I know that you all have just been perched on the edge of your seats waiting for these pictures. Desperate, anxious, yearning.
......
Maybe not. Even still, this post is going to be full of the "befores". All the shots we took the day we settled and got our keys to the house. Thankfully it looks MUCH different now, but since we don't have many (=any) "afters", I figured the best place to start would be with the befores. So here goes.
This is the outside of the house, from the street. I like how this picture captures the raggedy picket fence, as well. Though some of the posts are detached from the fence, I think they're all there, so we should be able to clean it, reassmble it, and paint it pretty easily to increase the curb appeal.
This is one of the first shots we took when we arrived that happy afternoon. J got an action shot of me opening the door for the first time with OUR keys. So exciting!
This is the view that you see when you walk in - minus J, usually - and look to the right. The living room is long and thin, with a fireplace at the end. I love the idea of a fireplace, but this one isn't so nice. We've painted the off-white portion since this photograph was taken and hope to switch out the tile and the grill (?) after a while. We may paint the wood-colored wood on top, as well.
The door is to the kitchen. And the sad fan is missing two blades. Very strange. Isn't that carpet a great color? It was through the whole house! If anyone needs carpet, we've got you covered.
At least we have a really nice, HUGE window along one long wall of the living room. It has a quasi seating ledge which the dogs will love.
This is the view of the living room if you were to come through the front door and look to the left. Front closet and the hallway to the bedrooms.
This is the view from the kitchen looking into the living room. That wallpaper was nice. Especially when paired with the kitchen tile. I knew as soon as I walked through that doorway that it wasn't wide enough. More on that later.
Here's another view of the kitchen, from the corner near the doorway. $5 if you can locate the dishwasher. It's like playing Where's Waldo.
To the left of the oven are french doors that lead onto one of my favorite rooms - the sunroom. Its walls are all made of sliding doors (which is apparently pretty common for sunrooms) with the exception of the wall it shares with the kitchen.
It has an air conditioning/heating unit on it, so it could be a practical room for all seasons. However, the floor is damaged because the previous owners left the sliders open during a rain storm. We have plans to remove the doors, replace the floor, and make it part of the home - as a dining room. Luckily it's very private, too, and it would offer a lovely view of the backyard.
Here's the view if you were to step through the french doors and look right. It also has stairs off the main sliding door from the car pad and from the yard.
If you were to go back through the french doors into the house and go straight, you'd go down the stairs into the basement. Because the basement is unfinished and I took the befores photographs in the dark, the camera's flash cast an eerie light that even I don't like to look at. Creeps me out. And since there's nothing really to show down there, I left those out. You can see the door to the basement on the left in the next picture. But, if you were to go immediately to the right from the french doors, you'd go into the office. 
The office is kind of strange. Perhaps it doubled as a dining room? It has two doors for entering. The door I just virtually led you through you can see in this next photograph.
From that door, if you looked into the room, you'd see the other door, which leads into the hallway.
Directly outside that door is the edge of the living room and the hall closet. Not too interesting - except that the hall closet door came with its own neck tie. Sweet.
If you were to go down the hall some more, the next door on the left would be to the bathroom. Newish cabinets plus reallllly dated tiling makes for an ugly sight. Unfortunately for the bathroom, though, this project is quite low on our to-do list. In fact, it's last.
The next doorway, at the end of the house, is to my craft room (yay!). Its fan was missing only one blade which made it imbalanced, so if you turned it on it would go crazy.
As if the fan is what you're looking at. Sweet wood paneling, huh? Makes the room look so... bright. And that neon orange trim? We decided to keep that. No, seriously. Even the registers and the face plates were painted orange. That's dedication to a color palette. I'll need to learn something from that.
This shot didn't survive my screwdriver. I had already begun taking off the tracked doors. Thank goodness.
And the last room is the master bedroom, though there isn't much about it that says "master". We chose it because it was the biggest (though only slightly). By the time I got around to taking pictures of it, it was dark outside. They didn't turn out very well at all.
Nothing says "master bedroom" like some greying wood paneling.
Whew! 960 (plus the sunroom) square feet of pure bliss, don't you think? Would you have made an offer on a house in this state?
Because I know what the "now" photographs look like, these look even worse to me than the house did when we first walked through it. But, though it's hard to explain, J and I just always knew the house had potential to be exactly what we wanted. And we were lucky enough to have the money to make it happen.
I can't wait to show you the progress!