There are just 168 hours in a week. That’s seven days to work, play, wrench, and live your life. Often, it seems those 168 hours pass faster than they should. Still, you have work to do and you somehow have to fit everything into your schedule. So how does one somehow juggle being a productive human while also keeping one, or a few, or a fleet of needy cars and other conveyances mechanically happy?
I had an easy answer to this for many years. I would work Monday through Friday, spend nights wrenching, and spend weekends either wrenching or driving. This was easy for me because vehicles very nearly defined my life. Some people wonder how I’ve owned over 30 motorcycles over the course of six years. Well, this is simple when buying, fixing, and selling bikes is your hobby.
In years past, I was an IT jockey who printed out Java code and SQL queries as my day job. Admittedly, I was never a huge fan of IT work, but computers were what I knew and I was able to score jobs quickly right out of school. Couple that with my personality and my customers loved me.
Yet, it wasn’t fun. So, I would go home, fire up Facebook Marketplace, and find an old motorcycle for sale for $500 or under. These bikes usually had an issue that was easy to fix. I gravitated toward bikes with descriptions like “ran when parked” or “no title.” Vermont still handed out registrations like candy back then, so I fixed title issues swiftly. Those bikes that ran a year or two ago just needed their carbs cleaned.
Fixing those motorcycles produced a kind of euphoria. Sure, they were easy fixes, but I got those bikes back on the road and eventually to new, happy owners. I never did it for the money but for the gratification of fixing something with my own two hands. And it was easy because I was usually single and I didn’t have many friends. Weekends were fixing things.
Things changed about four years ago. I moved from repairing motorcycles to spinning wrenches on cars and a school bus. Unfortunately, cars are harder to hide than bikes and I caught the attention of a nosy neighbor. That neighbor then made things hell for me by getting my project cars illegally towed. I fired off lawsuits and after over a year of fighting I won against everyone, but I came out of it a changed person.
I now have a wife, a pair of cute birds, and a long list of dreams I want to see fulfilled. I want to race a Smart around the Nürburgring. I want to finish getting my pilot license. I want to experience global car culture. One day I even want to start a car museum. Sometimes I just want to do nothing but find a body of water and go for a swim. I just discovered how awesome hiking is, too, and that needs even more time. I took the picture below while exploring Indiana, of all places!
All of this needs time, and time is a hot commodity. I have the most time on the weekend, which means two days to inch closer to my goals. For the past couple of years, I have been favoring dreams and experiences over wrenching.
Here’s how I divide time today. If a repair is something that will take most of a whole day or longer, I will usually farm that out to my handy mobile mechanic. Yes, it costs more than doing it myself, but I think of the price paid as buying myself time to spend with my wife, time I could use out on the road, time I could spend discovering new things, or time working towards my goals.
If a repair takes about 5 hours or less, like getting a Suzuki rotary running? Ok, then I’ll do it and bring Sheryl along for the ride as a teaching experience. Unfortunately, owning German cars means few DIY repairs fall into that timeframe. I mean, I need to replace the blower motor in my Phaeton and the process seems to involve removing the windshield wipers.
How about you? How do you juggle being an adult while also making sure your car still works?
I don’t get to wrench anymore because I screwed up my back. I have a lower disc bulge that puts me into excruciating pain when it flares up. The irony is I screwed up my back wrenching for years. Too much leaning over and lifting heavy shit improperly. Now I just stare out at my project car I am trying to sell in depression and sadness. I miss it deeply.
I love this article, Mercedes. I think we’ve seen David Tracy lately go through similar things, unloading his slew of essentially abandoned vehicles in favor of less cars and a simpler life in many ways.
As a 48-year-old GenX OG hipster, I think I have some insights to share, or I would like to anyway. SIDE NOTE: We met at David Tracy’s going away here in Michigan way back when, I really enjoyed chatting with you! I had the green Range Rover.
My situation: I own a home in Rochester, Michigan that I am renovating deeply and have been doing so for about 1 year now. I likely have 2 more years to go. I’m doing it all myself save drywall and heavy demolition. I currently have 4 cars and a 1996 Class C RV. I have 3 motorcycles. It’s TOO MUCH. My cars are all in operating condition, save one that is mid tune-up that I started.. a MONTH ago. The RV alone is another house and a truck, all in one. I can’t wait to sell it. It’s awesome, but it’s a burden for me considering everything else.
So, the RV will be for sale in a couple of weeks. Once that’s gone, my Wrangler will be gone. Two of my cars are deeply, deeply sentimental and will never leave my possession. But as it stands, I simply do NOT have time to work on any of these things, let alone the time to even USE them. That’s the key for me. I. Can’t. Use. My. Stuff. My weekends are packed. Every weekend. There is zero time for relaxation. I work a 9-5 job M-F, and my evenings I do choose to do fitness/gym or I’m working on cars. So really, I have about 20 hours/week to A) Do hobby stuff B) Renovate my house C) Spend time with family and friends D) run errands, and more. It doesn’t add up.
