Home » I Accidentally Turned My Car Into A Moldy Superfund Site. Here’s How I Fixed It

I Accidentally Turned My Car Into A Moldy Superfund Site. Here’s How I Fixed It

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Ah, summer’s finally in the air. That means the toys that I put away for the winter can finally come out to play. Apparently, it also means mistakes I made last year come back to haunt me. I accidentally turned my beloved 2005 Smart Fortwo into a horrible Superfund site of moldy disaster. Here is how I got rid of a ton of forbidden polka dots from my interior.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself cracking open my mini warehouse with the goal of rearranging the vehicles inside. It’s not very wide, but it goes quite deep. Currently, there are six cars, three motorcycles, and too many sets of wheels inside. I ran some calculations and discovered that if I line the cars up just right, I could fit a seventh car. Perfect! I just had to move every car in the unit.

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Mercedes Streeter

This process actually went pretty well, at first. Even the hardest car to move in the unit–a first-generation Audi TT with a VIN branded as stolen–was able to be bump-started thanks to my workhorse Volkswagen Touareg VR6. This car has a bad starter that I’ve yet to replace. Last year, my neighbor tried to steal it to feed his drug addiction. The bad starter meant that he couldn’t get it going. Instead, he successfully broke into the glovebox and jacked the car’s title and a cheap Gambler 500 ring. Yeah, a hard lesson was learned that day. Don’t leave titles in cars, kids!

Anyway, the “stolen” TT roared to life with a Touareg tug and I moved it to one of my other storage sites. Everything else moved out easily and it wasn’t long until we had just one car to go: my 2005 Smart Fortwo Passion Coupe.

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Guess which one is the 2005? Credit: Mercedes Streeter

I got this car for free in 2017 when its first owner could no longer register it in his home state. These first-generation cars were never officially sold in the United States. They are among the few cars exempt from the infamous 25-year import rule so long as it’s converted to meet FMVSS. However, while this car is legal on the federal level, not all states will register it. Some state DMVs simply won’t be able to find this car in their systems. That was the issue faced by the first owner, and after fighting Colorado for several years he just gave up and gave the car away. Now it’s in my hands.

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I parked the car right before the first snow of winter 2021. This warehouse rearranging day would have been the first day I drove the car this year. But there was a big, toxic problem:

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Mercedes Streeter

Yuck! Your eyes don’t deceive you, that’s a ton of mold just growing on everything. I ran full-speed and in full shock out of the unit. All of my other cars were shiny and clean, so that was not what I expected.

Thankfully, my fiancée, Sheryl, isn’t just an experienced lawyer but someone who has had to remediate mold more times than she can remember. Her years of helping rental tenants and growing up on a farm are about to help me big time.

Sheryl’s plan involves multiple prongs. The first involves this Bissell Little Green Pro cleaning machine. It injects searing hot water (or a chemical mix) into the surface that you’re cleaning and uses both brushing action and vacuum to get the job done. She combined it with RMR-86 Pro mold remover. The jug of RMR contains one of the active chemicals of bleach, among other harsh stuff.

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Mercedes Streeter

We also picked up PPE, gloves, and an interior cleaner for non-porous surfaces. Mold wasn’t covering everything, but we were cleaning everything in that interior, anyway.

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Sheryl got to work before I could take a true “before” picture, but here is what the situation looked like after she had spent just a few minutes getting into the passenger seat.

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Mercedes Streeter

The passenger seat looked only slightly less moldy than the driver unit over there.

And check out the mold just dangling off of the steering wheel!

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Mercedes Streeter

Sheryl made somewhat short work of the mold on the passenger seat. It took several passes and lots of scrubbing, but it took give or take an hour for her to be satisfied with the job.

Take a look! The seat is now even cleaner than it was than before it was parked.

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Mercedes Streeter

Next came the driver seat, and she said that the growth on it was much worse. The seat bottom in particular required a lot of scrubbing to get through. However, after about two hours even it, too, looked extremely clean.

