WEST LEBANON — Renee Costa walked out of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center after work one day a few years ago and as her eyes gazed across the hospital’s vast parking lot with hundreds of vehicles, she saw her future unfold.

There, before her like huddled masses yearning to be cleaned, buffed and shined, was a sea of cars spotted in dirt, mud-splattered hubcaps, grimy windshields and — she shuddered to imagine — dirty interiors in need of a good vacuum.

“When I came out I was like, ‘You got to be kidding me. These cars are filthy,’ ” Costa recalled last Thursday.

And Costa, who had relocated to Claremont from Massachusetts, where she had spent her career in hospital administration, knew the cause of the unsightly vision that had arrested her attention.

“When I got here, I went to wash my car and, for crying out loud, found there is no good car wash,” said Costa, who describes herself as a “car lover” who has long harbored a dream to “open my own car wash.”

That dream — presuming she gets the required permits, and more about that in a bit — will become a reality later this summer when Costa opens Lady Rich Express Car Wash at the former Four Seasons Auto Wash site in West Lebanon.

Costa’s car wash will also include a twist that few car washes boast: a self-service “dog wash” station to clean and dry your pooch along with your Beetle, Mustang, Impala, Viper, Cougar, Rabbit, Pinto or Stingray.

“There will be a blow dryer there, too,” Costa added.

Costa, 59, purchased the former Four Seasons Auto Wash property, which had been closed for long stretches of time in recent years as the former owner struggled with health issues, in May for $1.1 million, according to Lebanon city records. Costa said she’s spending at least $1 million on top of that to purchase and install a new automated car-washing system and to build new self-service bays and up to 10 vacuum islands.

“There won’t be anything else like it in the Upper Valley,” she believes.

In theory, at least, Costa has hit upon a need for a service in which the Upper Valley suffers a paucity. There are no car washes along the busy Route 12A shopping plaza corridor, and the closest other car washes are located on Miracle Mile in Lebanon and Sykes Mountain Avenue in White River Junction. Both are automated with no personnel on premises.

Costa, currently working as a research administrator at Boston Children’s Hospital, said she has immersed herself in the car washing business and technology involved.

“I’ve been following the car washing industry for years, learning as I go, but always unable to do anything about it because I was always going to school,” she said.

Costa declined to detail where she got the money to make a more than $2 million investment, other than to say she’s doing it with her own money and a bank loan.

“That’s private,” she said about the financing.

She has contracted with Exeter, N.H.-based New England Car Wash Connection, which will be installing a Belanger car washing system in the “tunnel,” as the structure that houses the water sprays, brushes and blow dryer is called.

The current self-service bay structure at the site will be torn down and a new one erected next year, she said.

Numerous trucks and crews from contractor HB Energy Solutions, of Springfield. Vt., were busy early last week at the site, located behind North Country Plaza off Route 12A and tucked between the Weathervane restaurant and the Sherwin-Williams paint and Salvation Army thrift stores.

The car washing system inside the tunnel and vacuum islands had been removed and a trailer disposal container was filled with debris.

The work crews disappeared by Wednesday, however, after Lebanon’s Development and Planning Department contacted Costa and the contractor that work could not proceed until the building permit or demolition permit applications had been issued.

On Thursday, Costa said the work crews were there to “clean up the area and doing a little bit of demolition work,” which she understood she had permission from the department to do “but we really haven’t done any type of work yet.”

(A demolition permit can be approved relatively quickly, but a building permit can take as long as 60 days to be approved.)

Lady Rich Express Car Wash — “Lady Rich” is the nickname Costa’s nieces and nephews have given her for the Corvette Stingray she drives — will offer four levels of service: a $13 “on the run” basic wash; a $17 “deluxe” wash that includes a “rust inhibitor” and “clear coat sealer wax” and a $25 “supreme” wash that comes with a “hot wax,” “wheel brite” and “wheel blast.”

But Costa said a focus in marketing is getting customers to pay for a $37 monthly “membership” that entitles the member to a daily car wash. She also wants to initiate a “VIP service” that would shuttle clientele, such as those wanting deep-clean auto detailing, between the car wash where they drop it off to their office or home, and pick them up when the job is completed.

Owning and running a car wash may not seem like a glamorous business, but Costa confesses to it being for her practically a religious calling, one she’s had her eye on ever since she earned a master’s degree at Emmanuel College in Boston.

“The problem with people who build car washes is that they just want to do it to generate income. I’m not doing that,” she said. “I’m building it because this is my passion. … I’m going to give you the prestige services you don’t get at other car washes, so when you leave here, your car will be clean, you’ll be happy and you’ll be coming back.”

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com,