How To Properly Wash Your Car...Sort Of

Step 1: Acquire Beer

This is arguably the most important step in washing your car, because like paint, it’s all in the preparation. Now depending on your car, your choice in beer will vary because your choice directly reflects the end result. You want a really good beer to start with, and then move onto a lesser beer.

Optional Step: Accidentally grab 7oz bottles, this will make sure your neighbors think your are an alcoholic.

Step 2: Acquire Wash Tools

If you want to wash your car and achieve a good result, you are going to need to use the right tools. If you’re like me, you’re on a budget, and your tools reflect that. Your going to want to get two large buckets. Stealing them is your best choice as it saves about six dollars but if you want to keep your job, you’ll have to buy them. Pick out your favorite soap, some are better than others. Some more sudsy, some PH balanced, some floral scented, mine was a year old and I found it in my room. You will need a wash mit and you definitely want to go for microfiber, it’s softer and less likely to put even more microscratches into your car. You are going to want to find a chamois to, attempt, to keep your car from becoming water-spot central when you’ve finished cleaning it. And like wine, the older the chamois the better, the one pictured is older than I am. Oh also, if you can, wash your car in the shade or late in the day, it makes keeping the car damp easier. Lastly, you will need a grate of some sort to try to pull the bits of dirt and particulate from your wash mit. I had a small grill grate which I used before but I couldn’t find it. I saw a tennis racket in my garage and figured I would try it, suprisingly, it works pretty good!

Step 3: Acquire Tunes

The best way to set a good tone for washing a car is to have good music to wash to. Something which has a good range of sound is preffered. You also get bonus points if it’s big, black, and recalled for being a potential fire hazard. Now for choice of music, you don’t want anything too aggressive nor too soft. A really good choice is a Beatles playlist. Mix it in with a little of The Who, and the occasional Doors song really sets you up for a good wash.

Optional Step: Fight with the speaker for 30 minutes because it refuses to connect to your phone. Get angry, calm down, and finish your first beer with your cat, because she understands why your so upset.

Step 4: Fill Buckets

This step is pretty simple, rinse your buckets out, spray the cobwebs off your tennis racket, fill the rinse bucket and throw the racket in there. Then, dump a considerable amount of soap in your wash bucket, enough that you think it will make for a cool sudsy Instagram picture, but know that it really won’t. Spray enough water in there to make sure that it’s mixed and move on to the next step.

Step 5: Pre-Rinse Car

In this step you want to just spray down your whole car to let any loose dirt run off the car and try to loosen up anything that’s really sticking to the car. Hit areas with bugs and road grime again and at an angle to break the hard bits off the car and expose the part in contact with the paint. Feel bad looking at the amount of condensation in the driver side headlight. Then grab another beer while the car soaks for a minute.

Step 6: Wash Panel By Panel

You are going to want to wash the car top-down. Start with the roof, move to the hood and trunk because they are going to be the cleanest and you don’t want to run dirty water across a clean panel. What I also do, like many others, save the lower third of the car for last, this is going to be the dirtiest area and you don’t want to drag anything which slips past your tennis racket onto the parts of the car you and others will notice. Also between panels, keep the car wet, and rinse your mit against the tennis racket before moving into the wash bucket.

Step 7: The Nasty Stuff

That lower third I mentioned is gonna be really nasty, this is where the beer becomes as I mentioned, one of the most important steps. You are going to have to get kind of mean to your paint to get this stuff off your paint. This area takes a beating on the road and has to take a beating to clean it up. Microscratches are unavoidable and the beer helps you accept that. Your also going to find little bits which won’t come off with the mit, so like with scabs, it won’t get better unless you pick at it. You will carefully take your fingernail across the imperfection like a razor on your face. Do it right and your car looks significantly better, do it badly, and you look like someone got Edward Scissorhands plastered and let him wash your car. Your lower panels should come out looking something like this.

Step 8: Rinse and Chamois

After having finished with washing all the panels, give the car another good rinse to take any remaining soap off the car, and prepare to chamois. You want to get the chamois wet and then rinse it out so it is soft and won’t damage your paint. Since you have been drinking throughout this process, you’ve mis-stepped and didn’t do the hot side of the car first. So after doing to the hood, the driver’s side had already begun to form water spots. I made an attempt to take some of them off with the chamois wet, but with the double bubble side panels of this car, these are a pain to keep from getting streaky with using a chamois. When you’ve finished chamois-ing the car, take a second to appreciate your car being mostly clean, because you know it’s going to rain in two days.

Optional Step: Wash Wheels

If you really want to you can wash your wheels, I would get a third bucket with suds in it and a soft plastic brush. Or, ignore your wheels because they are ugly and you’re getting new tires put on better wheels within two weeks.

And that’s it! How to wash your car and get marginally better results than someone who doesn’t care about their car! I hope you’ve enjoyed my little step by step tutorial, and take it easy.