This house is beautiful: wide trim, thick walls, beautiful windows. Unfortunately, the place has also been abused for years, and was in rough shape. Nothing unfixable.
It has a beautiful hardwood banister and barnboard floor in the living room, waiting to be stripped and refinished. Wide wood moulding around all windows and doors and floors are nice to live with.
The first thing we did getting here was rip up all the ugly smelly industrial carpet: underneath, the floor was covered with ugly industrial tile, but it was still an improvement.
We also ripped down all the wallpaper: this was mostly easy, except the living room.
We filled holes and removed all the trollish hardware everywhere.
We pulled down the failing and ugly (mostly flourescent) light fixtures throughout the house, and replaced them with new fixtures from Home Depot. Many of the old fixtures didn't work, were improperly wired, etc. We fixed all that.
All the receptacles and light switches (many of which were painted over, and one of which was a broken porcelain antique) were replaced with modern ones, all switch plate covers and duct vents are replaced with new white ones (which match our trim and are not painted on, rusted, or otherwise broken.
The wiring in this house seems to have been done twice: once in the 30's, minimally, and once in the 80's or so, more thoroughly. Thus, it seems not dangerous or particularly gross.
We forced a bunch of the windows open. Sometime we'll pull out the trim, and try to fix them so they open/close nicely.
We replaced the lock on the front door so that we now have a key. We intend to put a wooden screen door on that door, but we haven't worked out the details yet. We replaced the back door with a new steel entry door with good solid locks. The old back door looked as though it had been kicked in two or three separate times.
It's got gas heat and water heater, the roof has been redone recently enough (probably 5-10 years).
It has two fireplaces that have been bricked up and some tacky fake-stone stuff applied for some unknown reason: pretty ugly.
The sewer pipe to the road has roots in it, so you have to be careful, lest you plug it up. We had one experience with this already.
We filled holes, removed all the trollish hardware everywhere, ripped down the gross chain-link gate attached precariously to the garage, the broken old back screen-door, and did lots of tree- and bush-trimming.