For the last couple of weeks I’ve been watching car restoration videos on YouTube. I got sucked into a YouTube rabbit hole after my 3-year-old daughter caught me surfing Reddit on my phone and wanted to watch the video I was watching. It was an old Land Cruiser restoration video. This specific video became an after-dinner event for the next couple of weeks at my house.

My wife needed an oil change and her car still has the free dealership oil changes. I decided to take mine in as well because I paid $175 to continue my “MVP Service” plan for another 2 years.

Then the service tech gave me a list of maintenance/service items I needed to have done. This list included:

  • Coolant Flush
  • CVT Fluid Change
  • Spark Plugs
  • Front and Rear Differentials
  • Brake Fluid Change

In the moment, I told him they could do the diffs and brake fluid (to the tune of $600+). I came in for a free oil change-I didn’t come in to drop $2,500+ on maintenance items. At least making sure my brakes and diffs worked seems reasonable, right?

That night, after I put my daughter to bed, I turned on YouTube and saw some recommended car restoration and maintenance videos. This made me curious to see how hard it would be to do the work myself.

Turns out, most of it is incredibly straightforward and doesn’t require tons of special tools, and I definitely got ripped off on the diff and brake fluid change. So for the next couple of weekends I plan on doing my CVT fluid change, my coolant flush, my spark plugs, my PCV valve, and my serpentine belt. The last two items on the list are things that the dealership didn’t recommend but I discovered I should probably do. Mostly because the drive belt would squeal on cold/damp mornings and according to MrSubaru, the $15 PCV valve is a super easy but super important part to change.

I haven’t done significant work on my cars in a long time. In high school I worked on my Prelude out of necessity and to look cool (which I absolutely was, with my LED windshield washer lights, underglow kit that got me pulled over only to be saved from a ticket by my car overheating and a sympathetic cop, my cold air intake, and fart can exhaust). As an adult, I’ve done basic stuff—changed my oil a few times, changed spark plugs—but nothing significant since I never had space or the appropriate tools. The rest of my experience working on cars was as a kid/teen with my dad, where I learned how to hold a flashlight and get yelled at.

So the next few blog posts will be about my adventures in car maintenance for my 2017 Outback. To quote the great philosopher Jeremy Clarkson: “How hard can it be?”