Finally started...sort of

I recently decided to sell my 10 year old Civic Type R EP3 which I have owned since January 2006, in fact about 1 hour after my SAAB 9000 blew up on the way to Maidenhead Honda - it knew the writing was on the wall you know. Look how sorry it is feeling for itself...

So I went from what was my beloved SAAB 9000, car of many adventures, to what now, nearly 9 years on, is my beloved Civic Type R or CTR EP3 - EP3 is the variant or essentially the chassis code that Honda refer to it by. This variant was made between 2001-2005 and used the fairly infamous K20C1 motor. Sweet. Here's what it looked like just after I took delivery of it, 18 months old and with only 1500 or so miles on the clock...

Look at those wheels. Look how shiny it is. Anyway, as I said earlier quite recently I figured that the time had come to move it on and so I advertised it on eBay. After much interest it sold pretty quickly and the chap who was due to collect it wasn't available when I was nor me he so we pushed off until the following week. And that weekend I woke up at 4am in our hotel room in Bridgend and read over 20 pages of a forum post (Mandy was happy) after which I changed my mind what felt like 20 times before finally deciding that I wasn't going to sell it after all but restore it back to something like it used to look. Truth is it isn't actually too bad but there were a ton of options available to make it better which is basically what this blog is about. So that is my first scene-setter of which more in due course. So what does it look like now I hear you ask?

That's right...no fucking different. Except look how tall the laurels have grown in that time. They're out of shot. The Civic is definitely not as shiny above ground though so you can imagine it has taken some grief below ground too (underneath). So in my next post I will list exactly what I think needs doing to give it its mid-life upgrade and how I am going to go about getting it all done.