exterior detailed. I was scared the mechanic was going to tell me that it had some major $2,000 repair that had to be done, but luckily, all it needed were new rear struts, and an A/C belst, which will cost about $150. Definitely worth it. That's it! I was sooo happy!

After
Anyway, here are the "after" pictures. I went to Picasso Auto Detailing in Orem, and they did amazing! They even painted over the scratches on bumper where the paint had chipped. Drum roll, please...

Here's the bumper. They're going to touch it up a little more when I take it in again, next week.



And now for the interior. I think I got my money's worth.

The driver's seat:


The passenger seat:


The back seats:


The ever-so-clean and candy-free glove compartment:


The floors:


Back floor:


The "penny zones":



Front, dash:



Door:


There are still some spots visible if you look hard enough, but overall, I can't believe how much better it looks. Plus, that nasty stale cigarette stench is gone! It now smells like some nice citrus-y oranges!

A New Name for a New Purpose
So now for the difficult part: naming the car. First of all, how do you tell if it's a boy or a girl? I've heard that its determined by which side the gas tank is on: if it's on the driver's side, it's a male; the passenger's side is a female. That means my car is a boy. Of course, I really don't care if it is or not, all I care about is that it has a fitting name. We were thinking about Glacierita (because the color is glacier blue) or Icy Irma, but I'm not too attached to those. ;) Let me know if you have any good name ideas.