My husband wakes up early, stays up for an hour or two, then goes back to bed.

Can you break down the living room cleaning into smaller tasks, like vacuuming, dusting, etc. and just do a couple of sub-tasks? You'll still be making progress but not be so overwhelmed.

We need new cat trees. Cats ripped up the last two and the perches accumulated a lot of fur. My husband has been putting rope over them for scratching one they wore out the original scratching post parts.