I want to ride my bicycle.

This summer I really really really wanted to get a bike so I could ride around with my boys and pull B either in a bike trailer or get a bike seat.  I looked at our thrift stores, I posted on fb about anyone selling a bike for cheap, etc. etc.  No luck.  Either the bikes were too much or they were too small or they were run-down.  I searched for about a month.  I didn’t want to get even the cheap $100.00 ones at Walmart, because what if I hated riding a bike?  It’d been since my college years at BYU that I was even on a bike!

Enter my old bike from when I was growing up.  She’s a beauty, right?  My mom had given it to my sister a while ago.  My sis heard my plea for a bike and said I could have it back, that it wasn’t really great however, and that they had a ton of bikes and didn’t use this one.

Early 90’s splattering of color and shapes adorn this baby.  How about the pink wires?  Pink and purple—every girls dream.  In 1993 or 1994 (and really, I kind of hated pink until I went to college, so maybe not even then!).  ;)

The child bike seat I actually did find thrifting.  It was awesome too, because I paid $8.00 when they are over $30.00 at the store.  It had all the parts and was in great shape—just the colors weren’t my favorite.  It clashed horribly with the pink and purple.  

A little bit of work later, and here’s what I have now:

Not great, but WAY better!  I still don’t love the purple color, but the black and gray help a lot.

So originally I had this “great” idea that I would paint the bike.  So I took some sandpaper and got to work.  I knew taking it apart was better, but also a risk because knowing me, I wouldn’t be able to put it back together.  So I sanded for a bit until I realized that the pink/black/crazy swirls and slashes of color were stickers!  Yay!  STRONG stickers though—my fingers were so sore!

So where’s the pink wiring?  A bit of electrical tape did the trick—I just wrapped it around the wires and also on the red sticker close to the handlebars that would not come off for the life of me.

For the child bike carrier, I was pleasantly surprised to see that on the back of the red portion, was gray!    

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was going to sew double fold bias tape around the whole thing, but it was too thick and I ended up cheating by hot gluing it on.

I removed and painted the blue straps black.

I unpicked the strap stitching and replaced the red buckles with black ones from Walmart. 

I found a perfect basket to spray paint that had a broken handle.  It only cost $0.25.  I just used plastic zip ties to secure it to the handlebars. 

I did replace the bike seat, and even once more since this picture was taken because B’s legs couldn’t fit as well with this huge seat on.  I ended up with a bike cover and hope that it doesn’t kill my nether regions after riding tomorrow! 

So there you have it.  B wears a helmet and can talk to me from behind, and my boys have LOVED going on little bike riding adventures with me.