[HN Gopher] Writing documentation for your house
___________________________________________________________________
Writing documentation for your house
Author : lwhsiao
Score : 549 points
Date : 2023-11-28 11:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (luke.hsiao.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (luke.hsiao.dev)
| pmags wrote:
| The idea of writing technical documentation for your home seems
| like excellent advise. I think many people do this in an informal
| manner. I'm not sure a full blown mkdoc setup is necessary -- of
| having your "home repair/maintenance" notes in their own
| subfolder of an Obsidian vault or git repository might be
| sufficient. In my own experience, having quick access to this
| info has made troubleshooting easier a number of times recently
| during some repairs and renovations.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Seems like the perfect territory for a wiki.
| "Appliances/Furnace/Yearly Maintenance"
| moduspol wrote:
| I keep it in a Google Doc that I print out and have visible on
| the kitchen counter when I go to sell.
|
| Even putting aside the practical value it could provide to the
| new homeowner, it shows the house has been well-maintained to
| the potential buyer. It also conveys that there are likely
| fewer "unknowns" about the house because it implies nothing is
| being hidden.
| blakesterz wrote:
| I've been attempting to do something like this, but realized
| quite quickly many things need a video. e.g. Writing out how to
| change the furnace filter just made no sense (the layout of the
| furnace makes it really tricky) but a 1 minute video just did the
| trick.
|
| I like the structure laid out here, gives me a good idea on how
| to start on something that would work for me.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| It's the sort of thing I imagine products like the Meta Ray Ban
| glasses might be good for. Any time you start doing one of
| those annoying complex maintenance tasks that you forget how to
| do every time (the other night for me it was dismantling the
| toilet cistern since it blocks once every couple of years ...),
| you just click the glasses on and next time you can watch back
| what you did the first time.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| I like this idea even more!
| davesmylie wrote:
| I have a gmail account that I cc stuff to - receipts for any
| major chattels or work, engineering reports, wall cavities before
| lining (showing cable runs and nog spacing etc).
|
| Probably not as usable as this system, but pretty low effort and
| able to be passed on to the next owner easily if/when we move
| yodon wrote:
| Make sure you log in occasionally, or Google will delete the
| account due to inactivity.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I own an RV. The RV came with two thick manuals, one for the RV
| chassis, and one for all of the appliances that were factory
| installed. I am not the first owner of the RV. My brother, a
| meticulous military man kept the documentation for every
| appliance and gadget he installed in that RV.
|
| And since I took ownership of it, and have I been ever grateful
| that he documented it, I have done the same too, for the WiFi,
| for the networking, for the tool shed, for sit-to-stand desks,
| for the oven, for the plubming, and so forth.
|
| And I've applied the same rigorous principle to the house now as
| well for about the past three years. I kept documentation prior,
| but nothing so deep until the RV came along.
|
| Two thick ring binders, one for the house "chassis" and one for
| the appliances in the house.
|
| Instructions on how to reset the internet, instructions on how to
| "reboot" the water heater, instructions on how to change the AC
| filters, the model numbers required for the filters, and why
| there is no "air return" vents on the AC for the next owner, and
| also as a reminder to myself. Documentation on the maintenance of
| having the black water lines replaced after one of them
| collapsed, how to access the clean out hatch on the black water
| lines. Where wires in the walls are run too. The circuit breakers
| are each carefully labelled too. It gets written up in OneNote so
| it is searchable, and then it gets put in to the three-ring
| binder, with sections for each area, e.g. garage, master bedroom,
| kitchen, etc. And lots of paint codes for each individual wall.
|
| It doesn't take long if you do it step-by-step rather than try to
| boil the ocean all at once, and you will be grateful you did it
| for years to come. And your home, unlike the software developed
| by your team, doesn't tend to change all that fast.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Business idea - House Documentation as-a-service.
|
| You fill in the blanks online and it generates the PDF for you.
| djbusby wrote:
| I was just working on that w/a friend. Great minds and all
| that.
| thangalin wrote:
| KeenWrite[1], my Markdown text editor, was written with
| variables in mind. I've made a "theme" for the
| documentation for my house, called Domus.[2] You could get
| something producing PDFs in an evening.
|
| Profile has my email.
|
| [1]: https://keenwrite.com
|
| [2]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-
| themes/-/tree/main/d...
| djbusby wrote:
| Domus is our code-name too. LMAO
| CountGeek wrote:
| There's this https://github.com/hay-kot/home box "inventory
| and organization system built for the Home User"
| m463 wrote:
| Only later it has unskippable ads for replacement furnace
| filters, for water filtration, for solar systems, for
| appliance upgrades, ...
| justinlloyd wrote:
| It'll be a cold day in Hell before I put that much
| information into a venture-backed SaaS that is driven by the
| desire to monetize my life by any means necessary. It also
| over complicates what is a simple requirement by throwing
| unnecessary technology at the problem. The only tech I need
| with my three ringer binder solution to figure out how to
| restart a furnish when the power and internet are out across
| the county on a freezing winter night is a flashlight.
| zie wrote:
| I do this in a Fossil(fossil-scm.org) repository. I just take
| pictures and make PDF's of the manuals I get on paper.
|
| It's awesome.
| duck wrote:
| The house we live in now came with a paper version of this from
| the original owner/builder (along with almost a "dream" book
| section of where they got some of the ideas from). It was super
| helpful to have blueprints and things like paint codes, although
| the last owner had changed a couple rooms and didn't update it.
| The last owner did add some details on some plants they put in,
| which has been really valuable as well. My favorite part has been
| having receipts for lots of little custom things they added.
| justinzollars wrote:
| This is great advice. I have a ton of documents with the home I
| bought, but I can't seem to find when the roof was replaced. It
| took me months to discover I had a sprinkler system and I was
| amazed when I figured out how to use it. Something like this
| would be very convenient.
| xnx wrote:
| This is extremely organized and admirable. Don't let the perfect
| be the enemy of the good. A hand scribbled note taped to the
| appliance or somewhere logical nearby beats no documentation at
| all.
| m463 wrote:
| there is high-tech there too. They have cool postit notes now:
| super-sticky; super-sticky full stick (entire note is sticky)
| and now postit extreme notes that you can stick to lumber or
| man-projects or something.
