Home Renovation Triage

I woke up this morning cursing the PPO's of our house. We turned the AC on last night, since it's supposed to be in the 90s today. I don't mind heat during the day as long as I can sleep at night, but the nighttime temps are in the 70s (which means that it's still at least 80° in the house). So I set the AC to a conservative 76° and went to bed. When we got up this morning, the downstairs was a comfortable 76°. The upstairs... Maybe 82°. The bathroom is cool. The little front bedroom is cool. The two decent-sized bedrooms...? Not so much. Since the PPO removed an essential duct, the temperature in those two rooms is extremely difficult to regulate. It's really pissing me off that they took something that worked fine and ruined it. I can understand half-assed repairs and remodels, but why replace something that works with something that doesn't?
The uncomfortable-ness of our sleeping quarters has got me thinking about how to triage our planned projects. First and foremost, obviously, is finishing the living room. I was planning for our next project to be the office and closets. This would be to kill time while we save up enough money to do that bathroom. Then would come the bathroom, dining room, little bedroom, and then the kitchen. Last would be our bedroom and the back porch. That was the five-year plan, anyways. The two enormous projects (bathroom and kitchen) are flanked by smaller, cheaper-but-labor-intensive projects. The problem is that I want to fix that ductwork as soon as possible. In order to do that, we need to re-run the duct from the furnace up through the no-longer-existant wall between the dining room and kitchen. So we'd need to rebuild that wall, which would mean tearing up the dining room and kitchen a few years before we are able to really work on them. Ugh. This is especially distasteful because the dining room isn't that bad. The office is. Ugly carpet, ugly curtains, ugly closet doors, wallpapered paneling over the plaster, ceiling tiles, mismatched baseboard, and no air conditioning versus nicely painted paneling over the plaster, Pergo flooring, and ceiling tiles in the dining room. Maybe we'll just have to live in discomfort for a few more years. I don't think I can live with that carpet and wallpaper much longer...!