Skim coating the walls to be painted with Pearl Glo

If your wall isn't smooth enough, consider skim coat it with a layer of plaster to make it really smooth and looks nice from every angle.

Skim coating is important especially if you plan to paint the wall with Pearl Glo paints, or to install wall paper on it. Uneven wall will look wavy and not nice when painted with shiny paint or installed with wall paper. The effect is even maximized under the light.

During renovation, I had done skim coat treatment to all the walls downstairs of my house (excluding those in the kitchen with ceiling height tiles) before applying the ICI Pearl Glo paints on them. That had costed me for a few hundred ringgit only.

Toyota Avanza enhancement - seat locking system

The Toyota Avanza 1.5 provides versatile seat configuration. Both its 2nd row seats are foldable, and of course, its 3rd row seat is also foldable.

It is found that once you fold down the seat, you need to slam it pretty hard to lock the seat back in place. If the seat is not locked back to the car floor properly, it might flip up when you step on the break of the car later.

A simple modification to the seat lock position can enable the car seat to hook back easily to its place. Now, instead of slamming the car seat to lock it in place, you just need to gentlely push it downwards, and it will hook back firmly with a "click" sound.

The trick is to lift the rod of the locking system a little bit higher with washers. You'll need 2 washers to lift each side of the rod. As there are altogether 3 foldable seats, you'll need a total of 6 washers for this modification.



Just unlock and remove the rod from the car floor, put the washer in, put back the rod, and fasten the nut. Then, test the position by locking the car seat.

Toyota Avanza enhancement - rubber door seals

If you ever sit in a Toyota Avanza with original specs, you might have noticed that its noise insulation is very poor. Noise from outside is pretty loud, especially when motocycles pass by. The feeling is as if the car window is not closed, although it is.

This problem is due to a gap of about 10 mm found between the door and the car body when the door is closed. All Toyota Avanza doors with the original grey colour seal will suffer with this problem, because that grey door seal does not have a ring part to fill up the 10 mm gap when the door is closed.

It is found that all the 4 doors of Toyota Avanza 1.3 model are using that grey door seal; whereas the 2 front doors of the 1.5 model are using another black colour rubber door seal which comes with the ring, while its 2 rear doors are still using the grey door seal. This means the 1.5 model already addressed and fixed half of the problem.

The solution:

• For 1.3 model, replace all the 4 grey door seals with the black rubber door seal with ring.


• For 1.5 model, replace the 2 grey door seals with the black rubber door seal with ring.

You can get the solution from AOCM at the cost of less than RM50 only (for 4 doors). The rubber door seals are also available in most car accessories shops. Once the rubber door seals are installed, the noise level in the Avanza cabin will be about the same as in other car makes.



You can get even better noise insulation by applying special insulating material inside the doors, but that will be another story.