Friday, May 6, 2011

Honda Civics are Awesome

Back in 2003, after graduating college and getting a job that paid some decent money, I went out to purchase my first car with my own money. I ended up purchasing a 98 Honda Civic Ex, 2 door manual transmission, for about 11 grand. 
My sweet ride for the past 7 years. 

The car has been great to me over the years. I've never had a major problem with it mechanically, it was fast and fun to drive. I'm also proud to say I paid it off and it was completely mine back in 2006. Then as you all know in 2009 we had a wonderful little bundle of joy come into our lives. A bundle of joy that legally requires a fairly large car seat in order to ride in the car. Now I'm sure some of you can image it might be a little difficult to get a child into a car seat in the back of a 2 door car. For those who can't just trust me. It wasn't easy. Someone usually got hurt bumping their head into the roof or having to twist in ways our bodies were never meant to. But it worked, and we rarely took my car anyway. Usually we took the larger 4 door Outback. So last month I got my little reminder in the mail that it was time to register my car again for another year. And that's when I thought, Maybe it's time to get a new one. So I went on a rush to go find a new car before the end of the month. I learned that small cars with stick shift's are hard to find in the valley, Both the Honda and the Toyota dealer only had 1 in stock, and I wasn't happy with either. There was a nice Subaru Impreza that I found but I couldn't justify the drop from 36 mpg for my civic down to 26. I was hoping to get better gas mileage not worse. With 2 weeks left in the month I decided I would list my car for sale online to see if I got any bites on it. I was thinking that if I end up selling it I'll buy one of the other cars listed by some private sellers, and if I didn't sell by the end of the month I would go ahead and register the car and wait another year. I listed the car on Tuesday at work and had 4 phone calls before I even finished posting the photo's of my car. I ended up selling it less then an hour later for only $100 less then asking. Luckily he let me keep the car until the weekend. I needed to get to work the rest of the week after all and I didn't have any free time to go looking at cars until Saturday. I had a back up plan to borrow my dad's truck for next week if I couldn't find anything I wanted. Then on Wednesday night I got a phone call from the Honda Dealer. They had just got a 2005 4 door Honda Civic Hybrid, stick shift, on the lot that day. I drove over on Thursday after work to look at it. It was in great shape, low miles only 51,000 not a thing wrong with the interior, and only a small dent and some scratches on the side rear panel. I came home and talked about it with Cara and then bought it the next day. They even repainted the scratches for me.

My New Ride
4 door's. No more back breaking bending to get Aven in.
Hybrid car, 43 mpg average

5 comments:

  1. Ooh, a hybrid. Very sexy. Ben and I dream about what car we are going to buy when we get home... Honda is on the list!

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  2. You have all the luck! That worked out nicely. Enjoy having a hybrid!

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  4. Dang, our house looks cute in that 2nd to last picture! I wish someone would buy it . . .

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  5. ooh la la! Our hearts belong to Honda- we like reliable. You're lucky it all came together so fast in both buying and selling- that's the worst when the whole process is dragged out or you have to compromise somewhere you don't want to. Happy driving!!

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