Mike and I recently purchased our first home. It's a two-bedroom garden apartment in a 100+ year-old building.
On the broker's website the apartment looked like this:

But once we got in and started work we found many things like this:

And this:

One of the first things we did was paint. We used Benjamin Moore Aura paint on our last apartment and I hated it. It was hard to apply, I had problems with sagging, and it wasn't any easier to clean than other paints I've used in the past.
This time we went with Home Depot Behr Premium Plus. For the hallway, dining area and living room we chose Silky Bamboo.

After we painted the walls we put down new molding that I'd painted bright white. We also painted the odd, previously-black, strip of half-round molding near the ceiling bright white.
It was a lot of work but it was worth it. The Silky Bamboo has just the right amount of contrast with the white molding. The place looks bright, fresh and clean. I haven't been this happy with a paint color in years.

Another thing we did before moving in was tear out the existing closets and build in new closets. The old closets stopped two thirds of the way up and had cheesy sliding doors.
Here's the old bedroom closet:

And here's the beautiful new floor-to-ceiling bedroom closet built by Mike and his friend Buddy. This closet has 8-foot bi-fold doors and is big enough to hold all of our hanging clothes, our dresser, blankets, towels, boxes, you name it.

Here's the office closet before:

and after:

Mike and Buddy made the office closet a little narrower to give us more floor space. What we lost in width we more than gained in height as this closet also now goes to the ceiling.
In these photos you can see the bedroom and office paint colors (bedroom - Whitened Sage, office - Summer Moon) and the new doors Mike and Buddy hung to replace the cheesy (there's that word again) hollow core doors.
After finishing the painting, the molding and the closets the place was looking pretty good but it was still missing one important thing.
The fish tank!!!



Now that the fish tank is here it feels like home.