Before...

Here are the "before" pictures of our house! Right now the "after" is still a work in progress, but we'll get to that later :) This is what the house looked like when we first walked through, before the previous owners even moved out:

Our front porch:

The entry way when you first walk in. To the immediate left are the living room and dining room. If you walk forward a bit, the den is to your left and the hallway to the bedrooms is to your right.

 The front two rooms, which the previous owners were using as a living and dining room.

The small living room on the front corner of the house. Turn right here and you are looking into the kitchen.

This is the view standing in the living room looking into the kitchen and breakfast area. You can also see the door leading to the back deck.

This is the view standing in the breakfast area and looking around the corner into the den.

As you walk into the den from the kitchen, the stairs to the basement are to your right. The stairwell is actually right in the center of the house, separating the den from the dining room in the front of the house.

The den. Craig just LOVED the wood paneling ;)

Our fireplace! I loved having a fireplace in our apartment in Charlottesville and was very disappointed when some of the homes we were looking at in Birmingham didn't have one. It was a huge perk that this house did have one already - apparently they are pretty hard to go back and add!

As you leave the den, you walk back into the entryway and turn left to go down the hallway to the bedrooms. The master bedroom and bathroom are on the right and the two guest bedrooms are on the left with a Jack-and-Jill style bathroom between them.

This is the master bedroom.

This is the master bathroom. Right now it connects both to the master bedroom and out into the hallway. It has a full tub and quite a bit of space, which we were excited about. So many of the older homes we looked at had tiny master bathrooms where you barely had room to turn around!

This is the bedroom in the back corner - we are planning to use this one as an office for Craig.

The other guest bedroom.

This is the small bathroom that connects the two guest bedrooms. The shower is to the left, behind the door. Thanks, Mom, for taking the picture!

These are the stairs leading down into the basement.

This is a horrible picture, but it is the only one we have. It is a partially finished a room in the basement - they had basically just put up paneling for walls and a drop ceiling. It appears that the previous owners were primarily just using it for storage.

This is the half bath in the basement. You can see here that the laundry is along the back wall of the basement and would be a pretty close squeeze if you had a car in both of the garage spots. That is one of the things we're changing :)

Two car garage - this was another "must" on our list!

This is the other corner of the basement, in front of the partially finished room. The previous owners had so much stuff!

The side of the house and the garage doors.

The back of the house. You can see the stairs leading up to the deck off of the kitchen. To the right is our back yard, a.k.a., back woods right now. As I said before, there are stairs and decks leading down into the woods before the land flattens out and leads to a creek. Will be a great spot once we get it cleared out some!

So, as you can see, there is a lot of work to do! The house has all of the essentials we were looking for: great location, quiet street, all brick construction, plenty of space to (eventually) have a great yard, a two-car garage, a fireplace, three bedrooms and room to expand in the basement, and a spacious master bathroom. The things that are hard to change are already there; the rest we can go in and change to make it the way we want it!