So I thought it was finally time for me to put a worklog together for my car. I got my first car in May 2012 from a family member. It's a 2002 Mazda Protegé in silver and when I bought it there were a mere 65,000 kms on the odometer (roughly 40,000 miles). It was well taken care of and is my kind of preferred daily driver being a fairly light, 4-cylinder sedan.
The first order of business was a wash and wax because while it was well maintained, it was dirty.
I wasn't crazy about the stock wheels but since it came with snow tires not on rims I figured that once I put the snows on I could look at new wheels for the summer.
Next up was cleaning the interior and after a good vacuuming (thanks to my lovely assistant modelling vacuuming technique) and Armour All treatment, the interior looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line.
Apparently, I was too excited when I was clean to go out driving that I forgot to take pictures of the final result.
After buying the car I had to wait a few months until my birthday to get some money to upgrade the stereo as the 2002 stereo was merely mediocre and didn't have any modern features like handsfree. After getting the cash together I purchased a Pioneer AVH-P8400BH as I wanted to make use of the Double-Din format. Once I looked at putting it in, I realized that I needed a lot of peripherals to create the clean factory-esque install I was looking for. So I started collecting trim pieces and cables and put the stereo install on hold for a while.
Just before I would have switched to my winter tires, I blew out the front left tire. When the mechanic swapped the rest for the winters, I realized that all three other tires had the same issue. There were tears in the sidewalls from being mounted and unmounted year after year. This meant that I could leave the winters on the stock rims and look for an upsize in the spring. Sure enough I found a set on Kijiji that came off a Mazda Miata. They had been in the guy's shed for a while so they needed a good cleaning when I got them but in the end they shined up nicely. This is part way through the cleaning process.
Before
Part done
After
They are 16" FAST Jazz rims with Fuzion ZRi 205/45R16 W-rated summer tires.