The cab carpets in the motorhome had faded to a dirty, brown/pink in the 20 years since they were installed, and we were considering a complete carpet swap. However, I thought of using the valeter's trick of spraying them with the right colour matt paint. Hay was dubious, but I assured her it would work perfectly.
In cars, it's sometimes extremely difficult to clean the carpets thoroughly. The best way is to use a jet wash in the footwells and then use a powerful (3,000W) wet and dry vacuum cleaner to vacuum away the dirty water. However, this doesn't always produce the desired result, and sometimes you simply don't want to wet the inside of the car anyway, or it's ingrained, short pet hair or short pieces of dried grass that refuse to budge. That's where a can of matt black spray paint comes in handy - but only on black carpets, or so I thought.
I used an Android App that grabs the colour of anything you point to camera at and it returns the exact RAL colour. I pointed it at the carpet in the back of the van, which hasn't faded, and it returned RAL 3003 - Ruby Red. A quick search on Google produced a company that makes up spray paints to whatever RAL number you like. £21 was duly spent on two 400ml cans and I completed the transformation of the front carpet yesterday, not even using a full can.
You have to be careful to use gentle wafts of spray paint, rather than blobbing it on, allowing each waft to dry, which happens quickly, before the next application. The paint aerosols penetrate between the carpet fibres and colour it beautifully and is permanent.
As you can see from the photo above, it worked brilliantly.
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