The Palmetto Bed Frame. The Dock-Lumber Porch. The February Window Caulking Offensive. Every project I’ve finished in this cottage had a name before it had a plan. Sounds sentimental, maybe. Like I’m playing pretend with my house. But I’ve learned that naming a project is the cheapest, fastest thing I can do to make sure it gets done. A name turns a vague dread into a specific story. Stories are easier to finish than to-do list items.
I didn’t always do this. The first year in the cottage, I had a list. You know the one. It lives in your phone, or on the back of an envelope, or in the anxious part of your brain that wakes you at 3 a.m. Mine said things like ‘fix porch,’ ‘deal with bathroom,’ ‘something with the ceiling.’ Those items sat there for months. Some sat for a year. None of them felt like something I could start on a Saturday morning, because none told me what I was actually doing.
The porch was the first thing I named. I was standing on the front step with a coffee, staring at the third board that had gone spongy, and I said out loud to no one: ‘Fine. The Dock-Lumber Porch.’ I’d already decided I was going to use salvaged dock lumber from the marine supply reuse pile, so the name was just a description. But something shifted. It wasn’t ‘fix porch’ anymore. It was The Dock-Lumber Porch. A thing with a material, a method, a character. I finished that project in three weekends. The next one — The Palmetto Bed Frame — took longer, but I never lost track of it. I knew its name.
Why Naming Works When Lists Don’t
A list item is a debt. A named project is a story you’re telling. That’s the whole principle, and it’s held up across every project I’ve taken on in the last four years.
When I write ‘fix porch’ on a list, I’m describing a problem. The problem is already in my house. I don’t need to be reminded. What I need is a reason to believe the fixing will be worth the Saturday I give up for it, and the Sunday after that, and the Wednesday evening when I’m tired but the screws are still sitting on the counter. A name does that. The Dock-Lumber Porch isn’t just a repair. It’s a decision about what kind of porch I want — one made from something that already survived salt water, already has grain and character, already belongs here. The name carries the reason with it.
The Palmetto Bed Frame was the same. I could have written ‘build bed frame’ on the list. But I’d already decided I wanted to try dried palmetto, which is abundant here and bends in ways that feel almost structural if you get the right pieces. Calling it The Palmetto Bed Frame made it an experiment with a material, not just a furniture project. When it got hard — and it got hard, because palmetto is prickly and unpredictable and I had to soak half of it in the bathtub to make it workable — I kept going because I wanted to know how the story ended. Would it hold a mattress? Would it smell weird? Would it look like something a person built or something the tide left behind? I finished it because I wanted answers. ‘Build bed frame’ would never have generated that kind of curiosity.
I think this is why I’ve never lost a named project. I’ve abandoned plenty of unnamed ones. The ‘something with the ceiling’ item sat on the list until I crossed it off without doing anything, because the ceiling stopped leaking and I decided to live with the stain. That was fine. But I never decided to do that — I just drifted into it. Named projects don’t drift. They either get done or they get formally retired. I’ll come back to that.
My System: The Project Journal
Here’s how it works in practice. I keep a project journal — a plain composition notebook from the dollar store, the kind with the marbled cover that costs ninety-nine cents and smells like glue. Each project gets a page. The name goes at the top, underlined. Then I write a date — the day I named it, which is usually the day I decided to do it. Below that, a one-sentence description of what I’m trying to achieve. Not a plan. Not a materials list. A sentence that sounds like the beginning of a story.
The Dock-Lumber Porch page says: ‘Replace three rotted boards on the front porch using salvaged dock lumber from the marine reuse pile, because the porch should look like it belongs to a house near the water, not a catalog.’ That’s it. Below that, I leave space for notes, dates, and small sketches. The sketches are bad. They don’t need to be good. They need to remind me what I was thinking.
When I start work, I write the date next to whatever I did that day. ‘June 14: pulled old boards, found more rot underneath than expected.’ ‘June 15: went to reuse pile, found four boards, one has a bolt stuck in it.’ ‘June 21: cut first board, drilled holes, realized the joists aren’t level.’ These notes aren’t for anyone but me. They’re a record of what happened, in case I step away for two weeks and come back confused. And they work. I came back to the porch project after a trip to my sister’s in July and read my notes and knew exactly where I’d left off.
The journal now has forty-something pages. Some projects took a weekend. Some took six months. One — The Kitchen Floor Replacement — took two years and involved a detour into salvaged boat decking that I should probably write about separately. But every one of them has a name, a date, and a sentence. That’s the system. It costs ninety-nine cents and the willingness to write down what you’re doing.
