Random Musings

If you’re the owner of a BMW E46, you should be well aware of the infamous “window fuck-up problem”.  This is a problem where your driver/passenger side window doesn’t go up or down.  Even if the window manages to go up and down, it makes a nasty cracking/popping sound that sounds like glass grinding against metal.  You’ll also find out that to fix this problem you’ll have to replace something called the window regulator, which will cost you in the neighborhood of $400 bucks + tax at the dealership.  Sounds a little excessive don’t you think?

Not wanting to give the “stealer”-ship a chance to rip me me off again, I did a little research and decided to this myself.  Now there are two ways to do this, either buy the window regulator from the dealership and replace the part yourself, or repair the existing one.  Buying a new regulator will cost you about $160 + tax, going with the repair route will cost you about $2.99 (yep that’s right, two dollars and ninety-nine cents) in nylon cable ties.   Being the cheap-ass that I am, I decided to go with the repair route.  Here’re the tools you’ll need :

8mm socket
10mm socket
Torx20 driver
Torx30 driver
The magic nylon twist ties

1. Disconnect the battery.  This prob. isn’t necessary, but I heard horror stories of strange fault codes being thrown from the computer when you start taking things apart and don’t disconnect the battery.  So just to be safe, disconnect the negative battery terminal using the 10mm socket.

2. Roll down the window about half way.  Don’t ask why, but I find this helps with detaching the window glass from the regulator later on.

3. We are now ready to take out the door panel.  To remove the panel, you’ll need to expose 5 torx screws :
- One is located under the mirror control/insert cover
- Three are located under the trim
- The last two are located under the arm-rest

4. After you’ve pried all the door panel clips, you’ll notice several wires attached to the door panel.  You’ll notice some (I had two) wires going to the speaker, a door opening wire, and if its the driver side there are two wires going to the mirror control.  Disconnect all of these and remove the door panel entirely.

5. Now we need to remove the airbag.  Careful with this one, apparently its an “explosive” device so be gentle.  There are 3 screws holding the airbag, use the 10mm socket to remove them.  After you remove the airbag, you can disconnect the wire and put it some place safe.  I’m lazy, so I used one of those magic nylon cable ties and hung it on my door frame.  Careful if you want to disconnect it though, I heard that if you reconnect the power while the airbag is disconnected, the SRS light will come on and you will need to reset that some how (most likely by paying the “stealer”-ship)

6. Here’s the “hardest” part.  Actually, maybe not the hardest but this is the most time consuming and tedious part.  That grey foam stuck to the door is actually the vapor barrier.  This vapor barrier is fused to your door by some black shit, possibly some kind of weather chalking.  You’ll need to carefully remove the vapor barrier without ripping it, otherwise you’ll have a very wet floor after a rainy night.  I find the use of a heat gun (or if you’re ghetto like me, a hair dryer) really useful for this task.  The heat gun (hair dryer) can also be used to re-apply the vapor barrier when you’re done with the repair.

7. After the vapor barrier is removed, you can now see the window regulator and the window regulator motor.  The motor is secured using 3 torx 20 screws.  Go ahead and remove them and take out the motor.  You can unhook the motor I suppose, but I was lazy and I just let it hang there.

8. Before we can take out the window regulator, we’ll need to detach the window from it first.  Remember how I said to lower the window half way?  The window regulator is attached to the window with two clips.  These needs to be unscrewed, and the only way to reach these screws are through a metal hole/slit.  Lowering the window will put the position of these clips closer to the hole/slit.  If you can’t find the clips you can use your hand to push/pull the glass up and down until they’re aligned.  Once you located the clips you can go ahead and loosen them.  I think they’re a 8mm socket.

9. After you loosen the clips, pull the window all the way up with your hands.  You will not be able to remove the regulator unless you move the window up.

10. Now you can remove the 4 bolts (I think 10mm) holding the window regulator.  Once the bolts are undone you can take out the window regulator.  Removing the regulator requires a little imagination : The regulator itself is two steal bars held by criss-crossing wires.  The wires are flexible so you can twist it to take it out.  After I took out the regulator, I laid it on the floor.  This thing doesn’t really look like any kind of a regulator to me.  What is it trying to regulate?  I’m not sure about that.  What I’m sure is this stupid thing sure isn’t worth $160.

Fucking BMW sure knows how to make sturdy parts.  This “regulator” is built like a tank, the metal is thick and the wires are tough.  Be careful or you’ll cut your damn finger off when you pull this thing out.  Why then, you ask, would such a sturdy part break?  Take a look at the two metal “clips” which attaches to the window regulator.  You’ll find the same high quality steel construction, but wait.  What’s this?  Some cheap ass plastic part that got broken off!!!

This little clip is what breaks 99% of the time.  The metal cylinder on the wire is suppose to sit in the notch inside the plastic part.  I guess over time this plastic gets brittle and breaks, so the cylinder pops right out and your window doesn’t move.  Why the FUCK would those damn engineers build everything in metal but this part in plastic?  It almost felt like they planned for this thing to fail.

11.  If you bought a new regulator, simply throw this piece of garbage out and put in the new one.  Since I didn’t even want to pay the $160 to fix some stupid plastic, I decided to repair this piece of crap.  At this point, whip out your magic nylon ties.  The idea is to bind the metal cylinder to the clip, mimicking what the broken plastic part was doing (and still would be doing if it was built fucking correctly in the first place).  When tying the wire to the clip, make sure the cylinder is in the right place.  Remember, we want to mimick the $160 piece of junk errr I mean hardware with our $2.99 nylon ties.

