Making a start

I've made a start on the decorating that I have been threatening to do for a long time now. 
I've sanded down some of the paint work, only to find on close inspection some of the gloss painting has been done.  It was a cream colour, you know the one that was everywhere in the 70s and 80s, and I am painting it brilliant white, and in other places undercoating has been done, so all need to do in those places is the top coat. (I remember the name of the paint colour now.  It was called magnolia, but I've never seen any magnolias that colour.)
I really hate painting woodwork, which is why the stairs have remained unfinished for so long, also, there's an awful lot of gloss paint in the stairs as my house is a three storey Victorian terrace, and the stair case rails were boarded in, but I have ripped the ugly boarding off.  Eventually the rails, the spindles, and the newel posts will have to be replaced.  Reason one, the person who boxed them in flattened some of the spindles to make the hardboard lie flatter, and reason two, the banister at the top landing is below the specified height of modern day banisters.  (Although it was the correct height when originally put in.  It could also do with a newel post where the banister takes a right angled turn and a half newel against the wall for the banister to be fastened to. 
But as you can probably guess all that will cost money to buy, and then it all has to be fitted.
Originally I was leaving the stairs until all the rooms were done, which they are now, and I would have liked to put a Velux window in place of the small pane of glass that serves as a skylight onto the stairs.  Again, the cost is prompting me to try to finish the decorating and do the other jobs as I scrape together the money for them.
In a perfect world I would take out the large cupboard at the top of the stairs and replace it with a tidier one, or maybe utilise the space for something else.  This again is a bigger job than I feel can approach by myself at the moment.