interior cleaning
Sand in everything, sun cream on the seats, and a car that bakes all day with the doors shut.
A car in the Algarve gets treated as beach equipment, and the inside shows it. Sand goes down the seat rails and into the carpet where a vacuum cannot reach it. Sun cream transfers off the backs of legs into the seat fabric. Wet towels and swimming costumes go in the boot and stay there. Then the whole thing sits on a driveway at forty degrees with the doors shut, which is roughly the ideal way to turn all of that into a smell.
The interior is also the part that gets skipped. Plenty of people wash the outside of a car regularly and have never had the inside properly cleaned, which is odd given that the inside is the only part you actually sit in.
how we do it
Mats out, boot cleared, everything removed so the surfaces underneath can actually be reached. We will hand you anything that looks like it should not be thrown away.
Down the seat rails, under the seats, in the seat back pockets, in the boot well and along the door sills. This is slow and it is most of the job, and it happens before any moisture goes in.
Marks are identified and treated individually. Sun cream, food, drink and pet transfer are all different problems and they do not respond to the same thing.
Fabric seats and carpets are cleaned and then extracted, so what comes out of the fabric leaves the car rather than sitting in the foam underneath.
Leather cleaned and conditioned, which matters here because sun dries it out and that is what cracks it. Plastics, trim, vents, console and the inside of the glass, which is always worse than people expect.
If there is a smell we treat the source rather than covering it. Then the car is dried with airflow and the doors left open, because sealing a damp interior is how you create the problem you just paid to remove.
what is included
This is an interior service and nothing more. No polishing, no machine correction, no ceramic coating, no wheels, no engine bay. We are a cleaning company applying the same fabric and surface work we do inside a house to the inside of a vehicle, and we are not going to start describing ourselves as detailers because it sounds better.
It is also worth being realistic about headlining and about very old damage. A headlining that is sagging or has come away from the backing is a trim repair, not a cleaning job, and cleaning it aggressively will make it worse. Cigarette damage, tears, cracked leather and burns are all damage. We clean around them and tell you what they are.
how we keep the standard
Every job is checked against the standard for that surface before the van moves, by someone who did not do the cleaning. If it is not right we put it right before you have to ask.
We look at the property, then give you a price. What we agree at the survey is what you pay, with no extras invented once we are on site.
You can explain what you want and be understood, and we follow up afterwards to check you are happy. Not a sales call.
where we work
We cover Quinta do Lago · Vale do Lobo · Vilamoura · Almancil · Loulé · Quarteira · Faro · Albufeira · Carvoeiro, and the surrounding area. If you are just outside it, ask anyway and we will tell you honestly whether we can look after you properly.
questions
Yes. The work is done at your property, on the driveway or wherever the vehicle normally sits, so you are not dropping a car off and losing a day. We need reasonable access to the vehicle and space to work around it, and we confirm both when we book.
A normal car is a few hours. A larger vehicle, a family car after a full summer, or anything with a serious sand or odour problem takes longer, and a campervan is most of a day. We give you the time along with the price.
Most of it, and considerably more than a vacuum at a petrol station will. Sand works into places that need the seats moving and the trim getting properly cleared, which is why it is the slowest part of the job. Anything trapped inside a mechanism or behind fixed trim, we will tell you about rather than claim we reached.
Yes. Campervan and motorhome interiors, and boat cabins and upholstery, are the same work in a different shape and often benefit more, because damp and salt do more to a boat interior than they do to a car.
No. The exterior of vehicles is not something we do, and we would rather stay honest about where our work ends. What we do outside is buildings: glass, render, terraces, roofs and solar.
the rest of the inside