Our lovely new seat covers for the camper van arrived this morning.
They were an absolute bargain on eBay.
I was beside myself with the excitement of them, and showed Lucy, who had a day off.
She looked at them with undisguised horror, and said that they were a new low in my absence of taste.
I was disappointed to hear that, because I had tried hard to make them tasteful, and had rejected the leopard-skin print ones for that very reason. These are cheetah-skin fake fur, which is obviously far more discreetly upmarket.
Mark does not mind what I like and so hardly objected at all, apart from rejecting the tiger-skin ones for the same reason as the leopard-skin. Hence we have got cheetah-skin, and they are beautiful, warm and golden and fluffy and bright.
Obviously I wanted to fit them straight away, except I couldn’t because we weren’t ready to do anything as exciting as that.
We dashed over to the farm anyway, and made a determined start.
We cut and stuck the last of the sticky foam on to the cab floor. I was covered in this by the time we finished, it sticks like a very sticky thing and mostly it stuck to me. Also I managed to get covered in some glue from the hole where Mark filled in around the new heater pipes. Inconveniently this was all over my arm, and made my sleeve stick to it. This is really irritating in a repeatedly bothersome sort of way, it is very tiresome to have to keep painfully unpeeling your clothes from the bits of you to which they have adhered whilst you were distracted.
Mark laughed a great deal at my general incompetence until it started to inconvenience him, and he dispatched me to clean the seats which were to go in. One needed a great deal of cleaning, it was the driver’s seat out of the donor taxi. Regular readers might remember that this once belonged to the local kebab house who used it as a delivery vehicle.
It was vile.
If they had been frying kebabs on the engine and then wiping them all over the seat before they sat on it, it could not have been worse.
I scrubbed and scrubbed with a mixture of washing up liquid, disinfectant, and dog-wee-banishing shampoo, and it was still horrid.
We are never going to have a takeaway kebab ever again.
In the end I managed to turn it from black back to a recognisable shade of blue, and Mark looked at it and said that it would do. We left it outside to dry in the sun and wind, whilst we stuck the underlay to the cab floor, and then the carpet.
Mark did the carpet which involved a great deal of precision fiddling. I did the underlay, which did not matter at all, even if I cut it wrong, which I did, several times, and had to fill in the corners with oddly-shaped left over bits.
In the end it was done, and we could turn our attention to the seats.
They had been reconstructed from several bits of different seats, and I helped Mark bolt them together. Then I put the new seat covers on whilst he bolted the runners into the holes in the cab floor.
It was jolly fiddly but as you can see they looked perfect.
We put them into the cab and Mark tightened all of the bolts until we had got a perfectly perfect cab, full of cheetah-skin seats and brown suede and a brand new grey offcut carpet.
I could have sighed with happiness. I even had a little sit on the seats, but Mark made me get off again because my trousers were filthy. This was because I had been doing some in between painting, and for that I sit on a specially piled up heap of old truck wheels, which is comfortable but grubby.
The seats are magnificent. They twirl round in order that you can talk to people who are behind you. Rarely have I been so very pleased at an innovation to my life. It is like having a whole new room on the front of the van.
Oh goodness, we are so close to being done. Obviously there are a thousand more things to so, but soon, very soon, we could get an MOT.
It has been the most fantastic adventure.
Not long now.
