A Day in the Life

St. George

January 18, 2022

The weather forecast was great…four hours south of me. I had a holiday weekend coming up and thought to myself that–although I was just there two weeks ago–it was time to head back to St. George for the weekend where it would be 60º outside instead of 40º. Plus, I had some work to do on my car and my brother Kurt offered up his garage to me.

And I’m very glad he did. My project of replacing the upper and lower control arms in my Lexus GX470 went from a 2-4 hour job to a 2+ day job. The most difficult and pain in the butt car repair I’ve ever undertaken. I will never do that again.

The YouTube videos made it all look so easy. Just undo some nuts, pop out some bolts, and with just a little shimmy effort the old ones will fall out and the new ones will slide in. Well, none of those videos had cars from rusty land like I did. There was no popping out bolts for me. They had rusted so much that they had fuzed to the car, and the only way to remove was with a saw. To add insult to injury, there are also 4 castle nut & cotter pin combos to undo, and those were equally as stubborn to work with. My whole Saturday was gone. My whole Sunday was gone. My weekend in warm weather was spent in a garage getting covered in grime, wearing out my back and getting all sweaty.

I did get it done, though. Just in time for an alignment Monday morning, a quick trip to the St. George train park, followed by a late lunch, packing, and a drive home.

My weekend did not go as planned, but, it went as it needed to. I could not have done this at home by myself. Lucky coincidence? No. A little heavenly push from Mom inspired me to make the 4 hour drive because she knew what it would take, and there were some tools and help down there that I would need. Thank you, Mom. I hated every minute of it, but I chose to do this repair on my own and you made sure I could pull it off.