Scope Creep

What to write about when there's a water story drought

I never promised you a rose garden, which is just as well given my gardening skills, but I did promise you a PFAS post and a drinking water post. Well, you’re not getting either, at least not just yet. I had the PFAS post ready a couple of weeks ago, timed to go out with the announcement of some local agency action on PFAS, only to get the word from one of the agencies involved to hold off pending further internal review. Hurry up and wait. And while the news on another local drinking water project is good, even great, the story is changing faster than I can write it down.

Meanwhile, that list of household projects I mentioned last time is growing rather than shrinking both because we’re adding them faster than we complete them and because the projects themselves keep growing. Scope creep, we called it in the project management business. And speaking of scope creep, at times of water story drought you might see other topics creeping into the scope of this newsletter. Like this one, for example.

---

“What are you doing here?” Nick, ER doc and fellow cyclist, did a double take as he walked past the cubicle where I was waiting to be taken to Xray.

“Broken ankle,” I replied.

“Oh no, how did you manage that?”

“Tripping over a pile of crap in the garage. It wasn’t even on Strava!”

You’d think that would have been enough to get me to clean up the garage, but no.

I broke the ankle four years ago on the first day of our final and most ambitious house remodeling project - living room, kitchen, stairwell, and front door. Instead of working, I was stuck in a cast watching Sampa, the Tibetan wood whisperer, who was supposed to be helping me, do all the work. The leftovers from that project—mis-ordered IKEA cabinets, half boxes of flooring, and so on—added further to the already towering piles in the garage.

Over the past dozen years, we’ve remodeled almost the whole house. My parents lived through the depression and the second world war. My father was the kind who would keep a piece of wood that might come in handy to stir paint with, and I inherited that tendency. The result is a house full of stuff and in particular a garage with shelves stacked to the ceiling on three sides with tools, lumber, flooring, and half empty paint cans, which I keep pretending are half full, with another row of boxes and garden appliances between the cars so that there’s barely room to open the doors.

And it’s not just the garage. When we moved to Washington from New Jersey fifteen years ago, we got a ten-yard dumpster and a fifty-foot moving van. It should have been the other way round. I have stuff that’s been moved over a dozen times including from the UK to Holland, to New Jersey, and now to Washington.

Never put off till tomorrow, what you can do the day after tomorrow.
~Mark Twain, who attributed it to Benjamin Franklin*.

*Twain also said, “don’t trust everything you read on the Internet.”

In addition, the surgery to repair that ankle damaged a nerve, leaving me with foot and ankle pain until a few months ago when the nerve finally finished growing back. I began recovering the strength and fitness I lost, a topic that will get its own post at some point. After four years, I could finally stand to be on my feet and working all day. But in the meantime, the piles of stuff had grown so large and the backlog of tasks on the to-do list so long that the best I could do most days was follow in Twain’s, or Franklin’s, footsteps and change the due date on the to-do list entry from today till tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

So, what finally did it?

The van. Living in a van, even for a month, changes your perspective on stuff. Opening the garage door on our return was horrifying. And the house wasn’t much better. My office looked like a game of Tetris I’d lost five years ago, too cluttered even to run a vacuum, and there were boxes in a closet downstairs that were still unopened from New Jersey.

And the yard. Oh my. For four years it was all I could do to cut the grass. Last year we hired a crew of Mexicans to clean up the yard, but this year no hay, as farmers also know. And the van ate that budget anyway. So, I’m back on it myself, although I did get a little help from an unexpected source. At one end of the yard, we have a wax myrtle hedge. Wax myrtles are fast growing, almost too fast. They need aggressive trimming a couple of times a year. I can reach the sides and part of the top, but I can’t quite reach the very top, so the hedge wears a mohawk until I get my wife to hold a ladder while I trim the top. (County government friends, cover your eyes for this part.) Then I heard the County Road Shop worker with his tractor and brush cutter who comes by a couple of times a year to trim back the blackberries in the roadside ditch. I headed over.

“Do you think that thing could trim the top of that hedge?”

“Oh, yes, I bet it could”, he said, quickly following by “but I don’t know if I can do that, I’m really pushed for time as it is.”

“Well, if you can squeeze it in.”

He did it.

---

There’s an aphorism I remember from my software development days that says:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
~Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

I’ve found this to be true for all kinds of projects, for water system projects, and most certainly for house projects, accounting in part for all the ninety percent complete projects we have around the house.

And so, true to form, we got ninety percent of the yard done and our neighbor’s truck lined up to get topsoil and mulch, when the weather shifted and we turned our attention to an indoor project; installing kickplate lighting in the kitchen. While this was a success, it highlighted another ninety percent complete project - finishing the kitchen floor. Sampa had refinished the floor while we had the old cabinets still in place and left the edges unfinished with the intent that we would take care of it between removing the old cabinets and installing the new.

We didn’t.

And with the kickplate lighting, we couldn’t ignore it any more. Of course, once we’d done the kitchen, the dining area was looking a little dull.

Dining area after

And now we’ve done the dining area, the front door is looking a little dull…

---

Meanwhile, we’re purging stuff. In my office, I threw out a scanner that hasn’t worked since Windows XP, old trade show tote bags and name tags, and assembled a huge pile of books that have yet to find a new home. I can see the floor and most of my desk!

In my closet, using the filter of “would I take this in the van?”, I got rid of half the clothes, some to Patagonia’s worn wear program, but most to the thrift store.

As for the garage, well that’s still yet to come. In the spirit of sometimes things have to get worse before they get better, I’ve moved my car out and made that space a triage area—sell, donate, or dump—for the stuff we’re getting rid of. It turns out that in 2026 it’s much easier to buy stuff—add to cart!—than it is to sell it. That’s a feature, not a bug.

---

While the van trip was the trigger to get working on decluttering, there’s more going on.

Some of it is the season. It’s spring, at least here in the Pacific Northwest, and with that comes the urge, common to cultures across the globe, to spring clean.

Then there’s the stage of life. We can’t take our stuff with us. I remember cleaning out my parents’ house—including that piece of wood with dried paint on it—and find myself asking if we want to inflict that on our children? I could also ask myself if I want to deprive them of the experience, but then I have a vision of them just ordering the dumpster we should have got back in New Jersey, so we may as well save them the trouble.

There’s also a sense in this increasingly unsettled world of a need to be ready, ready for whatever might come, for a natural disaster such as an earthquake, or as seems ever more likely, a manmade disaster. Ready to downsize, ready to move. Ready to flee?

There’s one more thing. There’s a deeper urge to shed a weight, to travel more lightly, both physically and spiritually. Many of the things we’ve been holding on to are just props for stories that are no longer serving us. It’s time to let go of both. And that is where the true reward lies.

Are you spring cleaning? Are you decluttering? Let us know in the comments!

---

Next time, who knows, I might have that PFAS or water post I promised, or the scope might creep a little further. Whatever comes up, to make sure you don’t miss it please consider subscribing.