Okay, this is not very imaginative, but I think a light tan colour for the house, keep white trim/shutters, choose a more vibrant colour for the front entryway and LANDSCAPE!!!! That will make the biggest difference - it`s a house plunked down in a sea of lawn and it makes it look so stark. It needs a walkway as well. A few well placed shrubs, some vibrant flowers and a feature tree would make a huge difference.

The house isn't bad at all. It is the landscaping that is trouble. As is often the case, a couple of trees would help. Since the house is low, small flowering trees would work. Keep the plantings low on the right side of the house, but expand the bed out past the porch. We can't really see what is going on at the left side to know what areas are bed and what is hardscaping. Be extremely careful with color if you can't resist the idea of paint. Right now, the various parts of the house - the brick, the roof, and the siding - go together. I don't know how many houses have been posted here since the Landscape Design forum was merged into Houzz that started out with perfectly reasonable 1960s, 1970s color schemes but now are badly in need of fixing because the omnipresent beige siding of the 1990's never went with the brick.

I'm getting confirmation from the city on the ADU conversion in writing but new laws passed on Jan 1st of this year make it pretty clear I don't need to replace parking. The biggest land/hardscape I'm interested in doing is the entry walkway to the back. It may not look like it now but the walkway is almost 5 feet wide, from the tall wall to where the short wall steps up on the right. Stripping out the reeds on the one side and pulling the vines off the wall on the left. I like the wall of greenery but the clinging vine is terrible to maintain so commercial trellis mounted on alternating sides along the walkway with a non-clinging flowering vine attached would be nice I think. In-cement up-lighting placed opposite the vine to reflect light on to the vines at night? The maybe a glass door with intercom for security?

Don't square anything off. The arched window over the door echoes the arched window to the upper right. That mass is asymmetrical. The two arches make it look intentional, give it balance. Without the repeating pattern, you'll have two mismatched windows oddly placed in an asymmetrical mass. The smaller, higher arched windows match. You have an asymmetrical house with good balance. Mess with it and you'll lose the balance. Your landscaping looks uninspired, but it could just be winter, when no landscaping looks inspired. When looking at before and after photos, like the first one you posted, always pay attention to the elements that are not about the house, like house in shade with brownish lawn and dark windows in the before and bright light, green grass, and warm golden light from the windows in the after. The 90s is fine. You house is great. "Updating" and "modernizing" are ways to sell TV shows. Did you know sll the verbiage about openness and "flow" came from HGTV's discovery that men liked to watch sledgehammer scenes? You need a reason to knock down walls other than "it improves the demographics of our viewership".