Car interior cleaning in Medway

What gets into a Medway car

Country parks, beaches and a dog

Medway is the rare borough where a family can do a country park, a beach and a castle in one weekend, and the car carries all three home. Capstone Farm Country Park, 114 hectares of valley between Hempstead and Walderslade, and Riverside Country Park along the Lower Rainham Road are where the mud comes from; the beach at Allhallows and the shore at Upnor are where the sand comes from; and the dog, in most Medway households, comes from everywhere. Then there is winter. From mid October the council grits the main roads and the bus routes, and road salt walks into the car on every pair of shoes, drying to white tide marks on the carpet and the sills that a vacuum alone will not shift.

The Full Interior Detail is built for exactly that. Your washer vacuums the seats, carpets, boot and every gap, then shampoos the fabric and steams it, which lifts the salt marks, the stains and the smells rather than masking them, cleans the plastics and the leather, does the inside glass and finishes with a protectant on the surfaces that take the wear. Pet hair is lifted with the right tools rather than chased around with a hose. The Deluxe Interior is the lighter version for a car that is kept up: a proper vacuum, the plastics wiped and dressed, the glass done.

Done where the car is parked

An interior job needs the doors open and room to work, and that is all. A drive in Rainham or Hempstead is perfect; a kerbside space in Chatham or Gillingham is fine, because your washer parks their own vehicle and the only car that needs to be legally parked is yours; an allocated bay at St Mary's Island works if there is room to open the doors.

When to book it

Winter is interior season

Outside washes follow the weather; inside cleans follow the calendar. In Medway the Full Interior Detail is most booked in three moments: late autumn, once the salt and the wet dog have moved in together; early spring, to lift a winter's worth of tide marks before they set; and the week before a car goes on sale or back to a lease company, when the cabin is the first thing an inspector or a buyer notices. A rainy day is a fine day for it, because the job happens inside the car and the weather cannot stop it.

Allow a couple of hours of drying with the windows cracked after a shampoo and steam, longer in January than in June. If the car is parked in a damp spot, under the trees at Walderslade or facing the river at Strood, book a morning window so it dries through the afternoon. For a car that has been genuinely neglected, with a year of food, sand and dog in it, the Deep Clean goes further still and takes two slots.

Medway cars, and the inside clean that suits each

Medway's 111,458 households are mostly families in houses, two thirds owner occupied and nearly four in ten in terraces, and the cars are family cars: the SUV, the estate, the second hatchback for the commute to Chatham or the station at Rochester. The borough has 1.35 cars a household on the 2021 Census and more than a few dogs to go with them. Here is the inside clean each one needs.

• The family car after the half term: Full Interior Detail, with the seats shampooed and the crumbs gone from every gap.
• The dog's car: Full Interior Detail, with the hair lifted from the boot and the back seat and the smell dealt with rather than covered.
• The commuter car: Deluxe Interior every couple of months, the salt marks lifted before they set.
• A car that smells of damp after a winter facing the estuary: shampoo and steam, then a morning of drying.
• Handing a car back: see the end of lease page, where the inside is half the inspection.

More on this: what an interior deep clean involves and getting dog hair out of a car.