The other half of my carpet kit finally showed up. I drove it over to my dad's shop yesterday with the intention of spending all day working on interior and carpet. First thing I did was run to the hardware store for some fasteners, cleaning supplies, and acetone.
Kicked off my day by swapping out the mirrors. I know they were new but I didn't like them. Passenger side wouldn't adjust in far enough and the quality wasn't great. I ended up buying another set that cost 3x as much but are much, much nicer. I know the pics don't really show it but they are a huge improvement.
A previous craftsman decided it would look great to paint all the sill plates black so that they'd look extra shitty as the paint wore off and got scratched.
I used the acetone and cleaned them the best I could but there was some paint in crevices that just wasn't coming off. I took my collection of various aluminum paint cans and made some test shots on the back side of one until I found a good match for sheen.
I certainly would have preferred to leave them raw but they just looked horrible so I didn't have much choice. The other thing I did was try to use acetone to get some of the same horrible black paint off the heater box. It's ready for some finish sanding and flat black paint.
While that was drying I wiped down the cargo area and laid all the carpet pieces flat. Then cleaned the inner liftgate panel and side panels up. The speakers are just in cut out MDF type stuff and will be going away. I installed the liftgate panel with some of the new hardware.
At that point I remembered a couple little details under the hood I wanted to address. This is where my momentum stopped. ****ing mice! I saw 2 of them pop out and back into the inner fenders. So I set 2 traps under the hood and one on the passenger floorboard and got a ride home to set traps in my empty shop that I haven't even moved in to. ****!
When I checked the car this morning I had one missing cheese and a mouse in another.
Re-baited and set them and left it for another night. We'll see how they look in the morning and do a little minor cleanup. Luckily, it doesn't appear that they'd found a way inside the car and I didn't see any damage under the hood anywhere.
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