Unexpected repairs

On Friday we all piled into the van to go to the White Family Christmas Party. DH was driving and on the way there, the car was making a horrible grinding noise every time he hit the brakes. It was a painful drive there and back home again, the whole time wondering what was causing the noise and why we have never heard it before. I drive the van almost everyday and I'm sure I would have noticed that noise before (especially since it seemed to be coming more from the driver's side). We were pretty sure it had something to do with the brakes, but we were hoping that maybe there was something frozen in place since our high temperatures for the past week have been below freezing. After we got home, DH took off the front driver's side tire and sure enough, the brakes pads were completely gone and were grinding into the rotor - not a good thing. DH did some looking online and our hope was that he could figure out how to take the rotor off and find a place that could resurface it for us.

Unfortunately, this was horrible timing because we had a full day of activities planned for Saturday. M&M had her tumbling performance across the valley at 8:30 in the morning and then we were going to spend the day at my parents house decorating cookies and helping them put up their Christmas tree and then we were all going to attend Blondie's ballet performance in the evening.

So we decided to just pile everyone in our other car to make it to M&M's performance and then we drove to my parents afterwards and left the kids there while DH & I went back home to look into repairs for the van. Luckily we ran into someone at the tumbling performance from our ward that DH thought might know something about cars and so he asked him where we could go to get a rotor resurfaced. He said that Checkers does it at their store and it only costs about $10 dollars! So on our way home we stopped at Checkers, bought a repair manual for our van, bought some new brake pads and asked about getting a rotor resurfaced. They said it takes about an hour to do and said it would be about $11.

So DH & I went home and figured out how to take the brakes & rotor off and then took it to Checkers. They said it would take about 45 minutes to an hour and would be $9. So we left it with them and then went out to lunch (I must say it was nice not having the kids with us). Then we stopped at Sears and bought some halogen work lamps to give some more light in the garage and then went home to see if the store had called yet. Well, they had but unfortunately it wasn't good news. Apparently after we left the store the guy went back to start the resurfacing and realized that they were missing some of the pieces to their machine and so they couldn't do it for us. So we went back to the store, picked up the rotor and took it to another Checkers store that they had called to make sure they could do it (unfortunately we lost about an hour and a half of work time because of this delay).

After we finally got the rotor back it was pretty straight forward putting everything back together and then changing the brake pads on the other side (fortunately the rotor looked alright on the other side). Then we quickly cleaned up and drove to my parents house so I could pick up Blondie and take her to her ballet recital. Unfortunately we were late getting her there and the room was already packed so I wasn't able to get very good seats.

DH came with the rest of the family, my parents, sister M, brother D & his wife K after eating some dinner and were lucky that they made it there in time to see Blondie perform. Overall the repair on the van went pretty smoothly and it was nice not having the kids around so that I was able to be out there helping DH. It was a bitter cold day and it was nice having a garage to keep us out of the wind. I borrowed an electric heater from my parents that helped take some of the bitterness out of the air, but my hands are still suffering from the cold and dry temps. They were very red and raw on Saturday evening. Today they are finally looking a little better...

Thanks Mom & Dad and M for looking after the kids for us (& helping them decorate cookies)!