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Mercedes Streeter

Next came the dashboard, carpeting, and that horrifying steering wheel. One neat thing about a Smart is that the carpet is easy to pull up. We found that the mold didn’t get too deep into the carpet foam. Sheryl estimates that this is about two, maybe three months of growth. That would make sense as three months ago we were still dealing with below freezing temps in my area.

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Mercedes Streeter

Before long we had gone through the entire car. The entire gallon of the chemical mix was used up, as well as three gallons of water. But the result was fantastic. The car has never looked cleaner than this inside. Sheryl even managed to put a dent in the giant oil stain on the driver seat. We also gave the HVAC system a good cleaning and just disposed of the floor mats. Those weren’t even worth saving.

With the first treatment done we decided to move the car to one of my outdoor parking areas. There, the interior can dry out under the hot summer sun.

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Mercedes Streeter

These older Smarts have clear glass roofs that turn the interior into an oven. That’s bad when you’re trying to keep cool in the summer, but perfect for killing stuff.

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So, how did this even happen in the first place? When I saw the mold on the seats it hit me that I made a terrible mistake. Last summer I parked the car outside with a car cover on it. The car cover was a little too big, so I thought that I’d make it fit better by closing some of it up in the doors. For some odd reason I thought that this would work. Instead, water trickled in and pooled up in the parts of the cover that was inside of the car.

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Mercedes Streeter

When I opened the doors to take the car cover off? Oh, gallons of water spilled in. And yet, it never crossed my mind to dry out the interior.

Making matters only worse is the fact that my mini warehouse sits 500 feet some a huge lake, so it’s always humid in there. Yep, a dehumidifier is also on my list!

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Mercedes Streeter

Sheryl plans on hitting the car with a second and a third treatment, then finishing it off by putting an ozone generator in there for a few hours. Best of all, we’re going to be getting this done for about $300, far less than even the cheapest quote we got from a professional. More work is needed to be done. But for now, it’s nice not to have the car looking like a scene from a horror movie.

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Liam Greenwood
Liam Greenwood
2 years ago

Wow! She’s a keeper 🙂

Cheap Bastard
Cheap Bastard
2 years ago

Other safer-than-bleach things you might try are Borax/boric acid, vinegar, isopropyl alcohol, baking soda, and bleach-less hot water. Maybe clean with a hot solution of vinegar and IPA with a final rinse containing baking soda and borax. The baking soda will nullify the acidity of the vinegar. Both baking soda and borax are anti-fungal agents and odor reducers too. I’ve used all these to clean carpets and they work fairly well.

cgeorgemo70
cgeorgemo70
2 years ago
Reply to  Cheap Bastard

You use beer and vinegar to clean stuff?

Mike Vorland
Mike Vorland
2 years ago
Reply to  cgeorgemo70

Not sure about the vinegar but it would take me a few beers to approach that level of mold cleanup!

Bob Jablonski
Bob Jablonski
2 years ago

Thought at first why was Jason redoing his Scion xB piece on mold

Delta_Arturo
Delta_Arturo
2 years ago

You were very lucky to find your partner, in my case my ex-wife would not have helped me even if she needed me to take her somewhere, on the contrary she would have been angry with me.

Good to have you both here

Jared Lokay
Jared Lokay
2 years ago

Having detail experience, I think one step not done would be to turn on the vents at high speed and grab a can of Lysol Disinfectant. Go to the cabin air intake and spray away. Use the entire can. You need to kill the mold/mildew in the vents as well. Switch from floor to center to windshield to ensure all vent paths are covered. You can even take that bleach cleaner and pour a cup of it into a pie dish and let it sit a couple of days with the windows up. Mold spores release into the air when they come into contact with bleach (bathroom tip, wet your tile and grout with water before using bleach products to clean mold…otherwise it comes back faster than you would expect). Letting the bleach evaporate into the vehicle will kill off more unseen mold spores.

Chris Trapp
Chris Trapp
2 years ago

The newest team member is the most prolific writer it seems!

