Great report! I like the sparsely lighting of the images. This contributes to the atmosphere. I play a solo dungeon from time to time and thought about making notes for battle reports, so I could paint all the diced encounters, and make the images afterwards, for motivation purposes.
I'm not a fan of house rules, but I highly recommend you this:
Use a dungeon generator for playing AHQ. It will speed up the gameplay like a turbo boost and eliminates the two biggest flaws of AHQ: the confusing rulebook and the time consuming table referring. It will transform AHQ in a complete new gaming experience. I've made an generator with excel for myself (in german), but there is also a windows version on BGG. This guy made a manual for using it:
http://www.fclarke.com/2016/11/advanced-heroquest-map-generator.html
Use the dungeon generating rules of Terror in the Dark, as the dungeons are more compact.
Forget about different spell components and replace it with generic mana points/mana potions. E. g.: a spell which need 2 spell components instead consumes 2 mana points. The amount of spell components a hero has in the beginning = his mana points. When spell components are found as a treasure, give the hero a mana potion instead (amount of spell components = amount of mana points in the potion). I also let the heroes regenerate their mana points after they have left the dungeon.
Check the official corrections, which are listed on Greywulfs AHQ site.
A simple, but effective hint from Frank Clarke for adjusting the difficulty is to ignore high results on the monster tables. Just use a D10 or even D6 instead of the D12.