Carpet Installation, Part 2

Last night Victoria and I worked on her car installing carpet. It’s slow-going -much slower than I’d expected. I remember it being easier with the EM installs I’ve done. We did get the front piece trimmed and basically all in. Both of us are now sporting blisters from the cheap Harbor Freight scissors. In their defense, I don't think they were designed for cutting carpet. After marking the location of the dimmer switch, we cut a hole in the carpet and installed the grommet. We then had to remove the kickpanels with the fresh air vents. While the passenger side was easier than an EMs, easy ended when we got to the driver’s side. To get it out, I had to remove the dimmer switch from the footwell. We cut the excess away and reinstalled the panels. The issue now was I couldn’t have the dimmer switch in place to install the kickpanel, but once the kickpanel was in, I couldn’t install the dimmer switch. I ended up forcing the panel to bend around the switch. Not something I like doing with 42 year-old plastic, but thankfully nothing broke.

With the front done, we moved to the rear piece. There are flaps of carpet sticking out from each rear corner and it appeared they needed to go under the rear seat mounting brackets. NOT GOOD. The directions did NOT tell us we needed to remove these parts and they're not easy to get loose, so I decided we'd ignore the flaps and just glued down the back edge where directed. The seat bottom will hide the flaps anyway. With bricks holding the material in place while the glue dried, we knocked off for the evening.

I know Victoria is running out of patience, so I promised her I wouldn’t leave the garage tonight until the car was ready for the road. All that’s left is installing the door sill strips while pulling out all the bumps in the carpet. Then the seatbelts and seats go in. Both of those, however, will require melting holes at each bolt location. I’ll go into that in tomorrow’s post. Finally, Glinda will be ready to come down off the dollies and drive out the door.