Ooh I did this last month too, after somebody accidentally smashed it off my parked car. To be fair, instead of driving off, she came to the house all flustered and I said “look, these things happen, it’s just a car” and although she offered to pay for it to go to a garage, I thought I’d have a crack at it myself. Got a generic replacement from eBay, but the most frustrating part for me after finally getting the door card and the interior trim off, was finding that the bolts that attached the mirror unit to the A pillar were some weird-looking things I’d never seen before.

I’m no mechanic, so I took the car to Halfords and said “I need a bit for this bolt but I have no idea what it is”. The guy came out to look at it and said “Yeah, not sure if we’ll have something for that”. Then he went, “Actually, maybe we do” and I followed him to the back of the shop where they were selling this huge toolkit for about £1k, and he went through it and found the right bit, in amongst the hundred other tools in this box.

I said “I don’t suppose you sell this separately!?” and he laughed and said, “No, but come to the till”.

We wander off to the till and he goes “Do you want to buy these microfibre cloths for £2.99?”. I’m thinking, what the fuck is he on about, and he must have read my face, smiles and goes “You do”. So I say yes, and he wraps up the bit in the microfibre cloth and hands it over.

What an absolute fucking star of a man.

Anyway just as a bonus, after spray painting the mirror cover (the eBay one was just a primed thing), I message the woman to say all sorted, and she asked me how much it cost and I said about £70 for the mirror unit, bit, and spray paint, and the next day she knocked on the door with an envelope with £150 in it “for my time” and a card that said “Thanks for being so nice about it all”.

10/10 would let her smash my mirrors again.