Getting my van ready for summer!

Spring time is here! The snow has almost completely melted away and it’s time to start doing the jobs to get our cars ready for the summer season. These kinds of jobs mostly include cleaning but also include switching everything over for summer. For some of you this may mean doing a full detail in your driveway or garage, some it might just mean washing the dirt off of the outside. For me it’s half way.

One of the main jobs is to do is changing the tires back over to the summer tires, or in my case to the all-seasons, from the winter tires. This is a job I do in my garage typically, although this year I’m not able to. This is because, when I took them off last fall, I realized that the weights had come off on 3 of the 4 tires. No wonder it had been so bumpy! I had known about one of them and knew I needed to get it rebalanced, but I quickly found out that it was all of them. Right now I’m torn whether to just take them in as loose wheels to get rebalanced and then install them myself or to take them in and then have the shop just put them on my van while it’s in there. I’ll probably just let the shop change them over because it’s hard to find time to do it myself with such a large family! But those summer rims will be dirty, so this leads me into the next job.

One of the other big jobs that needs to get done is the big spring clean. This is a job I really enjoy and could spend many hours doing. I have already taken both my van and our Explorer over to the car wash to clean the outsides, though the van could already use another wash. But the outside is only a small portion of the cleaning we need to do. Anyone with kids can attest to that the inside of your vehicle gets really dirty. I have done a once over with the vacuum already but I need to still do a deep clean with my shop- vac in all of the nooks and crannies to find all of the rocks and wrappers from the winter. Then I also still need to get out my cleaning supplies and do a thorough clean of the inside to get the marks off of the walls, the sticky stuff inside the cup holders and all of the other places that is dirty.

Then there are the seats. The fabric underneath car seats gets really gross and needs to get cleaned periodically. I don’t recommend leaving this area unattended for much more than a few months at a time, especially if you have kids between the ages of 2-6. I found this year that somehow there were stains in the seat right where the car seat sat on the cushion and so I’ll be taking my portable carpet cleaner out there and washing the seat fabric to try and get that out.

Cleaning the car is one of my favourite spring time jobs because I find it really satisfying to see the end result. It’s also a great opportunity to involve your kids in a job. Yes, it won’t go as fast, but you’ll have a great time and make some memories with your family.

What job do you find the most satisfying when getting your car ready for summer?