Time to Pay the Piper - 01/06/2020

There were a lot of good times and miles driven between 2017-2020, I just didn't do a great job documenting, or at least, I can't find any pictures I took of the work. From memory, some of the notable jobs I did include:

Still, after 3 years of fun the inevitable happened. On January 6th of 2020 (as if anything else needed to go wrong in 2020) I was picking up my daughter from aftercare. When I came back to the car and cranked it up, I heard an unusual click / clink while starting soon followed by 1/2 a dozen timing related error codes. My car has always had the infamous vanos startup rattle throughout my ownership but this seemed different. While the car still ran, it sounded like a tractor + more whirring noise from the timing case and seemed low on power. I knew my cards were up.
I drove it ~20 miles back home and parked it vowing not to crank it again until I fixed the guides:

As you can probably see. We had a lot going on in 2020. We just moved into this house the month before and were still in the process of unpacking + we were painting the entire interior of the house plus renovating 4 rooms. The spot I carved out for the cars was really not sustainable, so I ended up pushing the 540i outside and putting a cover on it. In hindsight, I regret this move because the "waterproof" cover ended up not being so waterproof and the ingress of water caused mold growth and clear coat problems down the road :(

The silver lining of this mess is that when we bought this house, we negotiated the purchase of a shop that was on the family's adjacent land. The shop was being used for storage + semi repair shop / stopping point for a logging business they were running. The only caveat was that they needed 6 months to relocate, so the 540i spent  close to 7 months covered in my driveway.
In June of 2021 we finally got the shop, and after a month of cleanup + floor work we were able to get the high-bay area useable. I've never had a space like this to work on cars and consider myself extremely fortunate to have it now. 

Unfortunately it would be another year before I could do the work that needed to be done. One major project I had in front of the car was renovating the enclosed area behind the 540i in the picture above. In the meantime, I had time to formulate a work plan and purchase parts.