Last week I bought the materials to fix my car door, which I dented and scraped down to the metal on a cement wall. I called the dent fixers this week to see about them getting the big dent out, and they said they are booked til November, and “could try” to squeeze me in sometime in the next two weeks to look at it!

Well, I don’t want to wait that long before doing my part of the repairs, since the rust is already getting large, perhaps the size of a dime to a quarter in some places, so today I went to work. Here was the plan:

1. Scrape off scratched paint.
2. Sand off the rust from the metal.
3. Apply rusty metal neutralizer and primer.

Here is what it looked like after I scraped off the scratched paint and sanded off the rust:

Now I painted on the rusty metal primer:

And here is what it looked like after five or ten minutes of drying. I painted the stuff on liberally because there were so many scratches where I couldn’t tell if they were down to the metal and beginning to rust or not. The places where it turned purplish-black is where the metal and rust was, I think.

So things are looking pretty good, I think. I have zero experience with this kind of thing, so I don’t really know. I am going to give the primer 24 hours to dry, then either sand it down some and apply another coat, or just sand it smooth and paint (probably the latter because I am lazy).

I have realized I have a fault or quality which I call “Good Enough for Me”. If the work I am doing fixes my car door so it won’t rust away and fall off, and it looks even half-way decent, it’s Good Enough for Me.

If my computer program doesn’t crash and doesn’t leak so much memory that the computer is driven into the ground in a few hours, it’s Good Enough for Me (this particular instance of my fault drives my boss crazy).

If I can still find a particular document amongst my archived papers, which I organize by putting into Ziploc freezer bags and then into old shoe boxes, then that organization system is Good Enough for Me.