Recall there are two of these clips on your regulator.  Might as well do the same thing to the other clip even if its not broken, hell this is German engineering so its just a matter of time till they break.

That’s it.  Put everything back together in reverse order, connecting your battery last.  Congratulations,  you’ve successfully saved $400 bucks using a couple of $2.99 nylon cable ties.

So as most (if not all) of our friends know, the tile work through our house is shabby at best.  Some guy from the tile company dropped by last week and agreed that a good portion of the tiles need to be re-laid.  Come Monday (Nov 3rd), two guys show up and started demolishing my kitchen.  Its funny cause one of the guy (I think this guy’s pretty senior) started cursing as he’s digging up the tiles…. he wasn’t impressed at all with the work:

 Currently very satisfied with our builder. Enuff said :

Edit : So here’s more information : The grading of our garage made it such that the ceiling was too low to install the door. Our builder was pretty creative though, check out what they’ve done :

So they’ve cut the drywall, created a small slant, and (probably soon) resealed it with a fresh piece of drywall.  I’m pleasantly surprised that they went through all these trouble to satisfy their customers.  Bravo to our builder!

Here’re some more pictures, check out the “free” 6′ x 10′ deck they gave us (yeah I know.. we probably paid for it already in our original purchase price) :

I havn’t written an updated for a month, not because there’s nothing to update, but rather because I couldn’t get in to take any pictures. The builder’s been pretty vigilant in locking up since the dry-wall’s been installed. Luckily, we dropped by yesterday and found that they just finished the paint job so all windows and doors are opened. We immediately sneaked in (shh….. don’t tell anyone) and took a few pictures of our nearly finished house :

Despite all our worries, it does look like they will finish on-time. Let’s hope they don’t skimp on quality and workmanship and screw up the last mile.

The drywall is in!! Our house is looking more and more like a house. Funny thing is, after the walls are up, we actually feel the house getting more spacious:

Looks like we’ll be closing on-time (knock on wood)

The exterior of our house is shaping up pretty nicely which is a very good thing since there were several massive downpour these past few weeks. See pics below :

Not too shabby eh? In fact, the interior is not bad either!

As you can see, electrical, some plumbing, ducting and furnace is in. With 3 months till closing, this is looking good (or is it?) I recently heard from my future neighbors who are closing in September that they got delayed till Jan. 2009. I hope we’re okay… (crosses fingers)

Wow… these guys are fast.  Checked out the site today, turned out that all the windows are installed, the basement has been paved, stairs installed, air ducts are roughed in, and what else?  They fixed the shower stall!!! YAY!!!

So we just had our wiring appointment this weekend, in which we “designed” the low-voltage electrical infrastructure of the house, which btw, is basically phone, ethernet, and audio.

So we went in and ask the guy:

us :”Okay, since the builder includes CAT5 in all the bedrooms only we would like to install extra CAT5 outlets in the family room and kitchen.”

guy : “So you want extra phone lines in your family room and kitchen? Your builder already includes phone lines”

us : “No, we want CAT5 in the family room and kitchen for network connectivity. Since the builder already installs CAT5 in our bedrooms we want to add a coupe more on the first floor”

guy : “Urm…. no. The builder doesn’t include wiring for ethernet connectivity. The CAT5 is used for telephone”

WTF??? CAT5 for telephone? Apparently its true, they use CAT5 cables for telephone wiring, which is apparently clearly stated in the purchase agreement when we bought the house. Okay, before you scream “You should have READ everything you sign”, take a look at the following clause :

Pretty clear right? Telephone in kitchen, living, den, family. Bedrooms will get CAT5 cabling.

Read it again, no really. Read it again. This time, pay CLOSE attention to the punctuation.

For some reason, my brain spliced the sentence at “and all bedrooms…” and I associated the CAT5 cabling to the bedrooms and not to the telephone rough in. If you read the entire sentence, you’ll see that the what they really meant was “Telephone rough in provided with CAT5 cabling in the kitchen, living room, den, family room, or great room and all bedrooms.” What’s with the use of this passive voice business? VERY SNEAKY INDEED!!

Just another prime example of tricks how builders use to catch unsuspecting buyers off-guard.

Yes, you must be thinking to yourself “what’s next?”. Well, as of June 1st we officially have a roof. In fact, they managed to have the shingles installed by Jun 7th, which means no more sleepless nights worrying about our topless house flooding.

June 1st:

June 7th:

An update on the shower stall issue. We spoke with the head office and they affirmed us that construction has been notified of the issue and that “it will be fixed”. Well low and behold we went by June 7th and it wasn’t fixed. In fact they even started installing the water pipes into one of the side walls. Perhaps they want the facets to be embedded into the glass? Erm… no…

So we visited a week later, May 15th and notice we got a wall. Check it out!

So our first floor is looking good… Let’s see what happened the following week, May 24th:

Yay!!! Our house is practically move in condition, well if it doesn’t rain One thing that worries me though, we ordered the frameless glass shower, but notice the 3rd picture above of our shower. It doesn’t look very frameless to me. Perhaps they take the frame away after dry walling?