| mhb wrote:
| And for running the house - Jeffery Epstein's Household Manual:
|
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21128538-gx-606
| xpe wrote:
| Yikes. Well played.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Sinister source aside... that is very detailed, 1980s vibe, but
| dated 2005. Talks about telephone directories, and picking up
| the phone in 3 rings.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| I do this for my rental property. I have a complete guide from
| onboarding to offboarding tenants. Process guides for 6 month
| checkups, instruction guides on how to use the alarm system,
| changing locks and codes, dimensions of all appliance cubbies etc
| etc etc
|
| My wife wants nothing to do with the rental aspect but when she
| had to handle management for a few weeks she couldn't stop
| gushing over my OneNote administrative guide.
| gooseyman wrote:
| This is awesome. Have you ever considered publishing these?
| teeray wrote:
| Similar, but I also have a QRH[0] for disasters small and
| large: Floods, freeze-ups, fuel exhaustion, electrical failure,
| telecom failures, septic emergencies all the way down to
| missing tv remotes (there's a stack of spares and exact
| instructions to program it for specific TVs).
|
| The idea is that I can literally give anyone acting on my
| behalf access to the utility room, they grab the binder on the
| wall and mitigate the issue exactly.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Reference_Handbook
| efitz wrote:
| For my last house, I had spent years on smart home automation, I
| had a binder that contained clear instructions I wrote for
| everything, and receipts for every upgrade I ever made on the
| home, warranty docs, QR codes to download smart home apps to
| control the devices, plot maps, floor plans, a 1-page list of
| repairmen for everything- you name it. I made short YouTube
| videos for everything like turning the water on/off, hose bib and
| sprinkler shutoffs, device pairing, etc. I put dozens of hours
| into documenting my home, and felt a sense of accomplishment that
| I was doing a "warm handoff" of the home.
|
| The new owner sold the home after two years. From the listing
| photos she had ripped out most of the smart home stuff and had
| crappily remodeled (painting river stone hearth, etc). YouTube
| showed zero hits on it he videos I made. I sincerely doubt that
| she even bothered to look at the binder I handed over.
|
| I will never put that amount of effort into documenting a home
| again. I know what I've done and I keep just enough docs around
| for my own purposes.
| waveBidder wrote:
| nothing productive to add, but man that sucks.
| abraae wrote:
| I have a home-built system for monitoring the levels in our
| water tanks (we live on rain water).
|
| Of course some people get by with a simple float indicator, but
| why would I do that when I could be using high accuracy
| hydrostatic sensors, esp32, influxdb, grafana, spring, keycloak
| and mysql running in AWS?
|
| I certainly wouldn't want to be getting support calls if we
| were to ever sell, so I would probably remove it myself if that
| happened.
| edrxty wrote:
| Why would you use AWS for that? That seems like an extremely
| strange external dependency for a house running on rainwater.
| Sakos wrote:
| Because they can, I guess? There can be fun had in over-
| engineering personal projects. It can also be educational.
| It's no more odd than
|
| > grafana, spring, keycloak
| grogenaut wrote:
| Seeing a setup like this would cause me to start walking
| away from a house. But to be fair I'd be walking away
| from just about any smart setup.
| abraae wrote:
| Just for history. Current values are available without
| internet on the esp32.
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| why not use a local server, even just an RPi?
| j45 wrote:
| Sometimes the library pushes easier to a cloud.
|
| Managing storage and more can still be work and worth
| doing as a second step since most of the time it's worth
| doing the setup over at least one more time.
| abraae wrote:
| Mainly visions/delusions of a water monitoring SaaS, but
| it would probably run just fine on a pi
| camel_gopher wrote:
| I did something similar but with a small netgate box.
| bigiain wrote:
| Nah, sell them a monthly subscription for the cloud service.
| Or put ads in their dashboard and alerts. (Or both. Then work
| out how to sell their water usage data to 700 "partner" 3rd
| parties...)
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Then go out of business and leave them with an expensive
| paperweight.
| c22 wrote:
| The last time I bought a house I paid about $600 for a pre-
| purchase inspection and the inspector basically prepared such a
| binder for me. A few hundred pages of photos and suggested
| fixes for not only all the defects she found, but also
| suggested ongoing maintenance schedules and routines for all
| the systems of the house, photos of the water shutoff, etc. and
| even a thumb drive with a few videos she shot and a sewer
| scope. I was updating the binder as I added/changed stuff but
| ultimately figured it's probably easier to just a hire another
| inspection when it's time to sell. There were no smart devices,
| though, that may have added a premium.
| 20after4 wrote:
| That sounds like $600 well spent. My pre-purchase inspection
| didn't even uncover some fairly obvious unsafe wiring.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Mine was a fifteen minute jobby where the guy glanced down
| the crawlspace and took a picture of the (flat) roof with a
| selfie stick. Basically a box ticking exercise for getting
| a mortgage. That said, it was a fairly new house (late
| 2000's) and not lived in much due to the owner finding a
| new partner pretty quickly and living there mosts of the
| time.
| hnick wrote:
| I've already lived in my home for a decade and think that
| would be money well spent. There are probably time bombs
| coming due I don't know about.
| Wistar wrote:
| A few years ago, I wrote the following comment in another
| thread here on HN. It is germane to this thread:
|
| Back in the early 90s -- on a recommendation from a realtor
| who was a close friend of my brother's -- I hired an
| inspector who was close to retirement. He worked with his
| wife who served as his assistant tasked with, in essence,
| taking dictation of her husband's near constant commentary as
| he conducted an incredibly thorough inspection. Every outlet
| tested for proper ground, every nook and cranny looked at,
| wood moisture content, HVAC pitot readings, masonry, roof ...
| just a super-duper detailed inspection that took about 6
| hours to complete.
|
| At the end of the inspection, he summed up by saying the
| house was good and that he had no qualms recommending the
| house.
|
| Two days later, he stopped by with a three-ring binder that
| contained his inspection report. It first contained a summary
| that concisely covered the positive and few negative aspects
| of the house. Then there was a section about the history of
| the house: the year built, the name of the builder, changes
| in the neighborhood since it had been built, earthquakes it
| had gone through, flood events in the area, and so on. It
| also included the manufacturer names of things such as the
| windows, door hardware, etc.
|
| The third section was lengthy, covering the precise state of
| the electrical, plumbing, structural, envelope, etc, and
| included all the notes his wife had taken during the course
| of the inspection. It included a sub-section with warnings
| about certain materials that likely contained asbestos and
| would need to be dealt with if we ever did remodeling.
