After repairing the brakes on my Civic and washing the exterior, I quickly changed the oil and replaced a few bulbs that had gone out. Then, I decided to clean up the inside, which had become disgusting due to years of neglect. Almost every aspect of the interior was filthy, including the seats, carpets, dash, and trunk.
I began cleaning by stripping all the interior components, using an excellent tutorial by Refine Movement. I started with the trunk liner, which was in such a bad state from being soaked in standing water for who knows how long that I threw it away immediately.
Then, I moved on to removing all the seats, starting with the back seats. These are easily removed by folding them forward and removing a few bolts, as pictured below. Once the bolts are off, lift up the seat and pull it out through the door. Make sure you place these in a place where you'll find them easily again once it's time to re-install the seats.
The front seats were even easier to remove, and each one just has four bolts before you can take it out. One of the bolts on each seat is under a cover, so you'll have to pry this off first. Also, the driver's side seat has a weight sensor for the airbag, which you need to disconnect before pulling the seat out of the car.
Then you can start removing the carpet by prying it out of various trim pieces and slowly pulling off the adhesive. Once the carpet is unstuck, you'll have to make a small cut under the dashboard to separate it from the center console area. Then you can pull it out fully.
One I got the carpet out, I could see that it was absolutely nasty. It was covered in dark spots and gunk, which caused the car to look and smell really bad. You could buy a brand new carpet at this point, but it's difficult to cut and mold exactly to your specific car.
So, I decided to pressure wash the carpet with laundry detergent to hopefully remove some of the larger stains, as you can see below.
After this, I did multiple passes with a Bissell carpet cleaner in order to get the deeper stains out of the carpet. This worked really well, and the final product ended up looking great!
Before putting the carpet back in, I scrubbed down each of the seats and the various trim pieces I removed as well. Then, I refitted the carpet in the car and slid it underneath the side/door pieces. I also reinstalled the center console. Finally, I installed the front and rear seats, finishing off the interior restoration.
I hope you enjoyed reading this post! If you'd like to read more about my journey in restoring this salvaged EK Civic, you can find all my other posts here. Also, I have a lot of other engineering projects, if you'd like to check those out as well. Thanks for reading and have an awesome day!