The key is to simplify. Sell all of this stuff off. It doesn’t matter, it’s just stuff. You’re clearly focusing on new things here and narrowing your focus to things that are more important to you. I bet if you sold everything save a couple of bikes (they don’t take up much room) and maybe 1-2 precious cars like your Smarts, you could pay for your pilot’s license and throw in an instrument and multi-engine rating as well. Consider your collection savings for your current passions that you can dip into. Maybe take your lovely bride on a long weekend getaway, courtesy of an old bus.. 🙂
Part of getting older is getting to know yourself better, and re-prioritizing. We are all forever growing and changing. Embrace it and simplify. I’m doing it later than I should have.
Just my 2 cents!
I don’t much anymore. I only have so much space in the garage, and if I want to wrench on a car it means I have to move the table saw, band saw, CNC router, jointer, planer, workbench and whatever wood I’ve been working on out of the way before I have enough room to work on a car. By the time I’ve done all that, it’s time to go do something else. Been semi-seriously looking around for a place with a much larger garage or a detached shop or something, but I’ve got a great interest rate on my mortgage that would go out the window if I moved so that probably won’t happen either.
Never thought I’d get to the point where I paid someone to rotate my tires, but here I am…
I used to have the opposite problem, with my saws and such all tetris-stacked into an under-stairs closet. It would take me 2 hours to shift gears from car mode to wood mode if I needed to do anything.
Most of the time I just didn’t do the thing, and let those projects build up until there were enough to justify the hassle.
Yep. I’m also in that boat, which is particularly annoying. I live in an area that gets hail several times a summer so sometimes all that crap has to get rolled against the wall so I can pull all the cars in and avoid damage. Then it sits against the wall for weeks because I know that by the time I pull it all out, I’m out of time to make sawdust.
Doesn’t help that I live in a pretty modern house, which means “three car garage” really means “two cars and the kid’s bike or maybe a little sports car.” I miss normal-sized garage stalls.
I have it even worse. I travel for work for a living. 100+ days a year. So I have even LESS time for the fun stuff. Plus summer and winter houses of my own, two rental condos, and a third condo my Mom lives in that are my problem to deal with too. Thankfully, single, no kids and that job pays nicely. And since I am flying all the time, I don’t actually drive my cars very much. Maybe 10K a year across five cars. 14K if I drive between houses in the summer instead of flying. Aside from cars, I have a model railroading hobby that could suck up lots of time if I let it, and an aging (and slightly crazy) mother to deal with all too regularly.
I manage it by not buying project cars anymore. And for a while I bought a lot of NEW cars. I just can’t buy project cars anymore, and there are no new cars I want anymore. So my last couple cars have been really minty low-miles creampuffs that have needed very, very little.
I can about keep up with the five cars I have, albeit three are used only in the summer so they don’t need much attention – usually. And with five, I can ignore a car that needs something until I do have time to deal with it. But the last few years, after literally decades of doing ALL my car work DIY baring tires and exhaust, I actually paid real serious money to a couple shops for work on a couple of my cars. I paid a shop $1700 for a complete brake rebuild on my Land Rover Disco, and $4000+ for an A/C compressor and some other maintenance and a minor repair on my Mercedes wagon. All work I *could* have done myself, but didn’t have the time or energy to do. And for the Mercedes, which is at my place in Florida where I only have a 1-car garage and no lift, no good place to do it. But that credit card swipe suuuucked, and in hindsight I should have sucked it up and did it myself.
But by the first of the year I will have a new garage with attached living quarters that will have a proper lift. Then I will have no money for projects and yet another rental property in my current house, but got to start somewhere!
I feel this deeply man.
I could happily lead a life like Mercedes describes – everything is cars – but it wouldn’t be happily for long because there is too much else for life. For me, the top of the list includes bikes and travel. I build and maintain my own bike fleet, and it never requires very much time. But time spent on cars is time not spent riding bikes, and vice versa; commuting helps, but I need those longer fun rides and they always compete with car time. My partner is, fortunately, very understanding of and supportive of my obsession (she knew what she was getting into) and since we don’t live together (yet) it can be more challenging than we like to make time for everything. For me, one key to this is having a garage at home, which makes it much much easier than having to go to the garage somewhere else to work on a project.
One of the key heuristics for managing all of these competing demands, for me, is what I call cognitive overhead – the sort of steady-state cognitive or psychic weight that we operate under at nay given time. The higher it is, the more stress you feel. This is something that always needs to be managed so that it doesn’t get too high. And when it is too high, either generally or in a particular context (like car projects), then I tend to use it to guide how I prioritize. List of six car projects on the DIY list? Start with the one that gives you the largest reduction in cognitive overhead, whatever that is. Will sending a car to a shop give you the biggest reduction, or keep it from skyrocketing? Then do that.