|
| Finally, the largest section was what he called a
| "maintenance work order" arranged as a schedule for the
| ongoing, recurring upkeep of the house but beginning with
| things he thought needed to be done immediately, replacement
| of the circuit breaker box, splash blocks under each outdoor
| faucet, tuck-pointing some of the chimney's brickwork, etc.
| And then his estimates as to when he thought systems might
| need to be replaced, the water heater, furnace, roofing, etc.
| As I discovered when the water heater burst, his estimates
| were pretty much spot-on. Over time, I added notes as we
| upgraded things, added low-voltage wiring, and remodeled the
| basement.
|
| Nine years later, when I sold the house, the buyer was elated
| to have this owner's manual and I am fairly certain that the
| book was key to a very fast sale of the house which we did
| without a realtor.
|
| As I look back on it now, I realize that inspection was
| perhaps the best $350 I have ever spent.
|
| When we bought our next house, the inspection took about an
| hour and produced a few page report, most of it boilerplate.
| bowmessage wrote:
| Sounds like you found a good one.
|
| Though I wonder why they didn't recommend preventative
| maintenance on the water heater- if it was electric, why
| not replace the sacrificial anode?
| sokoloff wrote:
| After some length of time, there's a reasonable
| likelihood that the anode rod has corroded to the
| threaded boss and attempting to replace will condemn the
| water heater. (If you're not DIY, it's also a $200+ trip
| charge and a $75 marked-up part.)
|
| When we bought this place, the water heater was old and I
| decided it was a better plan to just leave it alone and
| replace when it leaked. (There was nothing valuable on
| the mechanical room floor.) A year later, we had a new
| heater and 15 years after that, it's about due again.
|
| I can definitely understand the "do nothing" approach,
| particularly if the rod is 10+ years in situ.
| tivert wrote:
| > Though I wonder why they didn't recommend preventative
| maintenance on the water heater- if it was electric, why
| not replace the sacrificial anode?
|
| I tried to do that on my old water heater, and it's
| probably good I gave up. I couldn't get that nut to budge
| (even after buying some pipe to make a long breaker bar),
| and I think there's was a good chance I might have
| wreaked it if I did.
|
| The thing was small, and we eventually just replaced it
| with a larger one that has the benefit of being new with
| a much more reliable control unit.
| bombcar wrote:
| You got a good inspector. Most give you a binder that's
| mostly boilerplate legalese how the inspector does nothing,
| a few photos, and a list of very obvious defects that
| usually aren't much.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| To be fair, smart homes absolutely suck. Especially about four
| or five years removed, or, in this case, an owner change.
|
| This is like writing code vs figuring out someone else's code.
| Those are totally different things, and code is a bunch of
| readily accessible text files. Smart homes? Some device in the
| attic, some device in the basement, some wiring that goes who
| knows where, where does all this info go? What was the model of
| this shit? Oh it has NOTHING on the front because serial
| numbers are gauche.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I have trouble finding the right code for my hardware
| projects and I check things into github including schematics,
| gerbers and code. then come back 3 years later and realize
| yeah I forgot to push that last actual commit. now I imagine
| someone else debugging that.
| j45 wrote:
| There really is starting to be a case for more remote control
| only smart home automation .. and then learning to handle
| those remote commands.
|
| Leaves what people are familiar with and trust in place.
| darkwater wrote:
| I have a (mostly) DYI smart-home, I mean, DYI as in "a
| Frankenstein of vendors and devices glued together by Zigbee,
| MQTT and Home Assistant", with some hard-deps on it in a
| couple of rooms and that gave me some bad nights when
| thinking about "what if I sell the home one day?" but reading
| the threads here I feel reassured: they will probably just
| rip it away and put some low-tech solution and call it a day.
| walteweiss wrote:
| Is it possible to rip off the devices and use it at your
| new location?
| bombcar wrote:
| By the time you sell they're likely all scrap value or
| worse, and the time to remove would be more than the cost
| to buy new.
| chimprich wrote:
| > What was the model of this shit? Oh it has NOTHING on the
| front because serial numbers are gauche.
|
| I'd really like some kind of standard for model IDs. Maybe
| something like a domain name and a model number.
|
| It would also be good if devices came with a QR code printed
| on them that linked to the manual.
| bombcar wrote:
| If it has an FCC ID you can search in that. Can be hard to
| find.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| But ... you might have to tear open a wall. Climb a
| ladder. Unscrew a plate cover and hope you can see it. Oh
| crap, now you have to remove it from the wall. Might as
| well tear out everything.
|
| And this is on the hardware side. Software? Did the
| former owner have passwords and everything tied to HIS
| ACCOUNT? Does he hand over some account? What personal
| info is in that former account. NOPE, big nope.
|
| The problem with smart home is this:
|
| - if the company wants to make money on the software, it
| will go with lock-in or fake open, which is what it is
| today. And that is a miserable failure
|
| - if the company wants to make money on the hardware, the
| software is a cost so it sucks.
|
| The solution is PROBABLY that the hardware vendors can
| only implement protocols, but CANNOT implement
| middleware. It can basically only provide information and
| take commands.
|
| The a software company makes the hub. It cannot have any
| interest in any particular devices, it cannot "partner"
| with a hardware firm.
|
| But of course that's only one part of the problem, with
| security and the central account. The software hub would
| need to provide some way to "move" an account with
| transparency on historical data reset.
|
| But the industry is so effing far from this. Maybe
| SmartThings was close, but they got acquired by Samsung
| and now push Samsung products and basically discontinued
| everything pre-Samsung. They highlight that there's no
| good money in pure middleware.
|
| The device vendors have to come together and do some sort
| of independent software company that they all can't
| meddle in. But then there's still soft pressure to only
| support devices in the "in group", so that still doesn't
| work.
|
| Really, this is an operating system + driver problem. The
| central core is the OS, and the devices are "drivers". A
| consumer OS can be priced at about $50 tops, and it needs
| about 10 million people a year buying it. THen it gets
| the critical mass.
|
| The other option is that some group close to the core of
| Linux take this on as the next big project. This could
| have important implications for Linux desktop, because it
| would create a Linux-aligned group that all the device
| manufacturers have to prioritize, and that provides the
| outreach to them also supporting device drivers for the
| Linux OS.
