Step 3: Upholstery
I did the actually upholstery in stages, always encouraged by my progress, but at the same time intimidated by the forthcoming step! I think my neurotic overthinking paid off in the end result though. I had a ton of help from both my mother-in-law and my wife with this part of the project. I definitely relied heavily on their skills and advice in working with the fabric, as this was and remains somewhat of a dark art to me!
First, I overlaid the 10mm foam over the door panels and cut it to fit. I used a round fabric punch to punch out the mounting holes and this worked very nicely. I then used 3M adhesive spray, left over from the carpet install, to glue the foam down to the hardboard panels.
We laid this out over the wool fabric, and my mother-in-law carefully cut out the fabric in the rough shape of the door panel, leaving enough excess to wrap around and staple on the back. She then used a serger machine to finish the edges of the wool so it wouldn’t fray.
We then carefully wrapped the foam/hardboard panels in the wool, stapling along the back, and finishing the front and rear edges of the panels with the rubber welt bead, as had been done on the factory panels.
Here again the project stalled for a while, as I had nicely wrapped door panels, without any of the requisite mounting holes. I debated how I wanted to proceed from here, as I did not want the fabric to fray around the holes in it. I thought long and hard about using grommets around all the holes. However, it would be very difficult to install grommets with the fabric stretched onto the panel. Marking the holes, taking it apart, installing the grommets, and re-stretching the fabric seemed like a good way to end up with a poor result, as the pattern in the fabric would likely be distorted from this process.
I finally decided to use a fabric punch and hardwood block to make the holes with the fabric in place, and use stop fray fluid to keep the fabric from fraying. As this will discolor the fabric, I was pretty careful using this stuff:
For the big holes where the window switches and lock mechanism go, we punched a small hole in the center and then used a very tiny set of sewing scissor to make x- or pie-shaped cuts, as appropriate. We then stapled the fabric on the back, or in the case of the window switches, held it in place by installing the AppBiz bezels. We also used a bunch of fray stop to (hopefully) keep these bigger holes from fraying.
Next, I debated what to do with the hole where the door opener passes through. In an ideal world, I would have used an oblong grommet, as demonstrated in the above YouTube video. However, in the interest of time, we made some patches from vinyl that we glued into place, later opening up an x-shaped cut. I think this works fairly well.
Finally, I glued some thick, high-density upholstery foam to the back of the panel in the same places that the factory did, in order to keep the thing from rattling, and installed it all in the car:
Anyway, hope that was informative, if you want to attempt this yourself! Like I said, I definitely could not have done this without the help of a couple skilled and knowledgeable ladies. And there were definitely times where I was worried this wouldn’t turn out well, and where I wondered aloud if it was worth doing on my own, instead of leaving it to an upholstery shop. In the end, this was pretty cheap. The biggest outlay was on the fabric ($250-ish, if memory serves) and a couple of tools that will be used for other projects in the future. The remaining materials were very, very reasonably priced.