This is the outside of our house, circa October 2005. Since then the following things have happened - that godforsaken barrel has been violently relocated to the backyard, the jungly area on the left has been torn down and now only the large oak tree remains, the two trees in the front right have been removed, the garden in the middle has been turned into a garden (as opposed to a chipmunk playground) and the gardens immediately in front of the house now consist of two rhododendrons, two evergreens, and an azalea. We also have the most wonderful wisteria tree in the world in the middle garden.
This is a picture of the house that Speed found from the town assessor somehow. I don't even knnow what to say about this, really. The only thing I do actually like more than the current set up is how the windows on the sides of the left hand/breezeway door go all the way down, whereas now they stop at hip height or so. I will also refer to this as the first exhibit in the case for making everything in the world green, which appears to be an argument that the previous owner was EXTREMELY dedicated to. 
This is our bathroom. I hate this tile with my entire soul. I refer to it as "Miami Dolphins green marble" and it's this heinous plastic tile that is original to the (circa 1954) house. We recently ripped it off and will be refinishing it...painting, not tiling, since the shower is tiled and has a sliding glass door, so there's really no need for tile on the walls. This pic is an October 2005 one but I can guarantee that the only thing that changed in this stupid bathroom of grossness since 1954 was POSSIBLY the curtain.
This is our yellow room...in this October 2005 pic, we were using it as an office, but now it is our bedroom. We reasoned that we would just be sleeping in the bedroom, but spending more waking hours in the office, so we picked the larger yellow room for the office. Maybe three months later we were claustrophobic in the blue room, switched the two with much ado and swearing, and never looked back.
And here's the old version. This is really the only place you can put a bed...it's a bit airplane hangarish. This is basically the reverse of the October 2005 one - in this one you're looking at the door, in the yellow one, you're standing IN the door taking the pic. Note the GROSS door jamb - apparently the original owner really sank into a depression when his wife died (as you would) and spent his days mainly drinking and smoking in the house. This provided a nice sheen of tobacco smoke all over the house. More on this phenomenon when we talk about the blue room.
Here you can see the windows...note that the curtain is fully double the size of the windows. The windows in our bedroom and office are the only thing besides the ugly bathroom that I would change about the house - they are right for the style of the house, but they are very short , where I would prefer full size windows. Maybe someday we'll get around to changing them.
This is the wall that Speed's chair would be facing in the October '05 pic above. Again with the nasty once-white-now-tobacco-colored trim on the window, and the long curtains.
This is the blue room, formerly the bedroom (we must have been nuts) and now the office. You can see the short windows a little better here. This pic was taken when I was painting the ceiling - the entire room, including ceiling, was blue, and the ceiling fan was a P-51 nosecone (the guy we bought it from was a Reservist, so we assume that's how the P-51 came to be). The blue of it all was overwhelming...it was one of those things where your senses are being smacked around but you also can't figure out why. After painting the ceiling, I took a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and scrubbed the dribs and drabs and pencil marks around the edge...and discovered that the actual paint had been two to three full shades lighter. I then scrubbed the entire room, and it was vastly improved. This is one of the timeline issues - the Reservist definitely did NOT seem like the smoking type, and it would seem to be the fault of the original owner that the tobacco stains would be there...and yet the blue is clearly post-renovation. Hard to tell.
This is a good frame of reference, because we're basically standing in the same place to take the picture. Note the GROSS windowshade. Any questions on how good for your health smoking is?
Interesting fact! These bureaus are IDENTICAL to one that Dad had in his office in our house growing up. He actually had the shorter one with the mirror to me to take to DC, and while the bureau has moved on to a better place (the back facing was perpetually falling out, leading to profanity and aggravation), I still have the mirror, and it is hanging over our bed in the yellow bedroom. 
This is the new kitchen, and in this pic you can see one of my favorite features of the kitchen (second only to the flatttop stove top)...see over the sink that there is undercabinet lighting? I love the nice homey feel it gives the kitchen. It rocks.
This is pretty much the outside of the house, writ small and indoors. Oh. Em. Gee. This is just so problematic. The ivy wallpaper, the heinous linoleum faux tile...just...saints preserve us, you know? As you can see, the Reservist really went to town on this one...he moved the stove almost exactly opposite to where this old, janky one is, and then put in the FAB new counter, which extends past the wall (on the left) and turns into a table. AND got rid of the linoleum and put in real tile.
This is the living room, which has also evolved beyond what you see here. The blah white curtains were ousted for some green and white sheers that hang on a dark wood pole - MUCH better. There is a major light issue in this room, so having the sheers instead of that ninety-pound-per-square-inch brocaded crap is a great improvement. You can see the beautiful refinishing job that the Reservist did on the floors - he was apparently VERY handy. 
Hey look! It's effing GREEN again! I actually do like the little mural thing on the wall, but it's just all so 1970s, isn't it? I particularly enjoy that even the BASEBOARD has been painted green. These people had to be stopped.
This...well okay. A while ago, Mom and Dad found some old pictures of when they moved into our house in 1983. And they'd been living in this townhouse in Gettysburg that was MAYBE five feet wide, okay, so their college kid furniture hadn't really been forced to evolve? So there are all these pictures before they bought a lot of Big Kid furniture where you've got this loveseat and couch that are literally bouncing around in the living room, on top of an area rug that is MAYBE 5 feet by 8 in this giant room, and you can practically hear the echoing through time and space via this picture? That's what this reminds me of. My favorite thing is maybe the supremely undersized picture on the wall. Note that they covered up the beautiful floors with carpet...that was a WIERD PHASE, all you people who signed on to it. Okay? WEIRD.
This is probably the most dramatic difference. The great room was what sold the house for us - the openness, the hgh ceiling, the way all the living space really flowed together...yeah, not how the orginal owners rolled, apparently. The door on the right leading into the kitchen is no longer there (our dishwasher is there now), and you can see on the left the wall with a window in it. The great room was an add-on, so that wall would originally have been an exterior wall and the window would have looked out into the backyard. I will say right now that the removal of that interior-nee-exterior wall was the best thing this house ever had done for it.
...because now it looks like this. So great, no? Great flow through the living room (where this pic is being taken from) into the great room. 
Here we have more...these pics were taken during a family visit. You can really see here how we'd been in the house about three minutes when the pics were taken, what with all the furniture having been thrown in the vague direction of where it was going to go and the use of the litterbox as a decorative accent.
While this pic highlights why we bought the house (we later bought wood blinds that PERFECTLY matched the wood in the room - we really lucked out, and a vertical blind for the slider), the best thing about this picture is how Flyboy (orange cat) clearly wants to fight Hillary and Emma (black and white dogs outside, who belong to Mom and Dad), who are eighteen times his size. Props to Scarlett for noticing that one.
Aaaaand the old great room. You can see the exterior-turned-interior wall better here...the window is CLEARLY an exterior window and framing, and the location of the bench and hat/coat stand really make it easy to see the past life of the wall.
This door is actually where the SLIDER is now...several million negative points for the architect of the project. "Let's make this beautiful, airy, window-ridden addition...and complete it with a boring wooden door!" Also note the louvered windows, which were moved to the breezeway when the Reservist redid the windows in this room for the big, open ones we have now. 
More great room...note the hardcore air conditioner, which we love, especially Speed, a.k.a. "Mr. Siberia." It's got a compressor out back and everything. Good stuff. You can see the same a/c unit in the picture with Mormor and Speed standing in front of the door above.
More great room, and more totally disgusting tobacco stains, this time on the curtains.
I'll be sure to take some more recent pictures sometime soon!
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