I used to be a Civil Site Design Project Engineer. I did site design and analysis for large commercial developments (wal-mart, lowes, walgreens, and value place motels were some of out bigger clients.) No one's building, so no job for me
LOTS of time to work on the house!
I started the first week of May of this year right after we closed on the house. I put in about 60+ hours per week until we moved in on June 29-30th. Everything was easy until then. I've done everything except the carpet install. I had the carpet installed only days before we moved in (on purpose) so work went much slower after the carpet was in! I would have been insane to have even tried that. It took a crew of 4 guys 9 hours to do our house, and they didn't even have base boards to go under! I basically took all of August off. Had a touch of depression (bad emotional spell from lack of job) plus I was burnt out on the house.
Yes, the cupboards were that nasty, that was after scrubbing with several different cleaners. I skuffed them and just painted them with an interior paint. The uppers have been painted for a couple months and seem to be holding up well.
Carpet was nasty. You can't see it because it was covered in dust, etc, but I used the old carpet pad in front of the fireplace. When it got kinda full my wife helped me carry the pad outside and we dumped all of the stuff into the trailer, worked out well. No damage to the floors
I wanted a "newer" house but not a new one. Everything is up to code, but it's not quite as thrown together as some of the ones I've seen in the past couple years. (My company also had a subdivision team and I did a couple site visits for them, I've seen some very nice work and I've seen some not so nice work.)
I was trying to do "progression photos" of each room. It will probably make more sense when I go back and label everything.