Mold is nightmare fuel for me. I hate ambient smells, especially in cars. My brother had really sensitive skin when he was young, so scented anything was basically verboten in my house growing up. Somehow my brain just cannot handle or appreciate smells that aren’t food. I literally cannot sit in an air cooled VW because they all smell like a box of crayons and I get a headache.

Tommy Helios
Tommy Helios
2 years ago
Reply to  Chris Trapp

Air-cooled vws smell like oil leaks. It is Mk4 water-cooled vws that smell like crayons.

Fe2 O3
Fe2 O3
2 years ago

Those pictures turned my stomach. Gross. Glad you got it cleaned… did you get under the seats too? What does it smell like in there now?

Fe2 O3
Fe2 O3
2 years ago
Reply to  Fe2 O3

Also… “It’s not very wide, but it goes quite deep”

Giggity

Boulevard_Yachtsman
Boulevard_Yachtsman
2 years ago

Pardon my spontaneous nasal discharge, just looking at the before-pic has me reaching for anything to mop up a runny nose. I just finished a mold-cleaning project as part of bringing my neighbor’s ’64 Fleetwood back to life, but that had been sitting for 20 years. He thought rust had crept up around the passenger side of the front seat, but wondered why it was all over the door-card and door-jamb windlace as well. I commenced to soaking, spraying, and scrubbing the best I could without causing damage to some of the delicate fabrics and it’s much better now. Granted, if a person looks close they can see stained areas, but for the most part it just looks like something that’s been okay-preserved from the era. Still, ick.

Sid Bridge
Sid Bridge
2 years ago

This article is going to save my butt some day soon, given how much the T-Tops in my Firebird like to deposit puddles on the driver’s seat. I love my 3rd Gen, but they did a crap job fitting those t-tops.

Jared Lokay
Jared Lokay
2 years ago
Reply to  Sid Bridge

Don’t use bleach if the seat covers are not polyester or nonorganic…otherwise you may end up changing the color. Always test in an inconspicuous spot first.

Mr.Asa
Mr.Asa
2 years ago

I thought this was gonna be about Torch’s Scion that he recently did this to (unless I’m misremembering something again)

Douglas Lain
Douglas Lain
2 years ago

MARRY. THAT. WOMAN!

A F
A F
2 years ago

Road trip!

Don’t worry. We’ll bring our own cake.

William Domer
William Domer
2 years ago

Wow, a great venue. I want to know how you found a mini warehouse that will take that many cars. The ones around here are stupidly expensive and you can only fit one toy in each. Jeez it would be cheaper to finance a 3 car garage but the Glendale building inspector police won’t allow it. My oldest brother, unfortunately deceased too early, was an aeronautical engineer at United Technologies and would come ‘home’ to Wisconsin for the EAA and the sadistic ritual of a golf outing with the siblings. The best part was the surprise airplane guest and the warbirds section. He was enamored of the PW rotary engines, as that was where his first job was. The giant C3, the Concorde, some crazy airbus cargo plane. Of course it was usually so hot that people dropped like flies from heat stroke, but the busiest airport on the planet for 1 week only. October is a great choice. Changing colors and modifying temperatures, I’m happy for you both.

Josh Ashby
Josh Ashby
2 years ago

Awesome idea for a wedding location.

MP81
MP81
2 years ago

I can *smell* that picture.

Ew.

Cheap Bastard
Cheap Bastard
2 years ago

“The jug of RMR contains one of the active chemicals of bleach, among other harsh stuff.”

Oh dear! Here’s what the SDS for RMR 86 pro has to say:

Chemical name: Sodium hypochlorite
CAS: 7681-52-9 4-6
Weight 4-6%

Also has a “Proprietary Surfactant “.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0745/8297/files/RMR-86_PRO_SDS.pdf?v=1587484974

So basically half strength pool chlorine and a bit of detergent.

