I live in a 23-year-old van that’s really grimy…I found the perfect tool to suck all the dirt out and it’s easy to use
A WOMAN who lives in a tiny van has revealed how she managed to clean it after it built up 23 years of dirt and grime.
Priya Sharma and her partner Sid often use their social media channels to share what it’s really like to live in a small home on wheels.
The pair, who live in Sydney, Australia, bought the van for just £4,568 and while it doesn’t have much storage space, a shower or a toilet – they love it.
One issue, however, is how clean it is as the van is 23 years old and has amassed quite a lot of dirt over the decades.
Tackling the topic in a video, Priya told viewers: “So we live in a van and this van is 23 years old and I have never cleaned the seats.”
She then plugged in a carpet cleaner before adding in a solution and hot water to one compartment.
Moving it into her van, she showed viewers the number of stains that have been left behind by previous owners.
“There are so many stains, I don’t know what they are but I hope this machine is going to get them out,” she said.
Spraying all the seats down, she said her guess was that the key to getting it right would be to cover everything in the solution, allowing it to sit and then hoovering it all up.
She then let it sit for 10 minutes in a bid to let it work its magic.
“This is the moment I’ve literally been waiting for two years and it was disgusting,” she went on.
Zooming in on the head of the hoover, viewers could see the dirty water being pulled out of the seats.
“You can literally see the change in the seat colour,” she went on. “It’s so satisfying”.
Priya then said that all the videos she’d seen about this showed someone going over the same spot until the water came out clean, but this didn’t happen for her – even after 20 minutes.
She began to worry that the seats would never get clean.
“Then I realised the doors were really dirty, so I gave them a spray down,” she continued. “There were spider eggs growing, sorry spiers. We live here, not you.”
She then decided to hoover the passenger seat of the van, which she said was “very nice and clean”.
Priya said it was a very tiring process and took her 90 minutes in total to complete, which included the carpets on the floor and on the doors.
But, it appears her efforts were worth it as the stains disappeared and her seats looked “brand new”.
She then showed off the dirty, brown water left in the second compartment of the carpet cleaner.
“It was such a thick, brown colour,” she said. “But this is so satisfying”.
In the caption, she added: “Worth the 90 minute clean”.
Carpet cleaners can be bought from £60 in the UK from the likes of B&Q and Vax.
People flocked to the comments section to share their thoughts over her cleaning video as one person said: “girl you lived here BEFORE deep cleaning…..?”
“cleaning is very tiring if you only do it once every 20+ years,” a second person argued, to which she responded: “Haha you have a point”.
A third suggested: “You may have to go over the seats again because when they dry water stains can appear,” to which she replied: “Yeah I think I’ll do it once more”.
While a fourth added: “Use the brush on the vacuum to scrub back and forth instead of just vacuuming!”