Renovate room by room or get the ugly stuff done all at once?

We went the brother-in-law route when we bought our 1972 ranch and I'd do it the same way again. The first six months we had no curtains, half the trim off, and a bare plywood subfloor in the bedrooms, but everything noisy and dusty got knocked out while we were barely living in it. Scraped the ceiling, refinished the oak floors underneath the carpet, pulled all the old baseboard so the new flooring could run tight to the wall. If we'd done that after painting and furnishing, we'd have wrecked every room twice. The cost thing is real though, so we didn't do it all at once. We split it into one dusty phase and one finishing phase per stage of the house. First summer it was just ceilings, floors, and trim demo, paid for as we went, and we camped in the back two rooms with an air mattress and a kettle. Painting and decorating came later, one room a month, no dust involved.

One thing I'd flag: once the ceilings were scraped bare, we couldn't un-live with them, so make sure you actually like your plan before you commit to the messy phase. Also keep one room completly untouched as a liveable refuge, sealed off with a zipper door. Ours was the smallest bedroom and it saved our sanity during the floor sanding week, which was genuinely miserable otherwise.

The compromise I'd suggest is picking your battles. Paint and flooring can wait and be done room by room, but if the ceiling scraping is happening, do every ceiling in one hit while the ladders and gear are set up, becuase redoing setup room by room is what really kills you. Same with any wiring. But ripping trim and sanding floors can absolutely happen one room at a time.

Seconding the all-ceilings-in-one-hit advice. We did the same when we stripped the artex out of our place, hired a scissor lift for the weekend and got the whole house done in three days. If we'd gone room by room the hire cost alone would've eaten the budget, not to mention masking everything up a dozen times over. The other thing that worked for us was doing the floors last in the messy phase, after all the wall work was finished, so the sander wasn't chewing through plaster dust. Meant the seal went down on a clean slab and we weren't picking grit out of the finish for months.

Before anyone starts scraping that popcorn texture, get a sample tested, because textured ceiling coatings in older houses can still turn up with asbestos in the mix even into the late 80s depending on where you are, and wetting it down and bagging the debris is a whole diffrent job if it comes back positive. We had ours checked before touching it and the lab result changed our whole sequencing, since we ended up leaving two bedrooms alone rather than paying for proper removal. Costs a few dollars for a kit and a week of waiting, wich is nothing next to the alternative.

Update: took the advice about testing the ceiling texture and got a sample off to a lab, results came back clear so scraping is on. Now planning to do every ceiling in one long weekend like the scissor lift poster suggested, just with ladders and dust sheets instead. Does the same all-at-once logic hold for flooring, or is that one fine to spread out room by room?