BTW regular laundry bleach is about 2.7% so this stuff is twice as strong as laundry bleach. The directions even stipulate: “Do not apply RMR-86 PRO to fabrics”. I’m surprised you didn’t bleach the crap out of those seats.

https://www.rmrsolutions.com/products/rmr-86-pro?variant=48382662863

Bleach is terrible for metals, even stainless steel. That poor Bissel may be toast. Next time I suggest a shop wet/dry vac with a large inline water trap, perhaps cobbled together from an old paint buckets.

You might have been better off just taking the seats out and leaving them in the sun. UV is a good mold killer too.

Michael Beranek
Michael Beranek
2 years ago

Mercedes, I always thought your photos looked oddly familiar and I finally figured out why. You’re my neighbor!
Don’t worry, I’m not a stalker, I just noticed that you live by-
An auto parts plant that a bunch of my buddies worked at back in the day
The hospital my dad was in after his stroke
The former used car dealer where I bought my Volvo
The former Polish restaurant where my HS grad party was
No wonder everything looked so familiar.

Ben Trueblood
Ben Trueblood
2 years ago

Ugh. I sold my old F150, at least in part because it sat idle too much, and would grow mold inside also. Same techniques to remove it (we have one of those Bissels from when we had two pet cats, and kept it because we sometimes host guest cats for others).

As others have said, glad to see you here and writing, you have a lot of cool projects going on. Now y’all just need to convince Tom McParland…

IanGTCS
IanGTCS
2 years ago

When I park my (mostly) summer car for the winter I let it run/take a drive with the heat cranked and the AC on to help dry out any moisture in the car. Then I pour flower dessicant stuff from the craft store into cheap dollar store aluminium pans and leave it in the car and trunk. Same idea as damp rid but cheaper. Seems to work well.

Glad you got it cleaned up. My wife jokes that the best gift she ever got me was a carper cleaner based on how much I use it. Such a useful thing to have around.

Cheap Bastard
Cheap Bastard
2 years ago
Reply to  IanGTCS

“My wife jokes that the best gift she ever got me was a carper cleaner based on how much I use it. Such a useful thing to have around.”

For those without a carpet cleaner or room for one a shop wet/dry vac can work wonders too, especially as a spot cleaner.

JohnTaurus
JohnTaurus
2 years ago

The same thing happened to me once, only I got it before the mold did.

I was working on a car and had left a cloth (a thin towel if I recall) shut in the door and a thunderstorm came up unexpectedly. I can only guess that it acted like a wick, as it basically transfered a whole shit ton of water into the car. I even had to pull the carpet to get all the water out. Hell I think I could have left the door wide open and less water would have gotten in! It was like a funnel.

Rollin Hand
Rollin Hand
2 years ago
Reply to  JohnTaurus

My dad once decided that the best way to keep the sun out of the interior of his beloved 1988 Country Squire (carbureted 351! In 1988!) was to put an old bedsheet across the windshield and hold it on by closing the doors on it.

Then it rained.

The next time I tried to open it, the doors were full of water. As the drains were blocked, it sounded like it had a couple of half-empty metal jerry cans for doors.

The smell in that car only got funkier from there.

JohnTaurus
JohnTaurus
2 years ago
Reply to  Rollin Hand

I bet so! But, I have done something similar in winter to keep frost off the windshield. I don’t tuck it in the doors, I put the wipers halfway up and put the sheet or towel under that. Works pretty good.

Keep in mind, I use it just for keeping frost off, I doubt it works for heavy snow!

Warlockbob
Warlockbob
2 years ago

2015 Smart ForTwo owner in the “always sunny” PNW here! Mold in Smarts seems to be an endemic problem. I’ve got about 4 dehumidifier bags stashed in various spots inside the car, and have definitely had to do the bleach/mold removal process once or twice already. Thankfully not as bad as yours, but still a total hassle to deal with!

JohnTaurus
JohnTaurus
2 years ago
Reply to  Warlockbob

I had issues with moisture on many of the clunkers I bought up there. I’d go to RV stores and get their dehumidifing products.

