2016 Mazda 3 2.0L MT Hatchback AKA "My whole paycheck"

The Story

I bought this car way back in 2016 as my first car (and my first manual car), since I've been in love with hot hatches since middle school! It has been incredibly reliable so far at ~57k miles, with the only weird problem being a smoked clutch and a bad transmission bearing at ~56k miles. Besides that little hiccup, it handles the mountains pretty well, and is generally fun to drive. But now that I have a job (ie money), I want to make my daily driver a bit more fun to drive everywhere! I want to be able to take it down the mountains, to the snow, and use it as my reliable daily. So that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'll also be documenting my builds part cost, as personally I feel like I haven't seen it documented well before.