And ... are you happy with the workmanship? Or just happy to have the car back, workmanship be damned (perhaps part of their grand plan)?

given that the body shop is about 8 miles away from the main facility, it was about right.

I've had limited daylight access to it. What I've seen of it looks pretty good. The door latch fits pretty tight and may need to be adjusted but it fits well and works fine. The paint looks very well matched. I can usually tell and I haven't found any of the normal telltale signs of being painted...except the smell inside. You'd think they'd protect the car from picking up that smell (the way the manufacturer does), instead they let it sit in their stinky shop for a month to pick up every waft that floated by. Gone is the wonderful smell of leather. I hope the fumes outgas eventually. I've been driving around with all the windows down, fortunately it's been warm.

It still looks good after looking at it for nearly 2 weeks. I figured out how to get that strong smell of body shop paint out of the interior. As I figured, it really isn't so much about outgassing solvents or curing resins. It acts more like a dust or residue that settles on everything. This car sat in a shop with a door off , the rear hatch wide open, and various interior parts removed and laying about. Every thing that could waft through the air (paint overspray, sanding dust, etc.) became part of my car and it stunk.

So if you ever need to get rid of this kind of smell, here's what worked for me.
1. Remove any mats and rear decking/carpeting that you can. Vacuum it thoroughly with a beater bar type vac. If you have rubbre mats, wash them with soap and water.
2. Take a strong vacuum like a shop vac with brush/crevice attachments and meticously go over every single square inch that you can access inside the car (including the headliner, doors, windows, under seats, windows, inside cubbys and storage areas). Don't forget the door jamb areas and edges of doors.
3. Wipe down all surfaces that are not cloth or carpet with a cleaner like 409 or fantastic. Before it dried, I also wiped it down with a different clean damp wrag. I followed it with a clean dry towel.
4. If you have leather, wash it as I did in step 3 but use an appropriate leather cleaner (not a conditioner as you don't want to lock-in the contaminants). In my case, I cleaned the leather on 2 different days, once with fantastic, and again with leather cleaner. After it was dry I applied leather conditioner.
5. Wash the glass surfaces.
6. Wipe out the door jambs with a damp cloth and towel.
7. Enjoy your efforts of smell-begone! :)

Ah! A Christler ! First name Jesus? LMAO! :D

Maybe, just maybe, she doesn't need to drive at all...at least not on the same roads I do!!! LOL!:p If she hits me (and I live...), you won't have a wife, anymore!

(Reviving the lost thread)

I used to sell cars. I had a lady take her brand-new Odyssey EX-L with Navigation and Entertainment system home and promptly closed the garage door on the back of the van. She tried to pull forward, and the door scraped the whole back of the van. It scratched the glass, ripped off the wiper, and knocked the bumpter loose.

I also sold a Civic LX to a very nice lady who was hit the next day. It took us 2 weeks to get her financed and delivered, since her credit was a wreck and her trade in was a junker Rustang. After she was hit, she went up to the guy that hit her. He was still in his car. He asked her if he should get out. She told him that "He'd better not if he wanted to live."

When I get a new vehicle, I should just take a hammer to it and save myself the heartache. It never fails...something happens pretty soon after I get it.

When I got my GMC, I added the ladder racks that I needed. Then I took it to the car wash. The racks were similar to my previous truck's racks, including a portion that extends over the cab; the old truck had no problem going through the wash with racks attached. The new one did not fare so well. The big horizontal brush got stuck between the rack and the cab, crushing the roof a bit and pulling up the bed rail where the rack was attached. I had a body shop fix the bed rail and the roof wasn't too bad. I should have just saved the money, hammered the rail down and bought a nice rail cap for it.

When I got my VW, the weather turned bad immediately after so I parked it (I shouldn't have committed to it so quickly, I could have gotten a better deal if I was willing to wait/walk away). So, it got snowed on and I went to brush it off with a push broom as usual...but I forgot that my broom had bolts sticking out. I gouged the roof probably before I had 1000 miles on it.

A friend of mine ran the coin store in the town I grew up in. In 1970, he purchased a nice '68 Chevelle SS396 w/factory Cragers, etc. All the cool toys. Today would be a $25-30,000 car, easy. He had it a short time when we went to a coin show in Long Beach, CA. A few blocks from the convention center, a guy in a Falcon runs a stop sign and dang near T-boned us...my friend jumped on the gas at the last minute and he just got us in the right-rear quarter panel. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and he had full coverage on the car (good thing, the other guy had no insurance). Unfortunately, he claimed the car was just never the same again.

I also had a similar situation...I bought a '79 Chevette in '88...the car was in nice shape for a nine year old car...my wife was driving it to the bank one afternoon, and a lady rear-ended her. Fortunately, the lady had insurance, and I wound up getting $400 more for the car than I paid for it! And I kept the car, which I fixed and drove for another 170k miles or so.

:facepalm: they dont assemble cars then paint them:p

they get painted and perfectly dried and hanging on a conveyor for a few days while the seats and interior gets shipped from 40 different countries:D