I like that story, I would have cut the roof off and made it a convertible!
My beater car story, tl;dr an 83 crashed up honda accord.
in my 20s I had a roomate, a friend from highschool and his mom's boyfriend gave him an 83 honda accord, high miles only thing wrong was rust on the wheel wells, he had a drinking problem and spun out along a guard rail and somehow hit front back and both sides against the guardrail in the same accident, then it sat in our parking lot a few months,

one time he owed $150 for the bills and he offered me the car for it, he was surprised I took the deal but it was a steal to me, the car was still straight and it was the V6 stick-shift accord actually had some newer nice low profile tires, I fixed the lights on it and rigged the bumper back up, gutted the steering wheel(air bag had went off) and put a push button from radio shack inside the steering wheel frame and hooked it up to the horn then proceeded to whip the shit out of it all over town, work and back, everywhere for a couple years till the transmission linkage broke, i got more for scrapping it than the 150. Everyone thought I'd just got in a hit-and-run when I arrived anywhere and it handled like a champ and accelerated pretty quick. I have too many stories to tell about the thing and most are incriminating but that's the one.