Almost as if the universe wanted to prove a point, the month I started ✓ Project Bucket List, January 2024, in the cold dead of winter, the driver’s side window of my car stopped working. The motor inside that opens and closes the window had burnt out, and I was left in the uncomfortable position of travelling back from a pottery class at 10:00pm with the window stuck open. It was 1 degrees centigrade, and it was raining, and I was cold.
That night, I got home and with trembling fingers taped a black bin bag over the window, hoping that I wouldn’t ruin the interior. The car alarm went off 3 times that night before I realised that I’d best just leave the car unlocked and cross my fingers that it didn’t get stolen overnight.
The next morning I took it to 3 different garages. The first said that they wouldn’t work on that type of thing because it’s too finicky. The second said that they wouldn’t work on it because the guy who could do it is on holiday. The third sucked his teeth, typed a few numbers on his calculator, then said that it would cost me £689, and they could get it done some time in the next week or so.
In a strop, I returned home, and googled the problem. I wasn’t going to spend £689 if I could help it. That’s perfectly good garlic bread money. It took a bit of figuring out, and I didn’t understand a lot of the words at the beginning (what’s a regulator assembly? What does scissor type armature mean? What’s a screwdriver?), but I ended up being able to find a replacement part on eBay for £19. I ordered the part, and it came the very next day in the post.
I watched a YouTube video where the nice man on camera talked through how to take the inside of the car door off. What wires to unplug from where, which screws to definitely not loose, and so on. I was reminded very much of a beefed up Lego tutorial.
It turns out it was a bit finicky, you have to fit a pretty long bit of metal in and out of a small gap in the door, and grip the window in a way that makes it slide up and down properly without scratching. It’s also very easy to loose scews if you don’t have a little trat to hand. It didn’t seem like long before I thought I’d got it all figured out. The moment that I clicked the “close” button (on the bit of plastic dangling down the guts of my car door), and it actually closed, was electric!
I was ecstatic, I’d fixed a car, even if it was just a small part!
I made a few mistakes along the way, definitely plugged the wrong parts together the first time I put it all back together, and I was in a pissy mood for a good portion of the job. But all in all, it probably took around 3 hours to do. I reckon it’d take an hour or two tops, now I know how it all works.
Some tips on troubleshooting, now that I’m better than 3 mechanics. You’re going to need to hop onto your favourite search engine and try get the technical name for your thing that broke. Then, you want to try and pinpoint exactly what broke on your thing. You can’t really get anywhere with “coffee machine broke”, but you can get pretty far with “Jura Z10 leak pressure valve”.
Depending on what it is that broke, you’ll get someone from some country on YouTube taking one apart, and they’ll give you the names for everything and how to fix it.
I’ve got to say at this point, I’m not very mechanically minded at all. I don’t usually know how to fix anything if it breaks without making it worse. I’ll try and be a bit of a handyman, but I know from experience that when something important breaks, I get someone who knows better to help me. But that mindset is changing now.
I can’t sit here happy knowing that I can get charged £689, when I could instead fix it for £19. Yes, I get the price of labour, and you’re paying for the expertise and knowing where to hit the hammer and all that. But there’s a certain point where the word “extortionate” comes to mind.
Learning how to fix your own things, your car, your house, your TV, your computer, your phone. They’re all minute acts of revolution, not even against some big authoritarian government or anything grandiose like that. It’s moreso against being ripped off.
Now that I’ve been on this soap box for a solid 3 paragraphs, I’ll step down and say that there’s a great sense of accomplishment that comes with fixing something too. Borrow some tools if you have to!