Removing The Door Panel

This job is one of convenience, I personally hate to have the door shutting me in as I attempt to get out of the car. So I did some diggin and found the part (which even I forgot the name of ) was not available at the auto parts store and before paying the dealer [I didn't even check the price, I am certain it costs plenty though] I called my local junk yard, whom I havn't seen in quite a while cause the car was too new and they had no parts. But this time he said he had 4 or 5 of those 01-05 civics and so I traveled the 20 miles and brought my tools.   The goal was to locate a rear door that had not been used much, you can tell by the white streaks of grease and the resistance of opening the door. Before that though, I hit you tube up for an explanation of how to remove the door panel and so here we start. Well I got lucky and there was a rear panel removed with an unused hinge, it took 2 minutes and $10 to get my part.I would get the part first from where ever, you will need some glue to put back a cover and this is automatic, dealer approved, and covered up for obvious reasons. The main reason I know this is because my door lock first went bad at 30,000 miles and so I brought it in for a one day warranty job, got the ride back home from the dealer, and when I called to pick it up, they said it would be another day. Well now I can see why it took another day, because he had to order that part on a one day shipper fee and then all was good. So here are pics of the covers to be removed and I had to use my dental tool on the top one and a tack puller I never use, never lost, but have had for many decades. Always start prying from the bottom and in this case I was quite successful.                               
                                                                                                                                                                                 
    This formating the photos has also gone down hill on this site, it won't be long before the site is gone all together one day but for now just be patient. The trick here is to start with the inside door handle cover first, then do the arm rest one, remove the 2 small screws from the upper and deep inside the arm rest are the 2 larger screws. Now the tack puller was the perfect job for this twister of a job, [you want to break as few of the plastic parts here as one can], so the lever is attached with a plastic gizmo that simply needs to be leveraged off, by pushing the plastic 3/4 round housing away from the rod it is attached to. Here is a photo but I dont know how well you can see this operation from it. At this point do not try to remove the mirror cover for the door panel itself has to lifted away from the cover to try to remove it.

Now use the tack puller on the bottom of the door panel itself to pry off the door panel going up the sides after the bottom.

Now what I did was to lift the door panel off the lock button and raise it so you can try to remove the mirror cover, he will act as if he wants to come off easy but there is a one way metal clasp holding the majority of the cover on, so when you pull it straight out or towards you, it will have to break the plastic seam holding it together, I simply glued it back on, and not to much in case I have to back in there for some reason, there are a # of things going on inside the door panel for it too be removed in the future. Unhook any electrical connections whenyou see them, they will have a tab in the center and then they can be easly pulled off. Carefully remover the plastic so you can stick it back in place, and unscrew the bolts with sockets, remove the regulator hinge, and go in reverse to put it back together, and don't forget to fish out the wire harnesses before snapping back on the door panel or like me you will have to do that twice.

I didn't have trouble aside from the mirror cover, and it took only 10 minutes or so to complete,having the right tools will go along way with this job. Good luck with your panel(s).