Home Owners

We are soon to be home owners again. We made an offer on a house in Brookings and after a lot of back and forth it will be ours on September 18 (my birthday). We were hoping we could find something we could move right into (because we had our fill of home improvement with our last house), but it was not in the cards for us. We have a list of projects a mile long already but are trying to be more realistic with this list than we were on our last house. To be honest - we are not jazzed about the look of the house (NOW) at all - (we had to contemplate posting pictures) but we bought it because it had the core things we wanted (great neighborhood, on a trail, close to a park, great deck and enough room to grow. It does need a lot of help on the outside and inside in order to look the part....we plan to knock out a wall before we move in between the kitchen and dining room and put an island there to make the space more open. That is project 1. Project 2 will be turning the den into a bedroom and huge walk in closet into another bathroom. Project 3 - the outside...it needs major help. Although we wish it could all be done right away we are trying to be realisitic on the timeline and hope to have it the way we want it within a few years....another project. Hope we have it in us and we are not calling that guy from HGTV that comes to help people when they are in over their head on home improvement!

Here are some pics of the outside (we will post pics of the inside soon)....

The front now.....
The front with our touch....We are trying to think of a good paint color....any suggestions?
The back.....The deck....