Jobs that you wish you never took

Hey guys I'm not sure if you remember but I bought my father's auto repair business about a year and a half ago.

Being a young energetic new business owner I'll take a stab at alot of different projects that dad wouldn't have even thought about.

Dad was mainly oil, brakes, tires, and some light mechanical if he felt like it.

I have added more suspension work, interior work like windows hvac etc, I have even taken on transmissions on rear wheel drive vehicles.

On the bigger jobs like the transmission I'll usual do that on a Saturday as to not get interrupted by the customers. It works out great.

Well about 2 weeks ago lady brings in her 2010 jeep patriot for rusted out cradles front and back. I know all about it she's my customer and I told her they were junk a long time ago. Well with the economy the way it is she wants to fix it. I give her a price which I thought was fair to both parties. She agreed so Friday morning we began removal of the cradles.

The rear cradle was the worst of the two. Bolts siezed to the bushings. Every time you used the impact the rust would rain down on a guy.

Lucky everything come apart OK. I ended up cutting 2 pieces of suspension off due to the rust and the bushings. I felt it was faster and cheaper to her to do it this way.

What have you guys gotten into and part way through wish you hadn't done this. But in the end it turned out good. I'm very proud of the out come of this project.

Edited by bobkyllo - 22 Sep 2024 at 12:53am

Several years back right after the Great Recession I landed a big house to build.
These seemed like very solid people and for most of the job they were.
All the siding, trim and interior were cypress.
We were buying logs in Mississippi and having them shipped here and milled here.
Sawmill got behind and we found a place selling milled cypress so we finished the job with that.
Towards the end the guys wife got hard to get along with.
We had a company install hardwood floors. They weren’t out of sight when they wanted scaffold setup in there to install cypress car siding on the ceilings.
I had highly recommend wait on the flooring until the ceiling was done but we didn’t have the material yet.
Once the ceiling was done we pulled up the paper and could see a trail everywhere the scaffold had rolled.
They then set sail to sue the hardwood floor guy.
Everything escalated from there. Upon completion I went out and found a job with an other builder and never looked back.

jaybmiller wrote: does marriage count ??

The economy terrible??? I hear whining and crying about that every day, yet every day I see proof otherwise: People spending more that I ever paid for a NEW pickup for a glorified golf cart to haul their fat lazy A$$ around instead of walking 20' feet, New pickups costing more than I've paid for NEW road tractors, pulling campers costing well over $100K, $50K for an "economy" car, people that pay to have their grass cut, even if it doesn't need it, Contractors that add unneeded bogus add ons to a remodel job to jack the price up....I could write a book.

my Dad has an auto repair shop/used car lot, asked if I have interest in taking it over in a few years... NO!  John Q Public has become way too hard to deal with for me. 

i have taken on some things i normaly wouldnt when i thought it might get slow , its never worked out the best