So how much time is too much time spent when it comes to cleaning your car? For me there doesn’t seem to be a limit, lol Last weekend I cleaned a little sat night, then spent all day sunday, and I mean ALL day sunday cleaning my car.

Am I obsessed with a clean car? Might be a fine line, I really enjoy the way a clean car looks and smells, but this was the first time I’ve ever really cleaned the interior of this car in over a year. I think a habit I inherited from my mother is once I start cleaning, I keep cleaning until the job is completely done, no half ass jobs.

So the routine started sat night with emptying any stray trash in the car, removing the floor mats and giving them a wash down. Vacuumed the entire interior, floors, seats, cup holders, door pockets. Then whip out the california dash duster and wipe down the dash, console and vents. Ran out of daylight and lights in the garage are only top down lights so I couldn’t work on the seats.

Sunday morning bright and early started with sweeping the garage floor to get rid of debris I didn’t want tracked into the car. Break out Lexol cleaner and proceed to spray it down my leg, great. I spent a few hours to meticulously clean every inch of leather in the car, down to removing the headrests and cleaning the bottoms. This was going to be the first real leather treatment this car had gotten and this weekend was probably the last chance before it was too cold so I took my time to do it right.

Oh and a broken office task chair with no back makes an awesome stool to save your legs/knees/feet from the constant bending down. My knees are no where as good as they use to be when I shot down the mogul slope at Cascade mountain as a kid (maybe that’s why they aren’t as good anymore, lol).

Lunch break - awesome sunday brunch buffet at a local mexican place (with no after affects, ya you know what I’m talking about). Shocked the hell out of me it was good and didn’t wreck me.

Seats had baked a while during my lunch break, time to condition. This process didn’t take as long, don’t have to rub into the leather with as much effort as cleaning. Karate kid - wax on, wax off. I think it took a little more than an hour to condition all the leather.

Next up was to 303 the rest of the interior. I could have conditioned the leather on the door panels but I wasn’t feeling up to the task and exposure to human oil on the vertical side panels of the doors were minimal compared to the seats. So 303 protectant deemed good enough for me. Applied 303 to entire dash, console (minus gauges), and all 4 doors in entirety. This took a little while to do just because of all the different surfaces.

Almost done… last thing on the menu to complete is to stoners the windshield. I hit the windshield a few times with my hand while 303′ing the dash, had to get rid of those oily marks

By this time it was getting late in the day and there wasn’t going to be enough daylight to do an entire exterior wash and wax session with Zaino. So I opted just to give her a nice washing head to toe including rims and tires. Apply some tire gloss to finish it off and called it a day.

Came out really great, wish I could have gotten another layer of wax on it, we’ll see if mother nature gives me another window before dropping snow on us.

Tags: detailing