Our License Plate Saga

From the Archive

It looks like I have some posts I wrote a while ago that I didn't publish. Well here they are now:

It has taken us awhile to get new California license plates on our car. Read further to find out why. Hint: it involves 3 trips to the DMV, 2 smog tests, a trip to the hardware store, and a trip to the body shop. Hopefully you can learn something from our experience.

When we first moved here in September, we didn't know there would be a fee for not getting California plates within a certain amount of days. We didn't even look into it much when we got here because Ricky was busy with his new job, and I was busy trying to get a job. In November, we finally looked into getting our car registered here. We found out that there was going to be a $66 fee for not doing this within 20 days of taking up residency here. We made an appointment at the DMV for a date at the end of December, because that was the soonest available appointment date.  

In order to get our car registered here, we would have to have a smog test done. So Ricky went and had that completed mid-December. We went to the appointment at the DMV the day we got back from Christmas vacation in Utah. There was a long line out the door, and a lady was talking to people in the line one by one to see what each of us needed. Turns out, the computers were down that day, so they couldn't help us with what we needed done. So we scheduled another appointment for another day (which Ricky had to request work off for). 

When we went back to the DMV, there was thankfully no line out the door. However, there was literally nowhere to park, so I dropped Ricky off and was driving around looking for a place to park for like 15 minutes. In that time, Ricky had gotten most of the things taken care of at the desk. I finally came in and just signed a few things. The lady informed us that our smog test was done incorrectly and we would have to have it done again. Apparently, the people that did our smog test saw our Utah plates and did a smog test under their out-of-state requirements, and not California requirements. She said everything else was good, so we could just pay and have our plates mailed to us when our smog test was taken care of. However, they did not accept credit, only debit, cash or check, so we literally couldn't pay during that trip. We didn't know they wouldn't accept credit! The lady was really nice though, and got everything else in order for us. She said to just come back to her desk once we got the new smog test done.

Ricky went back to the place we had our smog test done and let them know what happened. They did another smog test for us, one that met California's standards this time. Then he went back to the DMV and finally got our California plates!

However, when we went to switch out our old plates for our new ones, we realized the screws holding in our back license plate were were stripped. So we went to Harbor Freight and bought vice grips. Ricky used those to try to turn the screw, but ended up breaking off the head of the screw! I then asked on a Facebook page and found someone in the ward who had screw extractors and a drill we could borrow. We tried those, but our screws would still not budge. 

So I ended up calling a nearby Auto Body Shop to see if they could help. It was an unusual request, but they said we could bring the car in. It was a struggle even for the worker there, and took a little while, but he was able to get our screws off. He used a blow torch to heat up the screws, and that's what did the trick.