|
| I mean, that is a BIG undertaking. It would take someone
| like Torvalds with talent, hard work, and some form of
| charisma (not necessarily Torvalds' brand)
| natmaka wrote:
| For a fair part of the population, especially those using at
| home a crappy PC crashing twice a week, 'smart home stuff'
| means that some bug or backdoor may lead them into a mess: lock
| them out, let an intruder in, over/under-heat for weeks while
| they are out of town... They don't want any part of this.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| I don't think I could bring myself to extensive home
| automation installed by a previous owner, especially if there
| are cameras in the system. I have no way to know they're not
| maintaining access somehow without re-installing / re-
| flashing everything and linking to "fresh" cloud accounts.
| phero_cnstrcts wrote:
| Or sensors that register if you're home or not.
|
| They could even install something that isn't necessarily
| connected to the internet but can be remotely accessed from
| nearby.
| Gigachad wrote:
| If I bought a house that had a bunch of IoT junk, my first
| step would be to rip it all out.
| j45 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| At the same time any home automation needs to be able to be
| cloud and vendor independent.
|
| It begins with registering the property an independent
| email address for any accounts used during setups before
| taking them offline. Easy to manage for future tenant or
| sale.
|
| Gear is more able to be cloud independent or be made cloud
| independent, leaving a greater chance to leave at most a
| local wifi network and local appliance with touch screen
| (pi) that can peacefully operate without the internet,
| plugged in and hung on a wall like any other appliance in a
| mechanical room of the home.
|
| The more off the shelf parts can be, the greater the chance
| of it surviving.
| jakupovic wrote:
| You have a wishlist not something that you can buy.
| What's available now is a mix of random open and closed
| source hardware and software that requires a lot of time
| and HA to tie it all together
| j45 wrote:
| I don't disagree.
|
| With each iteration and replacement I'm discovering
| there's more out there.
|
| For example instead of using a random computer or pi,
| installing a home assistant yellow presents to a future
| home owner as more of an appliance.
|
| https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow/
|
| This is a nice gateway for non technical but "I can find
| someone to help me with this system".
|
| Same goes for particular groups of hardware.
|
| You're night it's a mix but the fact you can run most
| things on one platform fairly easily is pretty useful.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly. What little smart home stuff I have that is still
| operating smartly will be ripped out when I sell, or just
| left to rot.
|
| It definitely changes my decisions on further purchases. No
| smart switches that don't revert to being dumb if the smart
| stuff fails (as it always does).
| pjerem wrote:
| Even as a tech-savvy person,'smart home stuff' does totally
| means bugs and backdoors everywhere if you just plug and play
| things.
|
| Of course there are available possibilities to take somehow
| full control of your automation with some Home Assistant or
| the likes but honestly, it's really not that easy if you are
| not already a tinkerer.
|
| Great automation will also require more work and knowledge.
| As soon as you start playing with heating or venting, you are
| doing work that could require some background. It's something
| to buy a nice smart thermostat, but it's something else to
| understand where you may place it, how you may program it ...
|
| It's an interesting topic for those who like to tinker, but
| it's very understandable that most people aren't going to
| invest their time on it.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Some people just aren't the type.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The only thing I was handing over when I sold my last house was
| a Nest and a few Hue lights. The Nest was easy to factory
| reset, and the Hue stuff was operational without being plugged
| into a router, so hopefully they were able to continue with it
| as it was, and get it linked up to the phone app if and when
| they cared to do so.
| Nzen wrote:
| While I sympathize with your position, it is entirely possible
| that a person inheriting the smart home might benefit. I'm
| reminded of wmsmith's anecdote [0] two months ago about a smart
| home de-ghosting of a widow who couldn't drive the smart
| homing.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37860529
| erhaetherth wrote:
| The good news with smart bulbs is that they're easy to
| unsmart. Just unscrew them and put your dumb bulb back in.
|
| I replaced almost all my bulbs with smart bulbs, and then got
| annoyed having to ask Google to turn on the lights all the
| time. My solution? Even more technology of course. I found
| these little buttons that fit neatly over my existing
| switches so it not only keeps the switch in the correct
| position but makes it just as easy to turn off/on as before.
| But now they're dimmable and remotely controllable which is a
| plus in my books. Also my apartment is dumb and barely has a
| single built-in light so it's just lamps everywhere; without
| smart bulbs I'd probably have to flick a million switches or
| lamp-ropes.
| petemir wrote:
| Could you share a link to your found solution? Thanks!
| StingyJelly wrote:
| Smart home automation isn't for everyone. Many relatives see it
| as that weird hobby I have and don't see much of the value.
| (And I agree given the time I spend tinkering.) Even I would
| likely rip out most of the inherited smart home stuff in order
| to replace it or at least flash opensource firmware on it.
| Another important point I learned is that everything should
| work as a dumb home when the wifi, gateways, HomeAssisant or
| some sensors are down.
| ozim wrote:
| Home automation is for me exactly the same as designer kitchen
| or designer day room.
|
| Yeah it was great for the previous owner but it sucks for me as
| I have different tastes and needs.
|
| I am going to rip it all off and do what I want.
|
| But in reality I just don't buy anything that is advertised
| "one of a kind" because I know it will be more of a hassle to
| deal with it even if it looks cool.
|
| For me cool looking fancy stuff does not add value but rather
| lowers the value because I know I will have to rip it all of
| which is just more work. I also rather buy apartment/home with
| some default IKEA kitchen because I know then it will be super
| easy to rip it out and replace with what I want. Where most of
| the time I think I would just stick with that default IKEA
| depending on how long I plan to own the place.
| subpixel wrote:
| Home automation is a mystery to me. I have a coffee maker I
| can program to turn on in the morning, some ring cams for
| deterrence, and an automatic thermostat. I feel like
| everything else is overkill.
|
| Also starting and maintaining a fire in the wood stove is
| something I enjoy.
| philjohn wrote:
| It is and it isn't. It's definitely on the "you don't need
| it" side of the scale, but if done thoughtfully it can make
| everyday life just a bit easier.
|
| Some of my favourite automations:
|
| 1. Whenever someone arrives home and it's started to get
| dark outside, automatically turn the hallway lights on if
| they're off 2. When turning off the TV in the lounge, and
| it's dark outside, and the lights are dimmed, bring them up
| to 100% warm white so you can see where you're going 3.
| Motion sensors in the hallway and landing to turn the
| lights on when they detect motion at night.
|
| Do I NEED any of these? Of course not. But I like having
| them.