I’d buy cars for $35 at abandoned vehicle auctions north of Seattle, and drive the thing home. Crazy.

Warlockbob
Warlockbob
2 years ago
Reply to  JohnTaurus

Oh yeah, that’s a bit rough. As bad as my allergies are, I keep a 3M P99 respirator in my daily driver just in case I’m in a situation like that. Oof.

Scottingham
Scottingham
2 years ago

The sheer amount of quality content you have written for this site in such a short period of time is an indictment of how much you were held back previously.

I’m so happy you made it over here!

On topic: I buy 50lb bags of calcium chlorite and use that in as damp-rid refills for my cars in humid spots. It’s the same chemical that’s in damp-rid but 100x cheaper than their refills.

Cheap Bastard
Cheap Bastard
2 years ago
Reply to  Scottingham

“On topic: I buy 50lb bags of calcium chlorite and use that in as damp-rid refills for my cars in humid spots. It’s the same chemical that’s in damp-rid but 100x cheaper than their refills.”

Great tip, thanks!

Scottingham
Scottingham
2 years ago
Reply to  Scottingham

Edit:

I meant Calcium Chloride! You can get it for cheap in bulk marketed as ice melt.

The damp-rid containers are good to buy for their structure. Once through the original stuff, refill as needed with scoops of the CaCl2.

cgeorgemo70
cgeorgemo70
2 years ago
Reply to  Scottingham

The ingredient in Damp-rid is Calcium Chloride not Calcium Chlorite.

cgeorgemo70
cgeorgemo70
2 years ago
Reply to  cgeorgemo70

Edit I saw your edit after my post.

We really need a delete or edit option.

Baron Usurper
Baron Usurper
2 years ago

Mercedes! LFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can officially ditch the other site. Praise be to our holy wrenching trinity.

Jonathan Hendry
Jonathan Hendry
2 years ago

Might want to hang a bag of DampRid in each of the cars you have in storage. It pulls moisture out of the air and traps it.

Michael Beranek
Michael Beranek
2 years ago

^^THIS^^

Tommy Helios
Tommy Helios
2 years ago

Mostly used for things that go in storage for 6 months out of the year like boats or RVs but it is a godsend. Dammit, now I am thinking about my boat (which has been in my family since I was born) which I need to get running and in the water. Anyone near Cleveland wanna come help me wrench?

John M
John M
2 years ago

Agreed – the DampRid is a huge help to keep the mold from coming back after you get it cleaned up.

My spouse’s 07 Fit had white mold all over the carpet from water leaking from the front windows and rear hatch. I’m lucky we spotted the mold quickly so it wasn’t as bad as your Smart, but the Fit’s parked outside so while I was finding and fixing all the leaks I would keep a bucket of DampRid in the car and it prevented more mold from growing. I would just suggest putting the bucket in an obvious spot like the driver’s seat because once I forgot to take it out before running an errand and then had to clean up a puddle of goop and crystals when it fell over in the passenger footwell.

Tristan Higginson
Tristan Higginson
2 years ago

The Autopian, with all you favorite writers in once place!
David Trusty
Jason Torchlampsky
Moldcedes Streeter

Col Lingus
Col Lingus
2 years ago

Jesus what a mess. My head is hurting and major sinus issues kicking in now. And I am not within 800 miles of this thing.

Detroit-Lightning
Detroit-Lightning
2 years ago

Was excited to click on this as it legit could have been written by David, Torch, or Mercedes!

J Smith
J Smith
2 years ago

Mold is just the worst. My better half and I just spent the weekend cleaning the interior of her late grandmother’s Buick that’s been sitting in a barn since 2017. Not quite as bad as your little Smart, but pretty yucky none the less. We put a couple of DampRid containers in there to soak up some of the… well, damp.

Paul B
Paul B
2 years ago
Reply to  J Smith

If dust isn’t a problem in your warehouse, leaving the windows open would prevent this.

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