How to Prep Your Car for a Detailing Appointment

Take out what is yours

Empty the cabin and the boot of your belongings. Not the dirt — that is our job — but the things. Bags, gear, papers, the stuff in the door pockets, the coins in the console, anything in the glovebox you would not want handled.

Two reasons. The obvious one is that we cannot clean under a bag that is sitting on the seat, and an interior detail with the boot full of gear is an interior detail with the boot skipped. The less obvious one is that we do not want to be responsible for your things, and neither do you.

Child seats are the exception worth thinking about. If you can remove them, the upholstery underneath is almost always the worst area in the vehicle and we cannot reach it with the seat fitted. If you would rather not disturb a fitting, tell us and we will work around it — but the result under there will be limited by what we can reach.

Leave the dirt

Do not vacuum, wipe, or wash before you bring it in. It does not help, and it costs you an afternoon.

More than that, it sometimes hurts. Wiping a dusty dash with a dry cloth grinds dust into the surface. Scrubbing a stain drives it deeper into the padding. Washing the car the night before means we cannot see what the paint actually looks like under contamination, which is information we need. Bring it as it is.

The only exception is anything actively wet — a spill that just happened, a leak that is still dripping. Blot what you can and tell us, so we know what we are looking at.

Tell us what you know

The things that make the biggest difference to how well a job goes are usually things only you know. What was spilled and roughly when. Whether the smell has a known cause. Whether the car has had paint correction before, and where. Whether a door leaks, a window sticks, a seat will not move, a panel has been repainted.

None of that is a problem. All of it changes what we do. A previously corrected panel has less clear coat to work with; a known spill tells us where to look; a repainted panel behaves differently under clay. We would rather know at drop-off than find out halfway through.

The one thing that makes it worse

Deodorising sprays and air fresheners applied right before drop-off. It is a natural instinct — the car smells, you are embarrassed, you cover it — and it makes our job harder, because now we are trying to find a source under a layer of fragrance.

Odor work is a finding job before it is a cleaning job. Bring the car smelling like it smells and we will find what is causing it. Bring it smelling of pine and we will find that first.

On the practical side: fuel is not a concern, and the car does not need to be washed, dry, or warm. Drop it off, tell us what you know, and give us the day.