| ozim wrote:
| Talking about preferences I hate motion sensor lights I
| usually rather to walk in dark and get my eyes used to
| darkness. I still turn on lights when I get to bathroom
| or I get a glass of water in the end but somehow it feels
| better if I turn it on at the destination.
|
| Other thing is I hade all kinds of status LEDs - it is
| just insane with the bright ones. I know it is nice for
| quick troubleshooting during the day to know if the
| internet is on or not - but in the middle of the night
| they should be lowest brightness on all appliances or
| turned off. But not all vendors provide the option.
| njarboe wrote:
| I use electrical tape to tape over bright LEDs,
| especially ones in the bedroom. The light generally will
| still be visible and you can add layers to get the
| brightness you desire. The tape also comes in many colors
| so you can match the device you are fixing.
| tivert wrote:
| > Talking about preferences I hate motion sensor lights I
| usually rather to walk in dark and get my eyes used to
| darkness. I still turn on lights when I get to bathroom
| or I get a glass of water in the end but somehow it feels
| better if I turn it on at the destination.
|
| I agree, it'd be super annoying if it turned the lights
| on full power. I had a motion sensor light in my old
| apartment. It was part of a Hue system and it would turn
| on a single bulb in the hall or bathroom (can't remember
| which) to the very lowest dimness level if someone was
| walking to the bathroom at night.
| eddieroger wrote:
| Big use cases can be overkill, but I like to take on the
| small things as automation projects. Easy one - if everyone
| has left my house for a time, turn off all the lights. If
| we have left but the dog is home and the sun sets, turn on
| a few lights for her (my dog has a wifi collar). If I
| arrive home after dark and open the garage door, turn on
| the mudroom lights so I don't walk in to a dark house, then
| turn it back off 10 minutes later when I forget. I've left
| town before and had to let my parents in my house, and it
| was nice to be able to let them in without a key, and see
| that it was them on a camera. Then there are the fun ones,
| like setting the lights or closing blinds when I start a
| movie.
|
| I'm glad you enjoy maintaining a wood stove. I like asking
| my house to turn things on and off when my hands are full,
| or automating my bad habits and forgetfulness away.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Or if you're on holiday - turn the lights on at certain
| points.
|
| For top marks, have a train set with cardboard cutouts on
| and party music playing loudly every evening.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Also starting and maintaining a fire in the wood stove is
| something I enjoy
|
| Funny that, I'm sitting on my boat and it's soooo pretty,
| but one thing I _really_ won 't miss about moving off it is
| maintaining the fire in the stove. And especially the
| temperature when it burns out or dies out...
| subpixel wrote:
| Everything is more fun when it is opt-in
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _Also starting and maintaining a fire in the wood stove
| is something I enjoy._
|
| Yes, definitely. There's something satisfying about it.
|
| I've spent the last few weeks splitting logs - some by
| hand, most with a hydraulic splitter - and it's been so
| peaceful and good having fires on the back deck the last
| few weeks. It's not super cold here (Texas) but just chilly
| enough to make it fun.
|
| I finished this past weekend: https://twitter.com/CaseySoft
| ware/status/1728507279001923983
| digging wrote:
| Speaking of overkill, you might reconsider the Ring cams to
| be replaced with something more local. Public-facing Amazon
| data ingestion isn't the most polite home decor.
| rpearl wrote:
| I put in a bunch of Caseta smart switches. They are
| indistinguishable from normal light switches without any
| smarts, but if I want to, I can also control them via local
| network. It's nice to go to bed and turn off the entire house
| with one button. Lights turn off automatically when we all
| leave.
|
| The thermostat is an ecobee, which is a pretty polished IoT
| device but I'm frustrated i couldn't get something _more_
| local. It speaks homekit so I can do a number of actions
| entirely locally, and if the internet is down it still works,
| but I do wish it were more self-contained. So again, if I
| sell or get angry at technology and chuck my HomeAssistant Pi
| out the window, the thermostat will just work as a
| thermostat.
|
| Likewise, my blinds are motorized--but they have a working
| remote paired directly to them. It's incredibly convenient to
| raise the blinds in the morning for some sunshine
| automatically and close them after sunset, but they'd work
| perfectly well without a smart home.
|
| If you purchased my house, you probably wouldn't even know to
| rip out the "smart home" components because they fail over to
| just being normal components.
|
| It is not particularly hard to make this method of operation
| happen, although it admittedly requires a budget above "dirt
| cheap."
| wyldfire wrote:
| > They are indistinguishable from normal light switches
| without any smarts
|
| Except that most normal light switches (that I've
| encountered) are a toggle and not a momentary.
| jeremiahbuckley wrote:
| The kind of switches described are rocker switches with a
| small led to indicate state. In-person they provide every
| feature of a toggle switch, while also having a remote
| state change capability.
| rpearl wrote:
| The new(ish) Caseta paddle switches are pretty
| indistinguishable visually from normal paddle switches,
| and operating them is natural even though they don't stay
| toggled up and down. If that's the sum total of my
| concession to "these switches are smart", I can't say I
| care.
| mock-possum wrote:
| I mean that sucks, but... the thing I did when I bought my
| house, is rip out all the perfectly nice brand new carpeting. I
| don't want carpeting, I want hardwood. Not everybody is into
| smart devices.
| delecti wrote:
| There's a pretty enormous gulf between what you did and nothing
| (also it sound like you went a bit wild with home automation).
| I think you'd be doing your due diligence by just providing a
| list of products littered around the house, without also
| spending dozens of hours.
| somehnguy wrote:
| I love the idea, but yeah that outcome was predictable. Home
| automation is very much still in the hobby stage and most
| people simply don't care about it.
|
| I own my home & am into automation - but I don't plan on living
| in this house forever. As such I try to only install things
| that can be easily reversed when I move out, e.g wireless
| instead of hardwired smart switches - devices that piggyback on
| 'normal' home things. Otherwise I'm just giving the next owners
| thousands of dollars of things they don't want & unnecessary
| headaches.
| recursive wrote:
| > most people simply don't care about it.
|
| That's an optimistic view. I think the most common position
| would be one of active avoidance. I know that's true for me.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There is also the option that she did read the binder and
| decided "No way am I going to deal with all the crap" and had
| all the "smarts" yanked out an replaced with something that
| requires much less maintenance. That would have been my
| reaction.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| She did herself and the next owners a favor by ripping out the
| smarthome crap.
