The illusion of progress

Our situation is getting desperate, my wife and I have been living in my parents house (albeit their second, empty house) since early July. It's a perfectly nice and comfortable house, we have plenty of privacy (usually) and so far it's rent free, so I'm not complaining. It's quite tempting, in fact, to simply unpack all of our boxes in this house and live here. Realistically, we don't want to take advantage of my family (any more than we already have) and it would be nice to know where all of our stuff is. It's getting tiring spending hours looking through boxes in our garage for some small thing we need that we haven't had in 4 months.

With that in mind, I decided to put all my effort into work that will let us move into our house, even if some areas of the house will still be unusable. The most important room for us, is the master bedroom, so I figured I'd start there. Originally, we planned on knocking down a wall to make the room bigger and double the size of the bathroom, while also adding a walk-in closet. In the interest of speeding things up (also to avoid collapsing the roof by removing a load-bearing wall), I decided to leave the walls where they are now and just clean the room up.

I primed and painted the ceiling and walls (finally something I have experience with), which came out looking pretty good, in my extremely humble opinion. I might add pictures later, if I can figure out how to make them look good. Then I pulled out the carpet, which was shockingly easy, for once. The wood floor underneath the carpeting looks like it's brand new, but we might have it refinished anyway because the color is a little ugly and it would be nice to plug all the holes from the staples and nails used to hold in the carpeting. All that's left to do now is clean, or refinish the floor and install new molding. Finally, I think, we're making some progress. Then I think of what's left to do and it feels like I've done nothing at all.

List of things that need to be done before we can move in:

1. Paint three more bedrooms, two bathrooms and hallway (some drywall needs to be replaced first).
2. Replace tile floor and shower in master bathroom.
3. Replace vanity, sink and toilet in master bathroom.
4. Remove carpeting in three bedrooms, hallway and stairs.
5. Clean or refinish wood floors in three bedrooms, hallway and stairs.
6. Install molding in all rooms.
7. Prime or paint ceilings and walls on the main floor of the house.
8. Remove carpeting from living room, dining room and kitchen (project currently stalled in living room and kitchen b/c the carpet padding is rotted onto the subfloor)

I think that's about it. So, I have a lot more to do and no time to do it in, but hey, I've got my master bedroom done (almost) and I'm going to enjoy that accomplishment, small as it may be!