I May Have Ruined The Car

I may have ruined the car. I say may have, because I’m trying to work up the courage to go out and look.

See, I like to mess with things. Take things apart, paint them, carve parts off with a razor blade, stick things on with hot glue. I do that with furniture, I do it with my home. Stuff bugs me when it doesn’t look right, so I get some idea and I restyle things. I don’t ruin them too often, but it happens.

Furniture is pretty easy to change, especially if its painted. If I don’t like it, I can change it again, right? The desk I’m sitting at has been different sizes, had the top changed twice, and was recently three different colors over three days. But I’m pleased with it now, I think.

I added some moulding to my apartment doors. First to one, then to the others, and some extra detail moulding to amp up the casing around the entry door. But that’s it- I tell myself. We’ll see if I listen to my sage advice.

I’ve learned a lot over the years with these putter projects. I’ve learned which paint sticks to what surface, whether to hot-glue or epoxy or decoupage, and there’s a little thing called a finish-head screw for people like me who are not great with a hammer. By the way, it could be that you have the wrong hammer. Different hammers accomplish different tasks. So many rules!

The rules can be found on the web. I used to look them up in books. This Old House used to actually show how to do construction and remodelling. But mistakes can be so informative. Ya stick to a chair or scratch a table and it tells you that there’s a better way. I recently had a wall cabinet full of dishes jump off the wall and land in my arms like a kid learning to dive. Turns out I had just missed the studs with the mounting screws.

The rules are different for cars. They bounce around. You’re pretty much always in contact with the surfaces, and worst part is the temperature extremes of being air conditioned one minute, closed up and baking in the sun the next. The materials are unforgiving, and the construction techniques are surprisingly different from typical construction.

So many parts of a car simply snap on. YouTube taught me this. They travel down the assembly line and workers casually pop the parts on. The clips are engineered to make them almost foolproof. Stereo installers and upholstery guys know how to grab a door panel of face plate, pop it off, and reinstall it without breaking the clips. But it takes courage. And leverage.

As for my car, the Scion IQ, some little things have always bugged me. The original hubcaps looked super cheap, so I got super-cheap but attractive replacements. Then I changed those to actual custom rims. Gotta work on that ride height, but the exterior is shaping up.

The interior tho- it’s DARK. Two-tone gray and black, but mostly black. And the seats don’t match anything. Even the seat cushion doesn’t match the backrest. I wish it had gray seats to match the tasteful grey of the door panels.

I managed to find two-tone seat covers, black with gray center panel, but seat covers always look like covers to me. And the seats have airbags which the cover design doesn’t accommodate. I can sew. I’ll alter those. Still, there’s so much black in the barely-lit interior, I did add an extra dome light, but still, its dark in there.

The IQ’s heater controls run vertically down the center of the dash, which flows into the console. The tasteful gray of the lower dash is interrupted by a black panel, and the console is of course black. But a wiggle test revealed that the console top can be popped off. Hmmm…

So last evening, just before dark, and in the rain, I altered the seat covers, popped off the console top, and painted it and a section of the dash gray to match the existing gray accents. I lost daylight just as I was finishing up, so I haven’t really seen the result yet. Then there’s the question of whether the two-way tape I used on the seat panels stayed stuck or let go.

Painting interior plastics takes courage. I hope it works out. But I did the thing I wanted to do; the thing I always do. I made it my own, and frankly more of how it should have looked from the start. I often wonder why things look the way they look. But, hey, I’m usually going to change things anyway.