About

Rosa, one van, and a bucket of good soap.

I started Discount Mobile Detailing in my mom's driveway with a pressure washer I bought used off the bulletin board at the feed store, a stack of microfibers I probably paid too much for, and one paying client — my uncle Gil's tired old sedan. He tipped me in a casserole. That was nine years ago.

The "discount" in the name is a little bit of a joke now. When I started, I really was the cheap option — the teenager-with-a-sponge tier, the "I'll come to you because I don't have a shop" tier. I'm still mobile. I still come to you. But the prices have grown up with the work, because the work got better. I kept the name because the regulars kept saying it, and because it reminds me where I started.

What this is

It's me. One person. One van (her name is Pearl, she's a 2012, she idles a little rough on cold mornings). A schedule I keep on paper in a dot-grid notebook because I tried four apps and hated all of them. I detail between four and six cars a week, most of them belonging to people I've been washing for years. I know their garage codes. I know which dogs ride in which backseats. I know that the Hendersons' golden, Biscuit, sheds enough every spring to knit a second Biscuit.

This journal started as a way to answer the same questions I kept getting asked between polishing passes. "Should I wax before winter or after?" "Is that swirl mark fixable?" "What's that pink stuff you're spraying?" So I wrote some of it down. Then I wrote more. Now there are about forty posts, and people I've never met sometimes write to tell me a tip helped. That's nice. That's why I keep going.

What this isn't

It isn't a franchise. It isn't a "fleet." There's no booking widget, no app, no membership tier. If you found this site because a friend mentioned me, say hi through them — that's still how the best clients arrive. I'm currently at capacity, but capacity has a way of shifting when a regular moves away or retires a car, and I keep a short list in the back of the notebook.

A partial list of things I love about this job

• The moment clay goes from tacky to smooth on a hood that was gritty five minutes ago.
• The smell of a clean interior — which is to say, no smell at all.
• Dogs who come out to supervise. Cats who watch from upstairs windows.
• The way a sunrise wash on a dark car makes the paint look two inches deep.
• Handing back keys to someone who forgot what their car used to look like.
• That one client who brings me a thermos of coffee without asking every single time.

Short list lives on a dog-eared page at the back of the day-book. When a regular moves away or retires a car, I work top of the list first. That's the whole intake process.