Having gone thru some renovations lately myself (on the "new" house we bought), I highly recommend hiring a general contractor to deal with all this.

I would ask all my friends, family and co-workers for recommendations on who they have hired to do their major work. Ask them if they were happy with the work. More importantly, if they were not happy. After you have 3 or 4 names, call them and get estimates for what you want done, think you might want done, or just the list of problems for them to investigate. Then get their bids. Ask for references. Check out the references. Ask them if there is a recent project you can visit. Check with your Better Business Bureau to see if they have any lawsuits against them.

It will take a lot of your time, but doing this prep work will save you lots of time and money in the long run.

When we were thinking about buying our new house, we hired an inspector to go through it to point out problems. Then, we asked him for recommendations on general contractors for some remodeling -- note, he should NOT recomend himself or a family member! Once we had 2 names, we asked our friends and family if they had used them. Turns out one of them had been highly recommended to my sister by another person but she never got around to hiring him. This guy and his team has kicked butt at our house. I'm recommending him to everyone I know -- but he's in Alaska, so that won't be of much help to you.

Ask around. If you can afford it, pay a good general contractor to do all the hard work.

Also, the very first thing we wanted to do when we bought the house was rip out the gas fireplace and replace it with a woodburning one. We are so glad that we didn't. We use the fireplace every morning and it really heats up the house. Our old house had a woodburning fireplace and we found it too much of a bother to build a fire.