You know that things are bad in your car when a ten-year-old complains that it is gross. We have had a couple of strange weeks, so my normal policy of having everyone grab at least three things that don’t belong each time they leave the car just wasn’t working.
I hit the last straw yesterday when two things occurred: my daughter pulled out an old and yellowed cheese stick from behind a seat, and the carpooling kids didn’t want to put on their seat belts because they were afraid of all of the crumbs. “They are huge crumbs. It isn’t as though they are little ones,” one girl said with an accusatory look.
Okay, as much as I would like to blame the state of my car on my kids (and believe me before kids my car would never have looked like that), the truth is that I haven’t been giving it the regular maintenance it needed. So, on one of the hottest afternoons of the summer, I plunged in with one garbage bag, one cardboard box, one recycling container, a shop vacuum and a lot of drinking water.
The first thing I did was to target anything that could be recycled, including water bottles, paper cups and office paper. Those items went directly into the recycling bin. In some cases, half-filled water bottles needed to be emptied first.
Next, I started attacking the garbage. We did have a large garbage bag in the car, which my husband puts in the car. I don’t really like having a garbage bag in the car because it seems to encourage us to leave garbage in the car instead of taking it with us when we exit. After a while, this bag can get pretty disgusting, and since it is a reusable bag…well, yuck. I had to dig in this bag for some of the items that could be recycled. The rest of the stuff got dumped into a plastic garbage bag, and the old bag was set aside to be cleaned.
Next I gathered all of the remaining items that were in the car. Anything that we could live without went right into the trash. The rest went into the cardboard box to go back into the house to be sorted and put away. I made sure to go through the pockets in the doors and remove old maps, magazines, etc.
Once everything was out of the car, it was time to get it all vacuumed up. The shop vacuum is a great tool, because it is powerful enough to get stale pretzel pieces and it comes with several attachments to allow me to vacuum out all of the cracks and crevices.
Another day, I’ll have to shampoo the rugs in the car.
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