The rear door frames and their shades are officially a bust. I disassembled them and tried to recolor using fabric dye. The tan base color just made the new gray color look dirty regardless of number of coats. The velour textured material absorbed the dye like a sponge, leaving the corners still tan. While the velour material looked pretty decent before I dyed it, afterwards every scraped or damaged area stood out like a sore thumb.
The shades themselves looked great in grey, but didn't want to bend after getting dyed. Hard to get them to fold up cleanly.
Before giving up I tried some vinyl paint on the frames. Still looked pretty ragged. Set them aside in my garage for a few days to ponder my next move.
Do I wrap the frames in trunk liner material? Scrape the velour off? Bottom line was they just didn't seem worth it. They were an impulse buy to begin with. And even if I did get them working, I still have a window van with all those other windows with no blinds.
Hindsight being 20/20 I can clearly see I'm a moron.
My next impulse was to throw the whole mess in my trash can. Now that I got that out of my system (and into my trash can) I can live with the reflectix for a while.
With the added storage in the high top, reflectix storage issues have disappeared anyway. We are camping this weekend at the beach so we'll see how it all works out the way it currently is.
I may stop by the fabric store and look at some curtain material. Sewing can't be that hard, can it? As far as sewing goes, these relatively square flat curtains should be just right for a beginner to learn on.
Reflectix for the win!... so far.