Xiaoniu 小妞

Before:

After:

Not perfect, but not bad either, if I do say so myself. Sue’s father took care of bending all the metal back into place and installing the new headlight that I bought. I took it home and started painting it last week. I finished up the painting tonight. (I should mention that I had to take the new headlight out to paint the edge of the fender.)

Lots of scrubbing and sanding down all the rusty bits and removing loose paint. A few coats of primer, a few coats of metallic silver paint and she’s all better. If I really wanted I could have smoothed out the bumps with bondo and put on a clear coat, but I didn’t think it really necessary. As long as the thing isn’t rusting and it can pass the safety inspection I’m happy.

What I’m not too happy with is the hood. It came out worse than I expected. I suspect it had more to do with the paint that the technique for putting it on. Metallic paint does not go on like regular paint. It goes on kind of rough and the there are many loose flakes afterwards.

I even took the time to sand between coats on the hood, yet it still came out blotchy. The light makes it look worse, but I’m sure you’ll see the same look when in the sun, although not as dramatically.

Lastly here is the other new headlight. Now the car has a matching set. The only thing left is to align the new light. I gave it a quickie alignment, but it needs to be a little better.

Painting the car was the last thing I did today. I actually took the day off to take care of some stuff around the house. The car was just one of the many things on the list. My goal today was to catch up on chores (Monday and Tuesday really through us off schedule) and to finish up some projects where I could.

• Laundry: Yeah, like 5 loads of it. Started at 8:00am and ended around 10:30pm.
• Packing clothes: Little Emelia goes through clothes like crazy. We already have two large storage boxes of stuff she’s already grown out of.
• Cleaning the car: That thing hasn’t had a vacuuming and window cleaning in many months. My truck is just as bad, but we travel together in her car so it should be clean.
• Painted the Door: I finished putting red paint on the front door. The damn blue tape took off some of the paint I was trying to protect. I still have trim to paint, but now the brown has to be painted as well. Damn. Pic coming soon.
• Clean Gutters: Cleaning the gutters is going to become a common chore around our house. Lots of tree crap as you would expect. What I was not expecting to have to clean is massive amounts of sand/gravel from the roof shingles. Seems the roof is deteriorating faster than we thought. I cleaned out a couple handfuls of granules from two pieces of gutter.
• Fixing Sue’s car: Today I worked on the hood. Took all the loose clear coat (poor paint job a few years ago) off and rust down to the metal. I used up one can of primer and two cans of paint. Not to mention I had to tighten up the front seat bolts and install the second headlight. There is always something to do with cars and houses.

Doesn’t sound like much now, but it was non-stop work. I even got a chance to just pick up stuff around the house and put things back into their places. Even got a chance to shred some paperwork. I’m ready to crash. A quick shower to get off all the glittery flecks and I’m hitting the sack.