I’m pretty sure I’ve told you the story about how I came to own a Volkswagon Beetle that’s older than my grown up children but I’m going to tell you again because I love how I came to own my lovely little bug. And once I’ve told you how I got the car, I’m going to tell you how we gave her a glow up on a budget.
Basically, we bought a new family car last Summer but it had a couple of bits that needed to be fixed so the week after we bought it, we took it back to the garage for a couple of hours to get the jobs done. I dropped my partner, Big A – back off at the garage to pick up the car and when I did, I parked near a cute little Volkswagon Beetle and I told him that I’d always wanted a beetle. I then forgot all about it as I drove home and left him to collect our car and follow me back.
(Also, read about why I call him Big A here – spoiler alert though, it’s pretty boring)
By the time he got back home, he’d bought the beetle for me. 😁
He’d noticed after getting out of the car that it looked like it had been parked up for a while (the flat tyres and the cobwebs were a dead giveaway) and asked the girls on the desk in the showroom about it. They told him that the car needed some work doing and that the person who had brought it in had decided the work was too expensive and left it in their car park. It sat there for that long that it ran out of tax and its MOT expired and had just been sitting there for a good six months or so.
They joked that they could put him in touch with the owner if he wanted to buy it and to their surprise (and mine) he took them up on the offer. They called the owner and shared my partners number with him and he called him straight away to discuss whether he wanted to sell. The owner wanted to sell to someone who could get the bug on the move again as it had been a car that meant a lot to his family for various reasons and he really wanted to see it back on the road but just couldn’t afford to do it himself.
This was her in the car park just after we’d given her a clean to get rid of the cobwebs and all the moss
Big A promised that he would get it up and running and would maintain it for as long as was possible so the deal was done and we bought the car for around the cost of what it was worth as scrap.
The work that needed doing was something that my partner could do super cheaply as he knew how to fix the issue – in fact the car was started within five minutes of him meeting the previous owner in a car park to pick up the keys. He used a can of deodorant to see if the engine turned over (don’t ask me how but apparently it’s a thing) and that helped him to identify what the actual issue with the car was.
It was actually something quite simple and was pretty much what the dealership had thought it was going to be but the problem with the dealership doing the work was that they would only fix the part once they’d done some tests to verify that they were right and on top of that, they quoted a fair amount for parts as they would only use official Volkswagon parts and had added on a lot for labour whereas we could use generic parts and obviously there’d be no labour if we did the work.
The car was fixed within the week (it took longer than expected as we had to fix it in the car park) and sailed through it’s MOT the following week so my cute little beetle was back up and running, on the road for under £300 in total!
Once she was up and running, we wanted to restore the car so she wasn’t only roadworthy but was in the best condition possible for a 25 year old car so that’s where our mini restoration project really started.
I tried to do as much as I could seeing as Big A was the one who did all the hard work with getting it mechanically sound and running smoothly and I really enjoyed seeing her glow up transformation.
First up the badges on the car…
The ones that were on the car when we bought it weren’t in the best condition with faded enamel which made her look old and a bit tatty. We made that our first job as we thought that would be the easiest job to do. Believe me though, it absolutely wasn’t as easy as you might have thought as VW have discontinued making the front bonnet badge so we couldn’t get a replacement from the dealership and any secondhand badges that we found were extortionately priced – we’re talking £50 each and our little bug needed one for the bonnet and another for the boot which wasn’t much lower.
I joined a Facebook group for Bug owners and asked if anyone could recommend someone who could sell me the badges I needed and found someone who is an absolute bug fanatic and sells pretty much every part imagineable. He sold me two immaculate badges for £25 each which was a bargain compared to other prices I’d seen.
Next up, some cheap car mats
Now this really was the simplest job of all the jobs that we did on the car. I just Googled cheap car mats and looked at the top three results to find the cheapest price. 😁
I ended up going with Car Mats UK and the process was super easy – who knew that car mats were different depending on the make and even the individual model of a car. I mean, I know it’s common sense but I just never thought about it. I just put in the car registration and was presented with exactly what I needed – including the option to get a bright red trim around the edges which really match the car.
Now look at the picture I shared of the bug when we first got her again…
The sill underneath the door was faded to the point of it looking almost pink rather than the bright red of the rest of the car. The lighting doesn’t really show the colour difference as bad as it was in real life so the next job was to deal with that.
Another Google search brought up a company called Paint Nuts that promised to do a colour match spray can based on me giving them my registration number so two days and £20 later, I got a spray can that promised to be an exact match to the colour of the car.
I didn’t do the prep that I think Big A would have done but I did use a bit of masking tape to mask the area off and a baby wipe to clean the area before spraying it. It was a perfect match and I managed to do the respray with just one minor drip that you would only see if you were looking for it.
The last job was for me more than the car. 😁
The car is so old that it had a tape player and the last cassette I owned was the Jason Donovan album which is actually somewhere in my old garage but even so, it wasn’t going to cut it as my only car music. The radio didn’t work at all which left me driving about in silence which I hate.
The problem we had was that the old beetle radios are much more rounded than a usual car radio so most modern radios won’t fit in. We looked everywhere but had no luck at all finding one that would fit.
So, back to the Facebook group I joined to ask them for some recommendations for a radio and was given one for a great little radio that fit perfectly in the gap and looks pretty good. We ordered it and Big A fitted it for me in about half an hour.
And once the radio was fitted, that was the end of the glow up and she is ready to face the world!
We even took her to a car show last Friday night where she took her place in a line up of other older cars although the show was for retro cars so we’re going to call her retro rather than old from now on.
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