Check and check...

Two things "checked" off our summer to-do list.... 

I finally finished staining the children's wooden swing set.  We purchased the Rainbow play-system 2 years ago and I knew that it would require biannual maintenance in order to keep it in good shape.  At first glance I thought, "this should be easy; I can get this done in an afternoon".  WRONG!  When you look at it, it doesn't look like there's much wood but once I got started, realized that there's much more to it than I had thought.  Every side of every piece of wood had to be stained and trying not to get any of the hardware or accessory pieces stained was tricky.  All in all, I think I did a pretty decent job and I'm happy that it's FINALLY done!  I'm hoping that it will last another 2 years before it requires re-staining.

The second sigh of relief is that we picked up a new (to us) used car to replace Tim's truck which has put in a good effort in its last months.  We purchased the 1994 Ford Ranger truck from our best friends, about 5 years ago.  We only held a loan payment on it for a few months and we got several years with minimal repair costs.... the truck had served its purpose and didn't owe us a dime.  We'd been trying to squeeze every last week out of it and this time last year, we weren't quite sure it would even make it through the winter.  With its inspection expiring at the end of this month, and a heavy repair bill to get it to pass, we decided it was long overdue to get a more practical car for Tim.  We have the minivan now, so if we need to haul bigger items, it's almost as big as the bed of the pickup is, so we'll use the minivan now.  Tim's commute to work is roughly 45-55 minutes and the truck's gas mileage was less than desirable.  We spend hours searching online and basically concluded that our goal was to get something small, inexpensive to fit our budget, good gas mileage and 50K miles or less already on it.  We emailed and called on a lot of cars but the best deal that we found (looking at affordability as our primary priority) was a posting on Craigslist for a 2002 Hyundai Accent with 53K miles on it, one owner and a clean title.  I noticed that there were quite a few postings for the same vehicle with around 90-120K miles on it.... seems like that's when people are dumping them, my guess, for mechanical reasons.  So we figured that we ought to be able to get another 40-50K miles out of it before it needs any real major work done on it (we hope!).  That said, we should get 2-3 years with it... and for $4500, it was the most affordable option for us.  The gas mileage for highway is expected to be about 34 mpg.  We anticipate that Tim will only spend about $150/month (at the current gas rate) on gas commuting to work compared to the $250-280 he has been spending.  So Tim is happy that he has a newer vehicle to drive that he doesn't have to worry about breaking down and we're both happy that we found something that fits our budget pretty well.