Mould is, we can all agree, pretty unpleasant. There are very few times you want to see mould, blue cheese being the only one I can think of. Certainly when you open the door of your van is one time you’re not hoping for mould. This is why I was somewhat disappointed when I opened the door of my van, Charlie, after she’d been in storage over winter.
I have photos. Do you want to see? Of course you do.
Unhealthy
It was rather revolting. And quite a problem for me. I was planning to live in this van, to sleep in there, to cook in there! I did not want mould in there! You can get some pretty unpleasant respiratory illnesses as a result of hanging around too much mould.
The seats were mouldy, the wall panels, the ceiling, and the carpets were mouldy. My bed was mouldy. I was not impressed. I was, in fact, concerned.
So, I did what any full-grown adult does when they are concerned. I phoned my Mum. Partly to give her an update that I had arrived at the van, and also to ask if she, in any of her Great Mother Wisdom™ knew how to clean mould out of cars.
She did. Of course, she did. She’s a mother, therefore, she has Great Mother Wisdom™. And Google. Google may have played a part. She suggested vinegar, as it would kill the mould without damaging the upholstery. She also recommended cat litter as a way of absorbing the moisture.
Well, I walked down the road to the supermarket and got myself some vinegar and cat litter! I also got baby wipes, because I’ve used them on car interiors before and had wonderful results.
Chairs and other fabric surfaces
The baby wipes took the mould right off the surface of the upholstery. Charlie has velvet on the bed, chairs, walls, and ceiling. After wiping the mould off it looks great. There is a little staining in places, but overall, not too bad.
For a deeper clean of the fabrics, I have a couple of options. I could apply vinegar with a sponge and give it a good scrubbing. I don’t have a sponge that would survive scrubbing velvet though, and I don’t want to spend my time cleaning bits of sponge out of my van.
My solution is to vacuum the seats to remove as much dust as possible from all the nooks and crevices and then use a carpet and upholstery cleaner. Because I bought one for the carpet anyway. The van has deep 80’s carpets. Difficult to scrub with baby wipes.
Carpets
If your car has the type of shallow shag that’s common in modern cars, I’d just vacuum and wipe down with baby wipes and either the vinegar or the carpet cleaner.
In my lovely retro van, I’m going to be fighting the carpet for a while I think. I’m going with the carpet cleaner option; it came with a brush on the bottle so hopefully, it’s going to cope with the deeper shag.
Fingers crossed.
Hard Surfaces
The steering wheel and dashboard came clean very easily with baby wipes. Then I dried a clean baby wipe before dousing it in vinegar and going over everything again.
The woodwork in my conversion, unfortunately, isn’t of a very high standard. It looks like it was made with whatever scraps they could get their hands on, and there’s actually fibreboard used in the kitchen. Untreated fibreboard! The wooden surfaces are simply too rough and unsanded to be wiped clean. I may do something about this at some point.
But for now, pouring vinegar on and scrubbing with a stiff-bristled brush does a wonderful job. The part of vinegar that makes it smell vinegar-y is acetic acid. The acid kills the fungus, so the mould doesn’t then grow back.
Top Tip: leave the doors open while you’re working so that the vinegar smell doesn’t build up too badly.
Next:
Once all the surfaces are clean you’re now just looking at where the mould has penetrated to. Sometimes this will be into a porous material, like the fibreboard, and sometimes it’ll be nooks and crevices that you can’t reach to clean.
A surprising number of things in a car come apart relatively easily. BUT before you take anything apart, check that you’ll be able to put it back together! Door panels and such are often fixed on with simple screws or poppers, but if they have door handles and window controls, that will be a little more complicated.
For my conversion and its low-quality kitchen, I was able to just take some stuff out and throw it away. Like that ghastly fibreboard. (I will explain my hatred of fibreboard in this application in another post. It deserves a whole post to do it justice.)
Other things came out, got scrubbed up, and got put back in. Like the drawers for example, and the dash unit. Once I took the fibreboard off I found a lot of mould behind where it had been. So that all got scrubbed before the replacement board went in.
Finally
Another trick for getting into those hard-to-reach places; leave a pot of vinegar uncovered in the car on a hot day. Park in the sunlight and roll up all the windows. You’ll basically create a sauna of vinegar that will kill any remaining mould spores.
Just make sure that you stand back when you open the door, you don’t want a faceful of gaseous acetic acid. Trust me. Your eyes would burn, your nose would burn, your throat would burn. You would cough and cry.
Wait, what about the cat litter?
Ah yes, we mustn’t forget the cat litter. The purpose, you’ll remember, was to absorb moisture. I didn’t want to fight about getting damp cat litter back out of my carpet, so I used dried baby wipes to make little bags of cat litter that I could dump into damp spots (mainly under the bed). These worked okay; they seemed to absorb a little water, and they were very easy to clean up.
Honestly, not sure I’d recommend the cat litter. Opening windows and doors and just letting it air seemed to work better. And for anyone who doesn’t own a cat, you probably don’t have cat litter laying around. I mean, you might. No judgment. But I didn’t, and I was disappointed by the cost of cat litter. Especially in light of what the cats are going to do to it!
I did get the air-freshener-scented cat litter though. It was the same cost as unscented, and now my van smells ‘meadow fresh’.
