Should I say 'not the Kingswood'?

So I'll set the scene for you. Down the bottom of the hill from our house, there is a 1971-74 vintage (HQ series) Holden Kingswood for sale. It's been parked out the front of that particular house for a while now, but lately it's moved to the footpath with a for sale sign taped to its windscreen. At least on a drive-by inspection, it is in excellent condition for its age, and my Darling Wife tells me that she's walked past it, they want $1000 or nearest offer, and the sign also notes that the car 'runs well'. That's not a lot of money at all for a seemingly well-kept car of its vintage, that is approaching the stage where it is about to start being worth more as it ages, rather than less. For instance, you can't buy a good condition 1963-65 EH Holden (the one I really want) for less than about $8-10k these days.

So, you would think, given I've been saying for some time that a project car would be an interesting diversion, and old Holdens are famously easy to work on and get parts for, this would be a no brainer. Go and have a good look at the car, and if it's in good condition without rust, then hand over some money and drive it home.

Yet I have a reluctance to take this on, and I'm not sure why. My first thought was that it wouldn't fit in the garage, and I wouldn't want an old classic sitting outside. Then I measured the garage and discovered that I could, just, make it fit with millimetres to spare. Now I'm thinking that with a baby on the way, there is probably not going to be the time or the money to look after an old car like this properly, and I worry that it would deteriorate under my ownership. I also tend to think that I will probably want to spend time with my baby rather than be out in the garage working on an old car. In any case, I probably wouldn't have time to ever drive it anywhere and I wouldn’t want to be shifting baby seats all the time between it and the Commodore so I could only really ever go somewhere in it on my own. And then, of course, once I had it registered and back on the road, I'd be paying money to register and insure a car I didn't drive all that much. Plus old cars tend to be a bit crap to drive, so I might get tired of it very quickly. And I've heard plenty of stories about older car restorations that started out as just a quick coat of paint/bit of engine work/interior trim work and end up being $30,000 from the ground up restorations.

Yet, the other half of me thinks 'yeah, but old cars are cool, you can just work on it when you have time…'

What to do? I suspect the answer might be to let this particular car go by, good as it appears to be, and re-assess the situation in a year or two, time and money wise. But it looks like such a good car...

Stand in awe of Renovation Man

Yes indeed, I am pleased to announce that yesterday, just before lunchtime, I finished repainting my deck. And it only took me four months, including all of the weekends when I decided there were better things to do with my life, the incident on Anzac Day where I ran out of paint with only a couple of metres of the railing left to go, and repainting over the part of the railing that I thought would look good with a colour change (it would have, if it had turned out grey like on the paint chart rather than purple like in reality).

Four months...that's pathetic.

This, though, leads me to a broader philosophical debate that I mentioned to the good wife last night - in the five and a bit months I have left before our baby is born, should I spend the time getting a whole bunch of stuff done around the house, or should I rip into life with reckless abandon and do all the fun stuff now that I might not be able to do later? On the one hand, I will probably have far more time at home in the future on weekends and so on with a new baby and will probably be looking for ways to occupy myself, which might finally lead to me having a decent garden and all the broken things being fixed. So I might as well go out now, go driving, go go-karting, take off to somewhere interesting on five minutes' notice, read some good books, etc. On the other hand, I might be so busy with a new baby that there won't be time for doing anything else around the house so I should get stuck in right now.

(If there is plenty of time to spare after the baby's born...I wonder if I will have enough time and money to start on a project car? Hmm...)

In any case, the baby's room will need to be sorted out and repainted relatively soon. Given that it is currently being used as a sort of study, you can imagine how full of crap it actually is and how much of it is about to end up in my garage. But I can promise you one thing - given my history with colour changing around the house (the super-vivid blue bathroom and purple deck railing), I won't be changing the colour of anything. I will go and find the square on the colour chart that most closely matches 'bought in bulk new house grey' that the walls were painted in back in 1994....and paint them that colour again.