Help Melissa Get Her Dream Shop

I'm creating this campaign to ask the world to help my wonderful wife Melissa achieve her dream.  For years she has wanted to own an automotive shop where she can teach people how to care for their cars and provide facilities for car lovers to use real equipment to take care of their babies.  She's been eagerly anticipating the day when the stars would align and she'd have lots of people waiting to learn from her and a great little shop would find her and ask to be bought.  Well, that day has come and here we are.
A little about Melissa for those of you who may not know her personally: She's got a heart of gold and is a great mom, wonderful person and all a guy like me could ask for in a life partner.  She's had her struggles though, and this is what makes her dream and this campaign so special.  Melissa had a catastrophic accident a few years ago which all but destroyed both her legs and also left her with a traumatic brain injury that took away her ability to read, do math, type and do many things we all take for granted.  For years, Melissa has woken up every morning and, good day or bad, worked as hard as she could to build herself back up.  We've seen her through nineteen surgeries, lots of new metal parts to help save her legs from amputation and allow her to walk and countless hours learning how to use her mind again.  Today, Melissa has regained an amazing amount back - while she still struggles to read, she's able with effort to memorize most of the repair manuals for the cars she works on and use that information to be effective in keeping them running.  Her mathematical ability and computer skills are coming back more each day...


(Proof that Melissa really does get her hands dirty)

There are two things that have helped Melissa through these challenges - her love of cars and her desire to get up and be productive.  Anyone who knows us knows the problems we have finding a place to park all the wonderful classic cars she's working on day and night - it's a special lady that wants an engine hoist for Christmas!  So it's awesome but a little hectic that the perfect little shop happened to show up in her life and ask to be bought right when Melissa is ready to start teaching and helping people be safer and more capable with their cars.  It's an amazing opportunity at a great price from a seller who appreciates Melissa's goals and wants to do what he can to help her make this work.  We're looking into every avenue we can find to come up with the money as quickly as possible but it's not something we're going to be able to do alone.  We need your help, big or small, to make this happen.  We're hopeful that we can make this work, but if for some reason the stars fall out of alignment, we have someone in place that can professionally manage whatever people are kind enough to give so that we can be ready for the next opportunity.  I do hope we can come together and make this happen though, this really is a very rare opportunity and would be an amazing thing to happen for an amazing person.  Thank you!

Update: We were able to find some assistance through another channel and because of this are able to lower our goal!  Every bit helps. 

Update:  We've been asked a few times to talk a bit about the opportunity and what Melissa is planning to do.  For a few years now, lots of people have come to Melissa for information, advice and help with their cars.  Folks usually need simple things like help learning how to change their oil, check air pressure or change their tire and similar things that are simple to someone who knows about cars but are pretty scary to the rest of us.  She's also been asked lots of questions from people who need her to sanity-check some outlandish thing a mechanic somewhere told them, seemingly to get more $ in unnecessary repairs.  Melissa realized after a while that the community could really benefit from reasonably-priced classes to teach people how to safely check and do simple maintenance on their cars.  


(Melissa's son Anthony learning maintenance from her at a friend's shop)

As she's been talking to people, the response and interest in taking this sort of class has been seriously overwhelming.  We have hundreds of people waiting to take or send a loved one to class and there is definitely time pressure to make this happen.
Melissa also is a member of several car clubs so she can learn and chat about the various classic cars we're working on.  Another opportunity we found through these clubs is that a lot of people know a lot about cars and want to work on them themselves but don't have the facilities to do so.  People are willing to pay a reasonable amount to have access to professional equipment, shop and lift time but there are very few (if any) options in Vegas to do so.  That's why this opportunity is so special.  The shop that found us has three bays, two with 9,000lb lifts ready for action.  There's also welding equipment, a lathe for brake rotor machining and other work, a serious hydraulic press, an oil recovery system, compressor for pneumatics, cooling equipment so folks can work during the Vegas summers and a LOT of other tools that come with it.  It's the closest thing we're going to find to a complete solution and at an amazing price.  We do realize that some of the equipment is going to require certifications to use - we are working to make sure either we are in compliance with those requrements or we have people on board who are certified before we open our doors.  We are also working on making sure we will be properly insured and have the appropriate legalities (liability, etc) in place as well.  Luckily, we have a great community of people around us who are knowledgeable or who can make the right introductions.

Here are the cars we're currently (slowly) working on bringing back to their former selves now:

Alfred - 1967 Mercedes 250S

Lucy - 1984 BMW 633CSi

Shatze - 1983 BMW 633CSi

The Millennium Falcon - 2002 BMW 530i.  She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts -Han Solo