Interior Detailing in Port Washington, Wisconsin

From our shop

About 40 minutes

Cars

$135

SUVs & trucks

$150

Peak season

Charter season

What a dock leaves on boots

A working marina dock is coated with a film that nothing else in our area produces: diesel and two-stroke residue from the boats, algae from the pilings, fish slime and scales from cleaning stations, and the fine sand that blows in off the beach. It is oily, it is organic, and it goes into a vehicle on every pair of shoes that walked the dock.

In the footwells it does two things. The oily component holds dirt against the carpet fibre so the footwells go dark and stay dark. The organic component — the slime and the algae — continues to break down, which is the low harbour smell that a charter vehicle's owner stops noticing by June.

Scales and rope

Fish scales are the specific one. They are small, translucent, sharp-edged and they dry hard, and they end up in the boot carpet and the rear footwells of any vehicle that has carried a catch or a cleaning bucket. They do not vacuum — they are flat and they lie in the pile — and they are surprisingly persistent about it. Compressed air lifts them; then they can be collected.

Wet rope sheds fibre, and rope fibre in a boot carpet is tangled into the pile by the time anyone looks. Rope also carries harbour water into the carpet backing, which is where the moisture problem starts. On a charter vehicle the boot needs a proper extraction rather than a vacuum, and the spare well beneath it needs checking for whatever drained through.

The season, and the forty minutes

Charter season is spring through autumn, and the vehicle takes the dock every trip. A mid-season interior is undone within a fortnight; the honest booking is the end of the season, when the cabin has the most in it and the work lasts through winter.

Port Washington is at the edge of our area. A season-end interior on a charter vehicle is worth the forty minutes; a vacuum is not, and we will say which you need. If the smell has established, that is odor work rather than a standard interior.