Assignment Progress and Bloody Braces

Well, I've finally started seriously working on Assignment 1 for OOP344, and I have noticed a few things about myself. First off, I am a much sloppier coder when I am working with someone else's code, I go through and figure out what the code does, then I proceed to roughly patch each individual problem piece by piece, and I find that by the time I have completely fixed the problem, it looks ridiculous, for example, by the time I was done fixing one of the parts in Assignment 1, I realized I had three consecutive if statements that could have easily been packed into one. There are often other redundancies as well, but since I am satisfied that it finally works, I just write a comment in caps the clean up the code, which I hopefully won't miss when I finally submit it.
Which brings me to my next problem... Braces, more accurately, brace styles. The standard, or at least what I often see from other programmers looks like this:

Function(arg, arg){
  code;
  if(arg){
    code;
    code;
  }
  code;
}

I HATE this style, it makes it so damn easy to misplace a brace, put the a line of code in the wrong block, and in general is a pain in the ass to read. I much prefer this method:

Function(arg, arg)
  {
  code;
  if(arg)
    {
    code;
    code;
    }
  code;
  }

This looks so much better, easier to read, if you misplace a brace, it will glare out at you, you can easily see what code belongs to what function or what code belongs to what conditional or loop statement. I realize it takes up an extra line every time, but I'd easily be willing to pay that for code that isn't so infuriating to look at.