Top Down....Or Bottom Up?

Now that the pantry is finished, my husband and I were discussing what would be the next project. This resulted in a lot of overlapping and complications. 

• If we start on the downstairs bathroom, we have to fix the upstairs bathrooms pipes, since they are interfering with our ceiling in the downstairs bathroom. 
• If we build the missing wall between the kitchen and dining room, we may have to rebuild it down the road to add the master bathroom upstairs (the pipes will most likely need to be run through that new wall).
• If we finish the basement stairs the way we want, they are at risk for getting damaged and needing to be redone since we will be using the basement as our workspace (this was awesome while working on the pantry, by the way).

I'm of the mind to just work on the downstairs first, since it is already torn up quite a bit. On the other hand, I really don't want to have to do any of the work twice. Complicating matters, my husband wants to rewire the entire house. Thus far, we have found:

• new electrical cables wired into old cloth insulated wires; 
• fake outlets (meaning the outlets are there, but nothing is connected to them. What?);
• really weird circuits (like the bathroom all on its own except for the kitchen overhead light);
• we have a jump box in the master bedroom from when the house was converted into a duplex (and the jump cable runs from the basement to our bedroom along the exposed chimney. Great.);
• and old circuits that someone decided to just leave hidden in the ceiling, light fixtures, cabling and all.

We have removed all the drywall ceilings. The downstairs walls are primarily drywall, with a really nasty plaster technique on them that I really don't like at all. So these all need to be redone. I suggested to my husband that we just take the drywall down and flip it so that we have a smooth side to work with. Apparently this is not a feasible option. Sigh.

Upstairs, everything is the original lath and plaster, except for the girl's bedroom. Someone thought that rather than fix or replace the crumbling plaster, that it would be better to just put drywall on top. This means that all the moulding is now flush with the walls. Oh yeah....one more thing....they actually textured the woodwork with plaster. Like that was going to hide the fact that they put drywall on top of lath and plaster without adjusting the woodwork. Yeah, well, that did not work.

The upstairs is also not insulated very well, if at all. We can really notice the difference now that we have added a door to the bottom of the stairs. We are talking about a difference of at least ten degrees, if not more. Since we keep our thermostat set at 68, that means it can get cold at night.

So, back to our discussion. Upstairs? Or downstairs? Or upstairs.

I think maybe upstairs. We could insulate the rooms, reuse the original woodwork, refinish the floors. Yep. Our only cost will be disposal of all the lath and plaster, the cost of the insulation, and of course drywall. And paint. And stain. And shellack. And drywall screws. And we would have to rent a sander. And a drywall lift. Yep. This house is never going to get done.....