|
| It's like shag carpet: faddy, kitsch, and high maintenance.
| Smarthome stuff in particular is just so overkill. I don't want
| to overengineer my home. I don't want apps and QR codes and
| documentation just to water my garden or operate the lights.
| I'm not a nerd who enjoys tinkering with this stuff. I have
| shit to do. I want my hose to work like a hose, my washing
| machine like a washing machine, etc. And that's the case for
| most people.
|
| Playing with smarthome gadgets is a fun niche hobby, but it's
| not a hobby most people want.
| zellyn wrote:
| After years of owning services at work, I started writing
| runbooks for my house (and our holiday place).
|
| This looks a lot more organized and polished, but I can also
| highly recommend a Google Drive folder consisting of a main
| Google Doc, and all the various PDF copies of manuals that it
| links to. I plan on handing the runbooks off when/if we sell...
| donatj wrote:
| I live in the house I grew up in. My dad designed the second
| floor, an addition.
|
| He knows the skeleton of this house in a way I never ever will.
| He lives 50 miles away now, but I still have him as an amazing
| resource about my house.
|
| I wanted to run cat5 to my office on the second floor a number of
| years ago. "Oh just drill a hole in the floor right here in this
| corner, there's a void that goes all the way from the second
| floor to the basement." Sure enough.
|
| What I want is the schematics that my dad has in his head.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Best thing I ever did when our house was built was go through
| the entire house the day before the drywall went up, and take
| _many_ pictures of everything I could see. So now, when I want
| to do something, I know exactly what the framing looks like,
| where the water lines run, drains, electric, everything. It 's
| very handy.
| brk wrote:
| And with a cheap projector you can shine those pictures on
| the walls for X-ray vision. BTDT.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| oooh, now that's an idea I had not thought of. Thanks!
| acherion wrote:
| I did the same, before our plasterboard went up, I went
| around with a video camera and videod everything (borrowed my
| brother in law's digicam). It has helped heaps!
| bombcar wrote:
| If you don't want to do it yourself, you can hire a home
| inspector to do a pre-drywall inspection, and pay extra for
| full camera documentation.
|
| If they're good, they'll know what you want and they will
| also help the builder avoid callbacks. Many things are
| insanely easy to fix before the drywall is up.
|
| I also recommend that _you_ do the same walkthrough, of
| course.
| lrivers wrote:
| As a dad, one of my very favorite things is when one of my
| offspring asks me a question I have a solid answer for.
|
| Probably, when you ask him this stuff, he glows inside.
| dools wrote:
| I do this as a maintenance schedule on a Trello board. Each list
| is an interval (1 day, 7 days, 180 days and so on) and each thing
| to do is a card. When the due date is marked complete, an
| automation advanced the due date the correct number of days _from
| today_ (except in the 1 day list when it advances it 24 hours
| from the original due date).
|
| Then I have another Trello board where I stick documents and
| reference material.
| phanimahesh wrote:
| I'm building a recurring reminder system to scratch my own itch
| for this, with a checklist centered approach for home
| maintenance.
| RasmusMerirand wrote:
| No need for that, we built dobu.me for this, currety
| completely free as we are gathering feedback :)
| chezball wrote:
| So, i sold a house i had in north Seattle after a divorce in
| 2018. We had bought it in 04, i was working at Microsoft at the
| time. We raised our son there. I even built a 8'x8'x8' brick oven
| for baking pizza and bread (plans from Ovencrafters). I rented an
| excavator for a week and dug around the entire house and put in
| 12' deep footing drains, with clean-out pipes every 20' down the
| 100' to the road. A new 2" pex water main. 1" pvc sprinkler lines
| buried 3' deep. I completely gutted and remodeled the basement. I
| kept a 3" binder with everything in it. Every sprinkler line,
| footing drain, how my gravity fed recirc system worked,
| electrical wire, even the pictures of every stage of the six
| month long brick oven project, including how to move it if needed
| (10k lbs, but doable with a forklift) When i sold the house, i
| flew back there just to hand it to the new owner, some nuevo
| amazon guy. I went through everything with him, and although he
| listened, there was no interest or appreciation in what i had
| handed him. Fine. Whatever.
|
| I moved back to Seattle a few months ago, and my 17 yo son, who
| was literally born in that house (on a Murphy Bed i built, also
| included in the manual (the plans, not that my son was born on
| it, how weird do you think i am?) went and knocked on the door,
| and he asked if he could look around (outside). They apparently
| looked at him as if he was deranged, but said sure.
|
| He reported back that they had razed the brick oven, the one
| thing i thought would out last me in my life. I hoped that one
| day, maybe some kids would be eating pizza from this oven 100
| years from now and no one would know where the oven came from.
|
| Yeah, I haven't had a house since then, but i will do it again,
| document everything. I will just be pickier about who i sell it
| to.
| argc wrote:
| Yeah sounds like the people who bought it suck. Why would you
| destroy a pizza oven? It would add a ton of value to the house
| for the right buyer. If you had sold it to me I would have
| absolutely kept the oven :) Also inspires me to follow a
| similar path for my house. I think the key is to price the
| house so only someone who values the work you've done would
| bother buying it, if you have the time to wait around. And I
| guess that doesn't guarantee anything.
| bluGill wrote:
| One of those things that adds a ton of value for the right
| person, but for the wrong person is equally negative value
| (it takes up 64 square feet of yard space!). While most
| people won't really care. And so while it can add a lot of
| value to the right person, overall it is zero value. Even to
| the right person it won't be as much value as you would
| expect - unless they are putting a more than normal down on
| the house the bank will then value that at zero and thus not
| give them a loan for what that feature is worth.
|
| Pools are the same thing - should be valuable to the right
| buyer, but in practice worth zero. Even the most valuable
| remodels - kitchens - often are worth less than not doing it
| at all because while it adds a lot of value to the house it
| doesn't add as much as they cost.
| grogenaut wrote:
| thats why you should remodel while you live there so you're
| actually getting value out of your expenditures, not just
| upgrading everything right before you move out.
| balderdash wrote:
| Renovating before moving is the worst (excluding clean up
| (fresh paint, etc) - I feel like most people have
| horrible taste and use cheapo contractor grade materials,
| last time I was buying a house I couldn't believe how
| many newly renovated homes I saw where I thought "wow
| this needs a ton of work"
| bombcar wrote:
| Pools are worse - they are usually worth negative money
| when it comes time to sell, because you cannot just let it
| sit, unlike the pizza oven (at least in theory).
