10/26/2025
My wife’s level of motivation for this project is currently well in excess of mine. I’ll be totally honest here, if she wasn’t invested in this right now, Emma would likely exist in her current state until spring.
BUT NO.
I went out to the garage to replace the hood bumpers (old one on the left).
As I’m doing that, my wife decides it’s time to remove the driver’s seat,
the back seat,
the back seat back,
the trunk separator,
all of the seat belts,
the carpet,
and the dynamat under the carpet.
The point here is not necessarily to install the new carpet – yet – that will come with time, but to inspect the floor of the car for rust.
Yes, there is rust, but is it bad enough that we should saw it out and replace it with welded-in sheet metal?
From what we can tell so far, no.
There is rust, but nothing so bad that we need to do a patch job. We’ll get some brass drill brushes to remove the rust, and we’ll paint over what’s left with some protective matte paint.
THEN we’ll install the new carpet.
What we are trying to avoid here is eventual rust spots bleeding through the light-brown carpet.
An interesting discovery, though – this is the thick cardboard separator between the backseat and the trunk:
See that knawed-through section? See the padding that came from….somewhere… used as a nest? Yeah. We’re gonna have to mitigate that. Clearly a critter had a life here. Maybe raised a family. Mortgage. Life insurance. The whole thing.
I’ll put on a mask and clean that out later this week. Hopefully we don’t get more than we bargained for.
Former owner intimated that this car spent a lot of time living in a field, so I’m not totally surprised by this. In fact, I’m surprised there aren’t more indications of rodent infestation.
We’ll get it cleaned up.
I want to make a point about this photo – that rust in the driver’s seat floor pan *looks* bad, but it really isn’t all that bad. I took a hammer to it and it’s still totally sound. It just has surface rust. I’ll eventually post an after photo of this spot and you can see that (hopefully) I’m right.
Point here is: My wife is going to spend all week scraping that glued-on dynamat (it’s purpose is to reduce road noise, but the new carpet I bought has its own). After she scrapes off the bulk of it, I’ll try to hit it with some brass brushes. Get it down to bare metal.
Then paint. Then carpet.
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