Do it Yourself Car Repair: How to Paint Your Own Car- Cheap!

Looking for a way to make your car look like new for less than thirty dollars?

My friend and I lived in the same neighborhood, worked at the same place, and each of us owned our own pickup. Both trucks were old and the paint was faded. We were just a couple of young guys working at a minimum wage job and couldn't afford to fix them up. People at work used to kid us about our trucks and I was determined to do something about it.

Then one day my brother-in-law told me he knew a guy who painted his car with regular aerosol spray paint. He said it came out real nice and cost him less than thirty dollars. I was skeptical but he said all I had to do was tape newspaper over the windows and chrome. It sounded like a good idea to me and since he was ten years older I thought he knew what he was talking about.

When I told my friend about it, asking if he wanted to paint his truck too, he gave me an emphatic, "Are you nuts? They look bad enough right now without putting a botched up, uneven paint job on them!"

My mind was already made up and I asked if he wanted to help. But he said he was going to get a can of wax, some nice decals and wheel cleaner for his truck. So we went and got all of our supplies. I lived with my parents at the time and they had gone out of town for the weekend.

I was taping newspaper around the windows when my friend pulled his truck up behind mine. He stepped out and said, "I think what you're doing is stupid." Ignoring his remark, I proceeded.

The windows were big and not so much trouble. It was the little things that took so much time. My friend worked leisurely on his car, spraying it down with the hose.

It took me three hours to tape everything and by the time it was finished I was exhausted. My friend had just finished hand drying his truck when I started spraying on the paint. I started at the top but I wasn't tall enough so I got a bucket out of the garage to stand on.

There I was, standing on my bucket, spraying paint along the top of the truck when the wind began to pick up blowing paint back in my face. I ran my forearm over my face to wipe away the paint and when I opened my eyes I saw a blanket of leaves sprinkled across the wet paint, and then the bucket tipped!

When a person is falling they instinctively try to grab hold of something. I grabbed the side mirror and it came right off!

Standing with the mirror in my hand, I glanced at my friend who grinned like a possum and said, "You outta quit now while you're ahead."

I'd just spent three hours taping newspaper around that truck and wasn't about to give up. I was mad. I stepped back up on the bucket and the dang thing tipped again! This time the paint can I had in my hand hit the driver's side window and cracked it all the way down.

Kicking the bucket as far away from me as I could, I got a chair from the kitchen and continued painting the top of the truck. It didn't look too bad when I finished, except for the specs of leaves I couldn't get out. But it wasn't too noticeable.

The paint was coating the hood smoothly and evenly until our cat jumped right in the middle of it. "Hey!" I bellowed, waving my arms at him."Get off! Scat! Scat!"

He ran all around the paint, tore the paper off the front windshield and jumped off. Then he ran across the yard and into the house with paint-covered paws!

By the time I got to him he had left a trail of dirty blue paw prints across my parents' brand-new beige carpet. I threw the cat out, shut the door, stomped back to my truck and proceeded to rip the paper off.

I was kicking the tires when a neighbor came over and said there were specs of blue paint all over his new car that was parked in the driveway on the other side of the fence. I looked at my friend who stood beside his clean, freshly waxed tuck. He pointed to the decals he had just attached and asked, "How does it look?"

Looking for a way to make your car look like new for less than thirty dollars?