It was 24 degrees in the garage this morning when I sat down on an upside-down bucket with a cup of coffee and the spiral notebook from the Silverado's door pocket. The single bulb over the workbench was doing its best. Rusty had claimed the moving blanket by the door and wasn't interested in helping.
I've kept that notebook since 2016. Every fill-up, every oil change, every part I've bought for either vehicle goes in it, and once a month I move it all into a spreadsheet that my wife Tina describes as "a lot." She's not wrong. But between the two vehicles in our driveway and a 15-year-old who takes his learner's permit test on Monday, I've decided the notebook deserves a wider audience than me.
Who we are
I'm Brian Haskell. I'm 45, I live on the north end of St. Joseph, Missouri, and for the last 14 years I've worked as a dispatcher for a regional freight company. My shift runs 6:30 to 3:00, with every fourth Saturday on call, and my commute is 11 miles each way out to a terminal off US-36. I spend all day thinking about trucks in terms of cost per mile, downtime and what's likely to break next. It turns out I can't stop doing that when I get home.
Tina manages a flower shop downtown, which means Valentine's Day and Mother's Day are the two weeks of the year when I see her mostly in passing. Our son Garrett is 15, a sophomore, quiet and careful, and a little more confident about parallel parking than someone who has never parallel parked should be. Our daughter Lainey is 12, plays club volleyball and has already announced that whatever car Garrett ends up with is hers after him. Rusty is a black Lab mix who is 9 and supervises everything from the floor.
The two vehicles
Our fleet, if you can call it that, is two high-mileage vehicles that we fully intend to keep running:
- A 2011 Toyota Sienna LE, silver, eight seats, 3.5-liter V6. We bought it from a dealer in 2016 with 61,000 miles. This morning it shows 187,400. It's Tina's car and the volleyball shuttle.
- A 2014 Chevy Silverado 1500 LT, crew cab, 5.3-liter V8, four-wheel drive, dark gray. Bought in 2019 at 74,000 miles. It reads 131,800 today and does my commute at about 16 miles per gallon.
Neither one owes us anything. Neither one is paid for in the sense of being worry-free, either. At this mileage, the question isn't whether something will need attention this year, it's what and when, and whether I can do it in the garage or whether it goes to the shop.
Why I'm not the guy you should copy
I want to be clear about this up front: I am not a mechanic. My dad, Dale, taught me to change oil in 1994 in the driveway of his house in Savannah, about 15 minutes north of here, and he still comes down to sit in a lawn chair and comment when I do anything bigger than that. Everything else I've learned from a neighbor down the street who used to fix farm equipment for a living, from repair videos and from making mistakes slowly.
So here's what I do myself: oil and filters, brakes, wipers, bulbs, batteries, tire rotations and simple parts that bolt on and off. Here's what I pay a shop for: anything with refrigerant, anything inside a transmission, suspension work that needs a spring compressor or an alignment afterward, the cooling system on the V8 and anything that lives behind the dashboard. We have a family-owned shop on the south side that charges $125 an hour and has never tried to sell me something I didn't need. That's worth more to me than the labor rate.
The one rule I don't bend: if a vehicle is up on the floor jack, it's sitting on jack stands before any part of me goes under it. A jack is for lifting. It is not for holding.
This is going to be a log, mostly. Real repair bills with the receipts, the jobs I did in the driveway and what they actually cost compared with the shop quote, what our insurance does when a teenager joins the household, and what it costs to keep two old vehicles and a family moving around northwest Missouri. At some point there will be a third vehicle, because Garrett is going to need something to drive, and I expect that part to be educational for all of us.
I'll show my arithmetic. When something goes wrong because I did it wrong, I'll say so. When I hand a job to the shop, I'll explain why. And when a car tells us it's done, we'll listen, but until then the plan is simple: we'll run it till it tells us otherwise.
Next up is an oil change on the truck, which is due in about 300 miles according to the notebook. The garage should be up to about 30 degrees by then.