| Gigachad wrote:
| Because it takes up space and is mostly pointless vs a
| portable propane or electric one.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Thank you for sharing that story. Don't be too upset about the
| pizza oven. You built it for you and your son and hopefully you
| got to enjoy it for a while.
|
| There is no expectation for the new owners to share the prior
| owners interests. Maybe they are gluten free. Maybe they are
| the kinds of people who have zero inters in baking, whatever.
| You can't expect them to use the 64 sq ft of their yard as a
| monument to something you did if it's not relevant to them.
|
| I do get the idea of being attached to your home and hoping it
| goes to good hands. We have that kind of relationship with the
| folks we bought our house from and that's great. But there is
| no expectation that we won't change it to suit our family.
| bombcar wrote:
| A corollary of this isn't you don't mind things like random
| pizza ovens, you can ask the realtors to bring houses with
| "odd features" to your attention, because they often have no
| or negative value.
| pfd1986 wrote:
| Sad to hear about that. It's one of my dreams, after finally
| purchasing a home, to add a nice wood fire oven in the
| backyard. I'm guessing you don't have the pictures anymore?
| Would love to see them.
| htss2013 wrote:
| It's just odd from the perspective of a non American, because
| in much of the rest of the world houses are usually kept in
| families multi generationally. So your dream of passing on the
| oven would have worked most other places. It's just your
| desires are incompatible with the American treatment of houses
| as commodities to be frequently traded in bidding auctions.
| masklinn wrote:
| That's not been the case for a while in developed economies.
| The vagaries of modern life and work means most people can't
| live where they grew up, make their life elsewhere, possibly
| multiple elsewhere, and only go back to visit. Unless there's
| a real business to inherit e.g. a farm or hotel or some such.
|
| That was already the case in my grandparents generation. On
| my father's side is a large farm, but my grandparents moved
| into it. The eldest lives there, and a few of the aunts and
| uncles have shares from inheritance so they _might_ move into
| it eventually. Most of them made their lives elsewhere, and
| their kids went even further afield.
|
| On the other side, the grandparents came down from the
| mountain, built a house, the kids made their own lives
| throughout the country. The house was sold when my
| grandmother died a few years back. And she died in that home,
| for most of my friends the houses were sold when the elder
| had to move to assisted living (or worse when the house was
| lost for lack of income).
|
| Generational homes were a thing when people didn't need to
| move around, but my own parents moved 4 times just in my
| lifetime. So far.
| varjag wrote:
| I think it's not even the case in developing economies,
| with substantial economic and population growth. It simply
| can't work like that.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even with significant growth it _can_ happen - existing
| houses stay in the family, but the majority of people
| live in new housing.
| balderdash wrote:
| That probably worked when life expectancies were lower, where
| are people supposed to live the other 25+ years of housing?
| eddieroger wrote:
| > I will just be pickier about who i sell it to.
|
| You may sell the house, but you keep the memories. It sucks
| your grandkids won't be able to eat from your pizza oven, but
| you did, and you can talk about how you made it, and how much
| you enjoyed it, and that lives on. My parents sold their home a
| few years ago, and while my dad will regularly talk about how
| he misses it and what terrible changes the new owners make, it
| doesn't change that I was raised in that house, and we had
| great times and memories there, and he will now have a chance
| to make them with his granddaughter in his new house. It
| stings, but try not to let it.
| Larrikin wrote:
| >I will just be pickier about who i sell it to.
|
| Honestly this kind of mindset is a huge problem in the US. You
| built the oven, you enjoyed the oven, and you decided to sell
| the house. Why do you feel the need to dictate what the owner
| does with the house after? If you wanted to keep the pizza oven
| as some kind of monument to yourself you could have kept the
| home.
|
| This kind of mindset leads to stale neighborhoods, where some
| locals feel the need to dictate neighborhood look and feel. You
| end up with regulations that don't allow new construction and
| can even dictate dumb things like paint color. All to preserve
| a memory of something that is only important to the people that
| got to enjoy it when it was new.
|
| This is not say nothing should ever be preserved if there is
| actually something of historical importance that happened
| there, but it seems like there's a mindset to preserve things
| that are trivial to the many and important to the few. Then
| there are places with actual historical significance [1] people
| are willing to just rot.
|
| 1: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/30/rosa-
| parks-h...
| ajkjk wrote:
| What's wrong with minding? A person does something they're
| proud of, they obviously care about its future. Just because
| you completed some financial transaction doesn't mean any of
| that emotional attachment goes away.
|
| Honestly it is kinda depressing that anyone thinks otherwise!
| like somehow we should respect capitalism and $business$ more
| than, like, feelings.
| cinntaile wrote:
| The person that put time and effort into building it
| obviously cares, but the new homeowner most likely doesn't
| give a shit. Why would they? They bought the house without
| the emotional attachments. It's like inheriting a house
| from a relative. You dump most of it in a huge container
| but when they were alive they probably had a lot of
| emotional attachment to some of the stuff you just dumped
| in there. It doesn't have to do with capital or business.
| mgsloan2 wrote:
| Whoah, that interpretation seems pretty wild to me. They put
| a lot of effort into building a pizza oven and someone else
| tore it down, and they should feel nothing about this?! If an
| artist sells their painting they shouldn't care if the new
| owner paints over a section?
|
| Beyond the sentimental attachment to the pizza oven, I'd be
| bothered by the sheer inefficiency of it.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > I'd be bothered by the sheer inefficiency of it.
|
| This is the part that hurts me the most. I don't like when
| good things go to waste.
| mozey wrote:
| Been renovating an old house with a large garden for
| almost ten years now. I tell myself this is better than
| building something from scratch, but it definitely
| doesn't always feel more efficient. It helps that I
| didn't have the option back then, but now maybe I do?
| Sometimes it's also hard to tell, in the moment, which
| things to keep and what to rip out.
| taude wrote:
| You're assuming they like pizza and want an 8x8' pizza
| oven taking up space in the back yard....
| bombcar wrote:
| Reminds me of the tale of the guy who was told by his
| realtor that he could put $20k in new windows and sell
| the house for $50k more. He did and it sold, and was
| immediately torn down.
| hoseja wrote:
| You are allowed to be inefficient with things you own.
