Explain two of my concepts to them: art project and research project.

They probably understand art project if the wife has wanted something special built and it must look just so and they have taken it on themselves.  Research project is similar but it involves even more as an incredible amount of information must be located and, more importantly to the project, an incredible amount of information must be abandoned when it is seen to be irrelevant.

These two concepts have four things in common:
one cannot pin down a budget
one cannot pin down a schedule
the person who does the work is responsible for all choices
there is huge dissatisfaction when middle steps must be abandoned

As I heard it, Tom Edison tried 6,000 things for light bulb filaments before he found one that worked.  That's a research project.  And all of these things were available -- and none of them were rocket science, to century-mix metaphors.  They simply needed to be tried.