A Hard Lesson

We sure wish we had taken before and after pictures of this one!!

The parking outside our home is limited due to neighbors' cars and a fire hydrant, so we are forced to park in a very specific spot - right in front of our yard. This was working great for us until our landlord sent someone out to turn on our sprinkler system a couple months ago. The maintenance man turned them on, but did so without checking the sprinkler pattern or schedule, so a very powerful sprinkler head drenches our Jeep from top to bottom for almost an hour every other day at various hours. It turns out our water is very, very hard, so within a few days our car was covered in hard water deposits.

The hard lesson we learned.... if this happens, wash your car before the hot sun has a chance to 'bake' the deposits onto your car. Most car care professionals will say to wash it within 24 hours. We waited a couple weeks while the problem got worse and worse... not good. We did some online research on how to remove them from our car and we found a great website loaded with tips:
http://www.autopia-carcare.com/how-to.html

First we had to thoroughly wash the car, rinse it, wash/scrub every inch of it with full strength white vinegar (imagine doing this one bit at a time, using a whole gallon of vinegar and rinsing every 60 seconds), wash with car shampoo, rinse again, dry the car, then wax and buff. The hard water deposits were etched into our paint so badly that it took almost 5 hours with both Travis and I working on it until we had finished. Sadly, it didn't occur to us to put on some sunscreen first so we look like lobsters today (lobsters with very sore arms).

Our car looks a LOT better, but even all that vinegar wasn't enough to remove the deposits from the windows, and we can tell we're going to have to do some more work on a few trouble areas. We wanted to share this experience with our family and friends so hopefully you won't have this happen to you. Oy, oy, oy!!!!