[Vulgalour]

Had about 8" of snow here now over the last few days, even had a little thundersnow last night.
20180301-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

20180301-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

[ROVER Cabby]

You need to paint the pillars and roof white now.

[Vulgalour]

But then it'll look like a jam sandwich.

[ROVER Cabby]

Or just a massive red go faster stripe, go thicker stripe !

[Vulgalour]

Everything has fallen into place rather neatly at the moment. The Princess is presently my daily driver, I'll be booking the MoT soon. The Rover is all lined up for a fresh interior and that rear arch to be repaired.

Next weekend I'll be off to collect the last few items I need to turn the saloon seat into a rear hatchback seat, which includes all the various latches and trim pieces that weren't fitted to the saloon. I'm looking forward to this, it should be a fun job. I've got some dye for the spare grey carpet so that will be going burgundy to fit with the toned-down factory look I want inside the car. The new seats and door cards are from a slightly higher trim level than the SLi, the SEi, so they have additional adjustment on the seats, better side bolsters, half-leather and a harder wearing cloth than the SLi velour. They're black at first glance, but the cloth sections have a subtle burgundy/purple/claret fleck in them that I'm hoping the redyed carpet will pick up to help it match in with the wood and orangey-red dash illumination. Subtle isn't perhaps what's expected given the outside, but it's what I want, and I don't want the interior to be a black hole. Doing the orange carpet in the Princess proved nicely to me that a black interior is fine providing the carpet isn't also black.

Now, fitting this interior could be done without taking the Rover off the road but I've decided that I'm actually going to do just that. I want to stagger the MoTs and the Princess is capable of being my daily at the moment so I'm going to take the risk and go down to just one car for a bit, allbeit it the one car I have with an attitude problem. This means I can strip out the Rover properly, do the minor modifications of trim etc. in the back for the rear seat, repair the rusty rear arch and refit everything all in one go. The Rover doesn't always play nice when you disconnect the battery so it's best to avoid doing it, this way I should only have to disconnect and reconnect once to get all this work done and when I'm finished it will leave me with a car that technically doesn't need anything else doing at all which puts me in the best place for an MoT. It also means if I do need to go as far as dropping the petrol tank for any reason, I'll have the luxury of time and space to do that. An added bonus will be not paying the small amount of tax I do for the Rover for a couple of months while I build up that staggered MoT gap I want.

Hopefully this plan doesn't end in disaster with me stranded at home with a broken Princess again.

[ROVER Cabby]

I would stagger them mate, good idea, March, June, Sep would be good, 3 month gaps and warm weather to do works on them.

[Vulgalour]

I have a cold, again, because of this sodding winter. That meant we had to cancel our plans for picking the Rover carcass for the few bits I need but it's okay, it turns out the weather would have cancelled it for us anyway.
20180317-01 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

I don't feel too bad about being ill because of that, there's no way any of us wanted to do anything outdoors in that weather, even if well. Previously, I'd bought some more of the Simply Spray dye I used to refresh the Princess' carpet because I didn't want a dark grey carpet in the Rover. Instead, I wanted a dark red carpet. Now, I'm aware that dye usually has to go over a lighter colour and I was taking a risk by using a hue that was about in the same place as the old colour. There was a very good chance this wouldn't work, but there was realy only one way to find out. First coat always goes on alarmingly bright and certainly more purple than I fancied.
20180317-02 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

Second and third coats mellowed out considerably and once dry it was exactly the colour I wanted. Looks a little brown here because of the odd lighting in that room.
20180317-03 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

The reason for this colour change is partly personal taste, but mostly to match the new interior that I'd picked up from fellow R8 club member, who has an absolutely spotless R8 Tourer in Nightfire Red (sadly too dark to get a photo when I visited to collect the interior). I do really like the interior already in my car, and it's in reasonable shape. The interior I wanted was either the one with red inserts that only seemed to come in the Cabriolet or the half leather with black chevron cloth. Happily, I got the latter in the form of all the seats and door cards. They are for a hatchback rather than a saloon, this is actually also what I wanted since I'm converting my saloon to folding rear seats using hatchback parts that pretty much bolt straight in since the body tubs are essentially the same.
20180317-04 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

I wanted it to also look factory inside without being a factory option, so that's why the burgundy carpet. It picks up the colour fleck (burgundy, blue, and green) in the seats. It's really subtle and nobody would normally notice. Generally, if you can pick up a small detail like this and incorporate it into a personalised interior, it doesn't look personalised for some reason. Instead it ends up looking like a factory option. It also looks less cheap than if you had a plain black carpet with plain black seats. There's probably some sort of colour theory thing about this that explains just why it is.
20180317-05 by Angyl Roper, on Flickr

[27matt]

That carpet came out really well! I might have to try the same on the one in the Mini as I'm not particularly happy with with the colour.

[Johnny 216GSi]

You are having fantastic success with that dye. As I mentioned before, I had rotten luck dying the car mats.

Now I think about it more, my experience has been coloured (pun intended) by the very thin and tight pile on the car mats. It wasn't really pile at all. Now I realise a carpet with a genuine pile would have dyed, seeing the results you're getting.

I really want to see the interior with the burgundy carpet in place. A bit of the plushest 800 series look can't miss...

[Vulgalour]

It surprised me, this one, I expected it to be quite dull given the base colour. Instead it turned out as it's labelled on the tin. I'm a total convert to it, brilliant stuff and a great way to save cash on sprucing up or customising an interior. I'll have to try it on some thicker, finer pile carpet at some point and see if the results vary. The carpet I've been using has been fairly forgiving. I'm in two minds about the boot trim because if I do that I have to do the back of the back seat to match it all. Something for another day that one I suppose.

Sunday, hopefully, we're going to get the last bits I need to fit the rear seat. We shall be at the mercy of the weather so here's hoping for a spring day rather than yet another winter day.