The dreaded second car!

It is truely amazing what happens when you just let things be. Buying cars for instance....
We needed a second car for Ashley to drive to work in. We only had one car in Australia and this fact was the focus of many an early morning argument and source of tension. We could have bought another one I guess, but didn't want to. We felt we had forked out enough for the car we had already. I drove Ashley to work each day and picked him up each night when I needed the car, and despite the morning panic attack to get everyone in the car and the back seat fights on our way through peak hour traffic, it mostly worked out. It wasn't ideal, but we made do. But we did vow to get a second car when we moved.
We were quite conservative with our spending on the first car, to ensure we had enough for the second when the time came. Thus far, Ashley has been taking the hotel shuttle bus to work, but since we are moving out of the hotel this weekend, the need to buy the second one was now pressing. Ashley has spent a good number of weeks researching possible car types within the price we set aside for it. And spent a fair proportion of the long weeked and some money checking out cars on our short list, but to no avail - they were all rip offs. We were frustrated and also panicked that we were using up too much of our renovation money on the futile research of nasty cars, so we decided that this was a sign that we were not meant to buy one at this stage - things tend to flow nicely when the time is right and this wasn't at all. So we decided to let it be and see what alternatives we could find to buying a crappy, but still costly, second car.
So we put it out there. Would you believe that we were offered a free car the very next day? Albeit a very old Volvo that needed a lot of work, but a car none the less. And that afternoon, Ashley coincidently received an email from a work mate asking if anyone was interested in either one of his two old cars, which he was selling for practically nothing (albeit old, but they were working and one had new tyres and brakes). Ashley considered these and thought he would buy the one with the new tyres and brakes, which he got for an eighth of what we had originally budgetted for (and that was not very much I can tell you - I am too embarassed to say how little we are paying for this car). I haven't seen it yet, it is probably a really scary car - but even if it lasts a year, it will be worth the money. Problem solvered ....maybe, you'll have to stay tuned to see if it causes us any great deal of grief. I think the odds are against us some how, but you never know.