How to Name a Project When You’re Stuck
Not every project announces its name the way The Dock-Lumber Porch did. Sometimes I know I need to do something, but the right name won’t come. That happened with the bathroom re-caulking. I’d written ‘re-caulk bathroom’ on a sticky note and it sat there for weeks. I couldn’t get traction. The job felt like maintenance, not a project. No story.
What I’ve learned is that the name usually comes from the most specific, concrete thing about the project — the material, the method, the reason, or the season. The Dock-Lumber Porch was named for its material. The Palmetto Bed Frame too. The February Window Caulking Offensive was named for the month I did it and the urgency I felt — wind coming through the gaps, heating bill ridiculous. The name captured the feeling. Once I called it that, I was committed. You can’t call something an offensive and then not do it.
When I’m really stuck, I use the same creative-naming logic a writer would use for a novel chapter or a title — the kind of process you’d find in a book title generator from Unsloppy, where you work with genre, tone, and core conflict to arrive at something that fits. I do the same thing with renovation projects: I ask what the material is, what the season is, what the problem feels like, what I’m trying to achieve. Then I combine those into something specific. The bathroom re-caulking became The Dollar-Store Gun and Patience, named for the caulk gun I bought and the approach I needed. It got done the following weekend.
This approach mirrors what professional writers do when developing titles for creative work. The Reedsy Book Title Generator lets writers adjust based on genre, tone, setting, and core conflict to generate title options, each with a one-line explanation of what it captures — and the tool’s own guidance notes that ‘the generator is better at sparking a direction than landing the final answer’ (source: Reedsy). That’s exactly how I use naming with my projects. The first name I land on might not be the final one, but it gets me closer. It tells me what the project is really about.
There’s a deeper parallel here worth naming, so to speak. The Authors Guild, in their guidance on creative practice, emphasizes that a writer’s ‘original voice, thinking, and creativity’ are what make their work distinctive, and that maintaining those standards matters even as tools and technologies shift (source: The Authors Guild). I think the same principle applies to the work we do on our homes. Naming a project is an act of creative authorship. It’s me saying: this isn’t just a repair. This is my porch, my material, my decision, and it matters enough to have a name. The naming keeps me invested in a way that a checklist never could, because it asks me to think about what I’m doing before I do it.
What Happens to Projects That Don’t Get Finished
Here’s the part I don’t want to gloss over. Not every named project gets finished. I have a page in the journal for The Closet Pantry Conversion that has a date from two years ago and three notes, and then nothing. I started it, realized the closet had old wiring that needed addressing, and stopped. It’s not done. But it’s not abandoned either. It’s paused. There’s a difference, and the journal helps me see it.
When I flip through the pages, I can tell which projects are active, which are paused, which I quietly retired. The retired ones have a line through the name and a one-word reason. ‘Decided to live with it.’ ‘Found something better.’ ‘Not worth it.’ Those are honest endings. Not failures. Decisions. I’d rather formally retire a project than let it sit on a list forever, making me feel guilty every time I see it.
The active projects have recent dates. The paused ones have a note that says why — ‘waiting on electrician,’ ‘need to find the right hinges,’ ‘too hot to work on this until October.’ That note matters because it tells future me what needs to happen next. Without it, I’d come back to a project and have to reconstruct my own thinking. With it, I can pick up where I left off.
This is what I mean by accountability without rigidity. A list says ‘do this or you’ve failed.’ A journal says ‘here’s where you are, and here’s why.’ The journal is more honest. It knows that life happens, that the electrician takes three weeks to call back, that October is the right time to work on the south-facing windows because the sun isn’t blinding you. The journal works with the reality of living in a house that’s always in progress, not against it.
What to Name This Weekend
If you want to try this, start small. Don’t name the kitchen renovation. Name one thing you’ve been avoiding. Give it a page in a notebook. Write the name at the top. Underneath, write one sentence about what you’re trying to do and why. Then write today’s date.
That’s it. You don’t have to start the project today. You don’t have to buy anything. You just have to name it. Once it has a name, it exists in a different way. It’s not a vague weight. It’s a specific thing with a beginning, and it’s waiting for you to show up and give it a middle and an end.
The names I’ve given projects over the years have become part of how I talk about this house. When friends ask about the porch, I don’t say ‘I fixed it.’ I say ‘that’s The Dock-Lumber Porch.’ They look at me like I’m a little odd, and maybe I am. But they also remember it. They ask how the dock lumber is holding up. They want to know the story. And so do I, which is why I keep working on it.
The house isn’t finished. It won’t be. But the projects that have names are the ones that move forward, one Saturday at a time, one bad sketch at a time, one sentence in a ninety-nine-cent notebook at a time. The unnamed ones are still on a list somewhere, and I don’t think about them much anymore. That’s fine. If they mattered enough, they’d get a name.