Renovating the Defender, spring on the farm

Added: 2026-06-08

[00:00:13]Wa! It's hot in here.

[00:00:16]Oh my goodness.

[00:00:36]Okay, I want to try and get some cool air coming through here like first thing in the morning because it's going to get really hot again later today. But right now it's quite nice and fresh outside.

[00:00:49]Okay, the next task is to replace these door cards.

[00:00:57]Okay. So, first I'm going to give these a clean, I think.

[00:01:21]Okay. So, even after cleaning, these look pretty tired, especially this one.

[00:01:26]So, I'm actually planning to spray paint these. But first, I'm going to put some filler in this area.

[00:01:38]Okay. On this door, there is something interesting happening here where I'm guessing this broke at some point and someone has welded these pieces on. So, it just means it might be difficult getting this door lock to fit.

[00:01:57]It didn't snap into place perfectly, but I was able to screw it down.

[00:02:29]Oh, I reattached the door cards and handles and the winders for the windows.

[00:02:41]They're not perfect, but I think they look a lot better than they did. I can actually open the windows again, which I just couldn't do for ages. Another thing I want to think about is these things I took off the original interior. They're the things that you move to like give you some shade on a bright day. They're stained and just not nice. You can actually buy nice new ones of these.

[00:03:08]They make them like trimmed in different materials, but they are so expensive.

[00:03:14]They're like £100 or more for just this thing. And that is way out of my budget.

[00:03:22]So, I'm going to have to see what I can do myself.

[00:03:30]Okay. Maybe it will turn out that there is a reason why you can't make your sun visors out of plywood, but I'm going to try and I'll just have to find that out later.

[00:04:26]Heat. Heat.

[00:05:35]I'm honestly not sure how well these sun visors will work, but I think they turned out okay for a first try.

[00:07:29]So, I've just climbed up this hill and it's so incredibly hot today that down on the ground level it's just roasting.

[00:07:38]Up here there's a nice breeze. So, that is pleasant. But soon I'm going to have to go back down there. And I think I will need to find some water or somewhere to swim because it's just too hot to do anything else.

[00:07:57]It is beautiful though. I came here two days ago and we went climbing on this rock up here like a crag. It was really nice. And while we were here, I just thought that this landscape was so amazing and beautiful. It's really nice because it's you're like in a little hollow where all around is just crags and mountains and it just feels like another world. It's really, really nice here.

[00:08:30]One of the things I really like about climbing is that the places you climb are often in these like remote locations and you have to do quite a lot of like trekking up to like hidden places to do your climbing. And it just means you get to go and explore places you'd otherwise never find and places that feel really like wild and secret. And I love that so much.

[00:10:04]Okay, the next thing is to try and deal with this area of the cab and the seats.

[00:10:11]So, I've ordered some carpet which should fit in this area like the footwells and under the seats.

[00:11:20]Okay.

[00:11:29]The carpet was a pre-cut set of pieces, but it was still quite a lot of work to fit it. Some places were very awkward to reach, and the weather was still very hot.

[00:11:55]Okay, in order to make this carpet fit, I think I need to take off this bit of the soundproof insulation that I put on where the seat's going to go because otherwise I'm worried it'll be too like thick for the seat to bolt down to.

[00:13:21]I made some butternut squash soup just with some onion, celery, and I added stock and some cayenne pepper.

[00:14:42]Okay, this is the situation with the seats from the Defender.

[00:14:46]So, this seat base here is I guess the one that was in the driver's seat because it's completely worn away. The other one isn't too bad. It's looking okay. But this I will definitely need to replace.

[00:15:03]These are not looking in the best condition, but they are very expensive to replace. Like each of these bits is like hundreds of pounds. So I'm going to have to make do with what I've got. I think I will try to clean these and like rub them down a bit and then like respray paint some of the rusty bits.

[00:15:32]I cleaned the seats and removed the rust with wire wool.

[00:16:27]I also touched up some rusty parts on the wheels.

[00:16:35]It's not perfect and it probably won't last that long, but it's better than it was.

[00:16:53]Okay, I'm going to try and get these seats back in. I'm using the same bolts that drove me nearly crazy last year trying to get them out. So hopefully this will be easier than that.

[00:17:38]So, the only problem is this bolt that I had to cut because I just couldn't undo it just here. But what I'm thinking is that I can find a nut the right size to maybe screw onto that and just leave it in situ.

[00:18:37]Oh my goodness, this is amazing. This means I can actually drive again. I haven't got the base for this seat yet, but I can still drive it in the driver's seat just like this using that one. Ooh, so nice.

[00:19:06]Okay, this is comfy. This is really nice. I'm so pleased thinking back to how this was when I bought it. It was so different. It like had a weird funny smell in here and the seats were just broken and disgusting and the footwells were full of a mixture of mud and rust.

[00:19:32]And now it just feels so different. And it's not perfect. And it's also not very exciting. Like it's just the basic standard original Land Rover stuff with the black carpet. But I am really pleased with how this is looking now.

[00:20:56]around here in all these brambles and this hedge. I know that there are some baby rabbits living. I've seen them in the early morning and while I'm here being quiet, I keep hearing like sounds of things rustling. I haven't seen any of them yet, but I think they are in here somewhere.

[00:21:33]It was so sunny when I came out here, but now it feels like it's about to rain.

[00:23:00]In the past when I've made elderflower cordial, it hasn't worked. And the reason I know now is that I just never added enough sugar. And the truth is that when you realize how much sugar you're supposed to add, it just seems way too much. It just seems crazy. But that is actually the amount of sugar you need. It feels just insane. But then this is a cordial. You're not supposed to drink it like straight.

[00:23:40]Okay, so this is 2 kg of sugar for 3 L of liquid.