Ok, got to work on the car today...a little hot outside, but all together not a bad day. I started off in the engine compartment where I cleaned a few things up and replaced a few of the original plastic pieces which had gotten painted white (accidentally? maybe?) before I acquired the car. The replacement pieces came from a donor car at a salvage lot...total cost, $5.

Then I replaced the side marker lights, which also had white paint on them...

Before:

During:

After:

I then moved into the interior and replaced a lot of the worn out beige interior panels with newly acquired black pieces. With the addition of these pieces I am one piece away from having a totally black plastic interior...then all that's left to do is replace the carpet and the seats and we're relatively done with the interior. I do still need to find a few black plastic screws and retaining clips to replace the mismatched grey ones I have holding some of the panels on, but those should be too hard to locate over time.

The most difficult part of this project was replacing the cardboard 'glove box' on the driver side rear panel...the donor panel had one that was completely rotten. About 10 minutes of reverse engineering and I figured out how to remove the existing one from the car and place it on the new panel.

I even managed to find intact hatch strut covers...these things are impossible to find without busted retaining clips!

One of the mismatched grey screws...hopefully I'll find a black one to replace it with, if not I have some black dye I can use on these small parts.

Probably going to look for seats again this afternoon...may be expanding the search to 4th gen models, as I have found out they will fit without modifications and they look a lot better too.