Recently I’ve taken an interest in a new hobby. When I told someone what this particular hobby was, they were surprised and said “I don’t know what I expected you to say, but it definitely wasn’t that.”
I’ve started really getting into auto detailing. There’s something so satisfying about immediately seeing the fruits of your labor after spending a significant amount of time precisely cleaning your car from top to bottom (but not bottom to top, because that has the potential to leave dirt and cause minor paint damage). I’m not talking about just getting a sponge and some soap and slagging it over your car once every few months. I’m talking about buying a wide range of products specifically built for detailing your car and using them for their particular purposes both inside and outside your car. I absolutely love having a clean car, and the fact that I have a super nice car that I enjoy taking care of now is just the icing on the cake.
I got into this for the first time when I owned my previous car not too long ago. It was a 2014 Chrysler 300 S. I had several issues with that car that led me to trade it in for something else, but before I decided to get rid of it I wanted to clean it up really nicely to try to get myself to like it a bit more. It didn’t work in the end, but I spent over three hours immaculately cleaning the interior of that car and the result was impressive nonetheless. I scrubbed the interior with an all-purpose cleaner and a scrubbing brush, used a toothbrush on the vents, scrubbed the carpet, reconditioned the leather seats, scrubbed the door jambs, and more. I would’ve done the exterior too, but I didn’t have any products on hand to do it safely since the car had been babied since even prior to me owning it and I didn’t want to ruin the paint job.
Now I have an all black 2016 Chevy Impala LTZ, and it is a sharp looking car. The wheels have been powdercoated black and it just looks great. This past weekend I spent quite a while detailing the interior with many of the same products I used on the Chrysler. The interior turned out looking even better than when I drove it off of the lot from the dealership. I used my also-recently-purchased pressure washer to try and snow foam the exterior of the car, but that didn’t turn out nearly as well as I thought it would and I ended up taking the car through a touchless car wash to fix it.
Snow foaming is where you attach a foam sprayer to the end of a pressure washer and it sprays a thick foam of car shampoo all over your car to clean the dirt as efficiently as possible. What I didn’t know, however, is that you’re also supposed to wash the car by hand along with a snow foam application, so when I rinsed it off (and failed to dry it quickly which caused even more issues) I left all kinds of water spots and streaks all over the jet black paint. It looked just as bad if not worse than when I started to wash the exterior.
So, this caused me to start doing research into how to do these things correctly. I spent several hours in the following days watching YouTube videos, reading Reddit threads, and browsing various auto detailing websites to find tips and tricks about how to do all of these things. Just as you would expect, it is a very deep rabbit hole that exposes all kinds of techniques and things you can do, and it’s just exciting to me. Historically, I haven’t been a very hands-on person when it comes to enjoying stuff like working on cars or working in the yard, but this is something else.
I like this so much that I’ve started making a Christmas list that is already longer than last year’s and it includes nothing but auto-detailing supplies. This is an expensive hobby for sure, but I think it is more than worth it to keep your car looking as good as new for as long as you own it. Plus, it helps when I get compliments on the great appearance of my car all the time.