Another shot of the rear seat area...

Here's how he decided he'd fill in the rear footwell area around the subframe connectors...and he took the liberty to also fill in the front footwell areas for some unknown reason. :hairpullout:

Driver front footwell area. The one thing he did do which I'm thankful for was to use minimal glue on everything. Not only did the trip home do half the work by blowing the carpet loose but it made my life easier having to rip it out to redo it.

So my plan was to try and salvage the carpet if possible...if not I would just rip it out and think of another plan. My dad and I spent the better part of a day making filler panels for the rear foot wells and refitting everything. It has a couple of areas I'm not happy with such as around the dimmer switch, a small section on each side where it BARELY meets up with the sill plates and he totally massacred the area around the throttle pedal so I had to take out a lot of material leaving it terminated lower than it is on the other side of the steering column...none of which you can see without bending down and looking under the dash (more like laying down as this thing is LOW to the ground). Overall, I think that most people will never notice anything and it'll do for now in the interest of getting the car done so I can enjoy it a bit!

So here come the "after" pics...

Since it's all black, it's a little hard to see much detail...

Here's a shot of the rear footwell areas. We didn't fill it in completely because I wanted to leave some definition and contours...even though this will all be basically unseen once the seats are in.

Wow! I cant believe he would let that carpet out of his shop. No pride of craftmanship. You did a great job cleaning it up. What did you use for filler on the pans?

Thank you! I was shocked although at first I didn't think it was as bad as it turned out. Once I got it home and had a better chance to look it over, it became apparent that it was a hot mess.

For filler I went and got a 4x8 sheet of 5/8" thick blue housing insulation. I layered up each area and used a 4 1/2" grinder with an 80 grit flapper disc to "grind" the styrofoam into the shape I needed in order to follow the floor pan or side slopes. I was going to top it off with a 1/4" layer of furniture grade plywood for rigidity, but honestly, the foam was quite sturdy by itself once the layers were glued together and since there's really low probability of someone jumping up and down on it once the seats are in, I didn't see the point in adding anything else. I may change my viewpoint once it's in use but all the cars I've seen running similar setups with Recaro's have just barely enough room for someone's feet back there so for now there's a "No high heels" rule in the back seat!

I'm certainly not an upholstery guy so my method may not be the best but I'd be interested in what others have done. I've seen in some of DSE's build photos where they use wood to fill in the areas. Not sure if they're using it as a template for something else or if that's what actually stays in the car but I do know that they "smooth out" the rear footwell areas (and front too in most cars) with some type of filler.

I can only imagine how sick that made you feel. But it turned out great. The foam and plywood sounds good. With my subframe connectors I am needing to level out the rear floor area too. Thanks for the info.

Just a quick update...been working a lot at my J.O.B. but reached a huge milestone last week. What started out as simply getting the gauges to light up and check function turned into "well let's see if the engine turn over" which then turned into "let's puts some fuel in the tank and see if it'll start!" I'm happy to report that the only issue was a fuel leak at an AN hardline fitting that required some attention. Once that was fixed, the motor fired right up, open headers and all!:cheering: