Gearhead meets Mr. Practical.(consumer reports and car purchase desicion making)(Column)

Byline: Cory Farley

I blame it on Consumer Reports.

Before we got the subscription, I was as cheerfully impractical as the next bucks-down gearhead. Give me a choice between a Caravan and a Caterham 7 to carry my family, and I would've started thinking of ways to strap the kids to a trunk rack.

We didn't actually have a Caterham, because journalists married to teachers are usually limited to used Corollas. It was a two-door Corolla, though, with Bilsteins and big Pirellis. Sometimes, on late-night runs around Lake Tahoe, it pretended to be a Caterham.

Then we brought that magazine into the house, and it... colored my thinking.

It happened because of the 15-year rule. Hardly anybody knows it anymore because hardly anybody stays in one place that long, but when you own a house, everything lasts 15 years. Water heater? Fifteen years. Washer, 15 years. Countertops, if they're made of material a journalist/teacher combo can afford? Fifteen. Roof with 30-year guarantee? Fifteen years, and good luck finding the guy who sold it to you. Big Box Home Center drove him out of business nine years ago.

We bought our house in 1979, so in 1994, over about a six-month period, it began to collapse around us. It seemed like everything wore out but the wall studs and the floor in the kids' bathroom, which had some life left because it had been spared the cruel lash of mop and scrub brush.