Congratulations on your new home!! What fun this can be, taking a nice solid house and making it express your personality! Yes, how much maintenance you want to do outdoors is a key question. But there is a lot you can do that really, once established, won't require a lot of time. I have large garden beds and with good mulching and good plant selection spend very little time in maintenance. Mowing is far more time consuming. I would start with an attractive storm door/front door in a color that complements both the brick and the gray roof(I personally hate orange brick, and I might be picking out a color to paint it, but a whole lot of people must have liked it back then! But with good trim color selection, though, it can look good even to me!) Use that color around the window, too if you can. The idea for a porch or portico is a good one. I think that I would build a nice large patio or deck with a shade structure (can't think what they are called) between the front door and the driveway. I would also create raised beds along the foundation to hide it, balance the patio, and tie the brick to the ground. Fill it with low maintenance plants and shrubs; talk to your local nurseryman for ideas. Avoid yew or other shrubs that tend to quickly become overgrown. You don't want it to become cluttered, but you want to soften and add some interest with groups of varying textures and heights. I think the tree is fine, it just needs some other tree(s) on the other side of the lot to balance it. Might consider window boxes, or some other decorative structure, to give the high short windows an illusion of more depth but with a raised bed foundation planting the plants might serve to balance the windows in the overall structure.

Thank you everyone for your comments. It has been such a journey, but so glad we did it. @practigal I sure did! we had around 30 cabinets total or so. @Karenseb I actually am not sure what was used for lighting or power exactly. The electrician provided them, but they look pretty standard. Here is a picture. Sorry for the poor quality. I am pretty excited. I just ordered a bunch of reclaimed black walnut to wrap the brick wall in and to add some floating shelves to the right of the exterior kitchen door. It looks like this:

Here are a few options. I would remove the shrubs in front of the bottom windows and add something taller in the center. I would also limb up the tree on the right to reveal move of your house. Eliminate the storm door and modernize the front door. I really like the darker taupe and the cedar color at the top. With a dark roof (charcoal, not black) and the wood piece over the garage door stained to match and the modern front door, I think it would completely change the look of the house. Don't do contrasting corner blocks, make everything the same color to keep from chopping up the house. Does your siding need to be replaced or will a good paint job do the trick? If you're going to replace it, use the same wide size in a Hardi plank. You won't be doing the house any favors if you replace nice, wide siding with chintzy 5" vinyl. Power wash the concrete step, add a tall black planter and modern coach lights. Hope this helps!

I will preface this by saying I know nothing about the real estate market in Apex, NC, but off the top of my head, a 2,400 sq ft house that only has 3 bedrooms and 2 baths has a lot of wasted space somewhere. Several years ago, my mom, a widow at the time, bought a major fixer upper. It was an all brick house in an up-and-coming part of the city (major US city) and the only thing it had going for it was its location (which is obviously something you cannot change). We all thought she was completely nuts, but for whatever reason she fell in love with the house. She didn't move any walls or add any additional square footage but basically tore nearly everything down to the studs. Everywhere she turned, it was one problem after the next. She budgeted around $75K for all the wanted to do (including finishing the basement) and in the end (about 2 years later) her total came closer to $150K. Yes, almost double her original budget. Since she worked full time, she hired contractors to do a lot of the work, but she did a lot herself, like painting and tiling. We referred to the house as the money pit. She knew there was likely asbestos (there was, everywhere) but she did not anticipate all the plumbing and electrical needing upgrading. Or the mold issue in the basement. Or the broken sewer pipe in front of the house. I just shook my head every time she'd complain about another issue the contractors found. She wound up selling a few years later. She could only list her house for around $50-60K more than what she paid for it because that's what the market dictated, even though everything was new. In the end she lost nearly $100K. Even though everyone and their mother warned her at the time, she didn't listen and regrets having put that time and money into such a project. My husband and I recently finished our basement. A small remodel based on some of the projects I read on this site. But I would never do it again. We wound up spending maybe $15K more than I expected (because I didn't account for some of the things we needed to do before actually finishing the basement, like a new sump pump and having the walls sealed). We lived here during the finishing and because the weather is brutally cold, most of the stuff that was originally downstairs is still in the garage and will be dealt with this spring. I'm tired of my house being in disarray. I just want my life back to "normal". My husband is thrilled with the results; I would have rather moved (and tried to convince him to before we started this project, but I was obviously unsuccessful). Bottom line is these kind of major remodels take a lot more time (ours took a month longer) and much more money than you think. Unexpected problems that come up are par for the course. And then there's the problem of overbuilding/over improving for your area. My mom was definitely a victim of that and why she could only list her house for what she did. I'd rather buy a house that had everything I wanted in a heartbeat. I wouldn't even give a fixer upper a second look.