We're starting with our sunroom first. You can see it on the side of the house in the picture above - the long windows kind of hiding behind that pine tree on the left. It's currently painted a lovely shade of chalkish pink, and the carpet is a nice geometrically patterned hunter green. If you haven't guessed this already, our house hasn't been updated since sometime in the mid to late 80s.
Before delving into detail about our plans for the sunroom, I think I should probably provide a little more background info on the house. It was a foreclosure, and honestly, the price was a little higher than we wanted to spend, but the house and the property are worth at least 3X what we paid - it was, in short, a deal we could not refuse. However, b/c the house is slightly out of our budget, we have to be a little economical (a word I hate!) in our renovations. And, wow, does the house need renovations. Every room needs new flooring. Every wall needs painted. The appliances are all on their last legs. And the kitchen... sigh... the kitchen. The previous owners wanted to keep the house as historically accurate as possible (despite their addition of an 80s-style family room), so they kept the kitchen in its original galley-style layout. For those of you who don't know, galley is a fancy way of saying small. It means that you can stand in the middle of the kitchen and touch the counters on either side. 
And while I appreciate the fact that the kitchen sink has been in this exact same spot since at least the late 1800s, this is actually not my dream kitchen. I'd like a nice eat-in kitchen, or at least one big enough for more than one person to move around. The problem is that we can't expand the kitchen in the existing house, so we're going to have to add on square feet. Of course, the benefit of adding on is that the kitchen will then be connected to the family room, creating the open floor plan that I love. You can see in the background of the picture the family room with its staircase.
Anyway, the reason why I even brought up the kitchen when I'm supposed to be focusing on the sunroom (besides the tangled way that my mind works and being generally overwhelmed) is that we kind of were waiting to do our big fat kitchen reno/addition before we replaced any flooring because we want the same new flooring for all of the house (or at least the first floor). With all the additions, we don't want the house to feel choppy, and if every room has the same hardwood, it will seem to flow better. Our conundrum is that we most definitely cannot afford a major addition for maybe 5 years or more, so do we live with geometrically patterned hunter-green carpet of a late 80s vintage, or do we buy new, which we may end up replacing before necessary? My instinct is to not waste money on new carpet when I know I don't want to keep it, but what on earth am I going to do with that hideous old carpet??? What is the point of repainting the sunroom if it's going to end up ugly anyway?
After a ton of thought, we've decided to go ahead and replace all the first-floor flooring now, which is something that is doable even though it will stretch our budget, and just order enough extra hardwood for our planned addition to the kitchen, and we'll store the extra until we can afford the addition. So now I get the fun task of picking out hardwood! To be continued....
And the picture below is Shelby. This was taken this summer, before she was old enough to leave the breeder and come home with us - she was probably 6 wks at the time.