How this blog started

Not that it is important, but I thought I type a few words about the moment when I decided to create this blog.

I am not a huge fan of dealerships, therefore when we got our family van, a 2004 Toyota Sienna, I found a repair shop very close to our house, where the owner Dave was a really nice guy and really knew what he was doing. I hate, that in the dealerships, you are not allowed to stand next to your vehicle, while they are working on it, you cannot ask questions what and why happened and in general I just do not trust dealerships. At Dave's shop everything was different: we could go and check what he was doing, he was very open showing what part was wrong, if needed, he spent time explaining why it was causing problem, how to prevent it in the future. Everything went very well. He has done larger repairs and even simple things like regular oil change. We have never had his cell phone number as his shop was really close, that is how it has happened, that one day we wanted to ask for an appointment and recognized, that his shop is closed and the garage is up for lease. Since we could not find him and the next oil change was due within a few hundred miles, we end up trying to find an alternative solution.

As I have been doing the oil change myself on my old 1994 Ford Explorer, I thought it cannot be that difficult to do it on the Sienna. Of course as with everyting else, first I was searching on the internet for reference information, pictures, descriptions. I told you, I am not that familiar with these things so I need every help I can use. Then I could not find too much information and when I have found a page, where someone put together and answer for exactly the same question that I had ("How do you change the oil in 2004 Toyota Sienna?"), I thought I could do better than this...

For your reference, I include a screenshot of that description (the source is from http://wiki.answers.com):

It is an average, generic overview of the oil change process, but for people like me, who has never done it on that particular vehicle and was looking for the location of parts, did not offer any help.

Then I have started to check carefully everything with a friend of mine and took care of the oil change. As expected, not big of a deal, as soon as you know what to do.

I told you this story is not that important. :-)))

I wish I would have taken pictures of replacing the front brakes or the shock absorbers on the Explorer! As much as I was scared to death, now as I know what to look for, both are easy. The key is: in case you know what you have to do with which parts... :-)

In case you have any recommendations, comments, description you have created and want me to add here, please send me a message to diy.repair@gmail.com.

Good luck and never give up learning new things! :-)))