After drinking half the Gulf of Mexico on a day trip to the beach last week one of my pups subsequently barfed most of it back up in the X5 on the drive home. This wasn't anywhere near the first time for this either so after wasting too much time trying to clean it up with rags, I broke down and ordered a portable Bissell carpet cleaner.
I spend this morning with the X5 and the new machine cleaning 21 years worth of crap out of the carpets. Judging by the final product, and the crap that was in the collection container when finished, I can say it worked better than I had hoped (given its reasonably small size). A bit more suction would be nice as I judged about 25% of the detergent/water I sprayed into the carpet, stayed in the carpet. A crevice tool with a brush would be nice too, but beyond those quibbles I'm happy with it. Bonus: the rear-seat middle seatbelt decided to start working again, after being locked for the last 10 years.
I'm on the cusp of finally finishing a few upgrades that have been in limbo for quite some time.
-The front seats I've got out for new foam and upholstery may finally be close to completion, after an endless, and ultimately fruitless wait for an OE leather match. The leather company my upholstery shop uses couldn't source the OE dye so I picked another brown, that frankly looks like the same shade and they can provide. I'll get the rear seats cleaned and color dyed if the new front leather is significantly off. The rear seat leather is fine, and ultimately I'll have the center sections of the rear seats redone with the uberkaro fabric as well.
- I'm also ready to buy the new amp, which will allow me to finally finish my sound system upgrade. The Kicker speakers have been installed in the OE enclosures I picked up on Ebay for cheap and I just need to break out the soldering iron and bridge the OE tabs on the enclosures to the input tabs on the speakers. I'm planning on using the OE speaker wires, connected to the new amp, and just plug the OE plug into the speaker enclosure.
I ran RCA cable in the roof when the liner was out last year and have a 10" Kicker powered sub in the right cubby working great, connected directly to the Kenwood head unit via RCAs. The new system will have 6.5" two way Kickers for the rear doors (mids on upper doors will be inoperative) and 6.5" Kicker components for the fronts. The tweeters will go in the side view mirror positions (I hope), which will make for much easier wiring and placement of the crossovers inside the door. Assuming the tweeters fit in the sideview mirror positions without much drama, then I'll disable the dashboard speakers.