Damn it, Harold.

Or Jack. He was know by both. I just keep getting mail for someone named Harold.

Harold is the previous owner of this house. The man who, at some point, stood in the same basement I now stand in, watching water come in where water absolutely should not come in… and thought, eh.

….seriously…

Damn it, Harold.

There are things in this house that aren’t catastrophic. They’re not dramatic. They won’t make a real estate horror show. They are just… friction.

Water leaking into the basement when it rains hard. Pipes that slowly, persistently drip. A master bathroom with no drawers. Not one. (His poor wife. Where did she put her mascara? Clearly, these are is grounds for a divorce…)

Do not let those rectangles fool you. They do nothing.

These are not aesthetic flaws. They are experience flaws.

And maybe this is what happens when you work in UX long enough. You stop seeing “problems” and start seeing systems that were allowed to stay broken.

Every leak is a 404 error. Every missing drawer is a dead-end navigation.
Every daily inconvenience is a poorly labeled button you have to click around.

The thing that gets me isn’t that things break. Houses break. Life breaks. It’s that someone lived with this friction every single day. The basement leak didn’t start yesterday. The pipes didn’t wake up one morning and decide to drip. That bathroom didn’t accidentally misplace its storage.

At some point, Harold encountered these things for the first time. And he chose adaptation over improvement. He likely put a bucket under the pipe. His wife likely bought a small organizer for the counter. He likely told himself, It’s fine.

…But “fine” compounds. Friction compounds. And over time, “fine” becomes the emotional equivalent of walking uphill in sand inside your own house.

I think about his wife a lot, standing in that drawerless bathroom. I imagine the daily choreography of shifting products around the sink, negotiating for surface space, tolerating the inconvenience because that’s just how it is.

It makes me realize something about how we live:

We get used to bad design.
We normalize it.
We route around it.
We build workarounds.

Until someone new walks in and says, “Why on earth is this like this?”

Renovating this house has been less about upgrades and more about restoring flow. Fixing leaks is not glamorous. Installing a new vanity is not headline-worthy. Reworking pipes is not Instagram content.

But removing friction? That is everything.

Good UX isn’t flashy. It’s invisible. You don’t notice it because you aren’t fighting it.

I don’t hate Harold (although I curse about him from time to time). I just don’t understand him.

How did he walk past the drip every day? How did he live with water entering the basement and think, later? How did he live with a master bath with nowhere to put anything?

Maybe he was tired, or just got older, time gets away from you. Maybe he was overwhelmed. Maybe he just stopped seeing it.

And that might be the real lesson.

Friction becomes invisible when you live with it long enough. So here’s to noticing it.

Here’s to fixing the leak instead of moving the bucket. Here’s to adding a vanity with drawers. Here’s to refusing “fine.”

Damn it, Harold, I’m redesigning your house.