| Again, shouldn't have sold the house if they wanted to keep
| control of it.
| bombcar wrote:
| Or be a rat bastard and tie a covenant to the land
| forever muahahahaha
| delecti wrote:
| It's totally reasonable to be sad someone tore it down, but
| you also have to accept that you lose any say over a house
| when you sell it.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| But why buy a house if younger going to tear everything down
| or change it? Why not buy something that you already like?
| Why not accept that tearing down and rebuilding is expensive,
| for you and for the planet? Why not just accept "good
| enough"?
| Fatnino wrote:
| Because the land under the house is worth so much more than
| the "improvements" on top of it that the improvements might
| as well not exist.
| nostrademons wrote:
| You're buying the land and location. There's always someone
| willing to make you a new house for the right price, and
| you can get it done exactly the way you want it. There's
| nobody that can make new land, particularly not in the
| place you want it. You can change anything about a house
| except its location.
| toast0 wrote:
| The house I want isn't available, so I'm going to buy the
| closest thing and make the changes I want... building a
| pizza oven is a lot of time and effort, but tearing it out
| isn't. I'm not sure how much a pizza oven adds to the price
| of a home, but I'm guessing, not that much because most
| people aren't going to understand its value ... anyway, as
| a buyer it's not like I'm getting a list of features I can
| refuse some of, the house is being sold with the pizza oven
| and I'll deal with it when it's mine.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly. One person bought a house and added a pizza over
| because he wanted it, another bought it and removed it
| because he didn't want it.
|
| It's nice to think we might do something that lasts a
| long time but the more nonstandard it is, the more likely
| it will be changed someday.
|
| A similar effort on a fancy "outdoor kitchen/barbecue" in
| a more outdoorsy state than WA may have lasted a long
| time.
| mavhc wrote:
| It's too cheap to pollute the planet, the solution is to
| price in the externalities, tax everything the amount it
| costs to clean up the pollution it causes, then spend that
| money cleaning up the pollution
| peebeebee wrote:
| Things can have sentimental value. We need more of this
| sentiment in the world, not less. Certainly for architecture.
| It's that detached mindset that is also partially responsible
| for all the horrible empty architecture nowadays. Just a box
| to live in.
| Larrikin wrote:
| I actually agree with this statement, but people should be
| allowed to build the sentimental value. They shouldn't have
| the sentimental value of someone else's past ideas dictate
| the new.
|
| An awful local law may have dictated that the OP should not
| have been allowed to build a pizza oven in the first place,
| because people want to preserve the look and feel of the
| neighborhood when they moved in. But I also view it as
| equally bad if the new owner couldn't tear it down because
| of some HOA regulation saying that structures built before
| some arbitrary date, conveniently a time after they moved
| in and did their renovations, can't be torn down. The only
| real reason being the sentimental value they have to that
| past.
| bombcar wrote:
| The latter can happen with historic designated buildings,
| and can often be applied widely in unexpected ways. Some
| will basically say you can't modify the exterior look,
| others will say everything up to and including bulb
| changes must be approved by the historical society.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Honestly this kind of mindset is a huge problem in the US.
|
| It sounds like _less_ of a problem than its opposite:
| "Nothing matters but how much money I can make."
| Larrikin wrote:
| Whatabout something else that is a problem in the world?
| Your post history seems like you exist to be an example in
| a Wikipedia article
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| You extrapolated "I will just be pickier about who i sell
| it to" into an argument about regulations. If your
| contention is that sentiment obstructs progress, it seems
| totally fair to argue that the opposite is also true.
| Accusing someone of "whataboutism" isn't doing much to
| move the conversation forward.
| Larrikin wrote:
| They made a snarky single sentence comment. There is no
| argument about any thing else.
|
| I have a quote from the OP, but address matters from the
| entire comment.
|
| You are arguing about two sentences.
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| Why keep a complex thing in your garden if you know you'll
| never use it? All of the infrastructure around it sounds like
| it needs a lot of maintenance. It's arguably more efficient
| to remove it rather than risk any of it going wrong.
|
| If OP loved it so much then he should have moved it. Once
| he's sold the house then it's not his business anymore.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| Unless you're selling to a family member, you just can't expect
| these things to last.
|
| I share the feeling though.
| swells34 wrote:
| Honestly, the singularly wonderful thing about purchasing a
| home is that you can do whatever you want with it. The sky is
| the limit, you can make the yard into a garden, build a pizza
| oven into your wall, turn the basement into a gaming pad. You
| did all of those cool things with it!
|
| Now, don't begrudge the people coming after you for doing the
| same. It's their house, not yours, and they have the chance to
| make it how they like it. If you want control over a thing,
| don't sell it. Similarly, if you want to dictate what your
| employees do during non work hours, you have to pay them for
| it. You treat something as a commodity, and it becomes a
| commodity.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Less sentimental, but just as infuriating (to me): My last
| house we bought had an old hot tub out back from the early 90s.
| My agent said don't price that POS into your estimate of the
| home's worth--it's probably never worked. We bought the house
| and lo and behold it did not work, but I carefully rehabbed it,
| replaced the pumps and sensors and cleaned everything up, made
| a custom topper for it, and went on to enjoy 8 years of fun in
| it.
|
| Came time to sell the house, and I told the buyer, the hot tub
| is great--we'd love to keep it--if you don't want it, we can
| negotiate that, and we'll arrange to actually move it to our
| new home! They didn't respond and bought the house anyway. I
| find out from my next door neighbor that the first thing they
| did when they moved in was demolish it and haul it to the dump.
|
| Hey, it's their house, but some people are just wasteful.
| saalweachter wrote:
| When I bought a house, the prior owners requested I return
| the front door to them within N days, the contract had a
| section keeping $500 in escrow to be returned to me upon
| receipt of the door (by the shipping company, I believe).
|
| My realtor was like, "this basically means the house costs
| $500 more", but I went ahead and returned the door.
|
| If you're faced with that situation in the future, you could
| try including a clause like that in the contract; the $500
| wasn't really the motivation for me to immediately replace
| the door and pack up the old for shipping, but putting a
| little money on the line might motivate the buyer to at least
| value the feature you'd like returned if they don't care for
| it.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's fine but I'm just laughing at "the front door doesn't
| convey".
| walteweiss wrote:
| What a wonderful story! We need to start a community of guys
| who documents their Jose' houses. I am in the process of
| documenting mine, it is so very helpful for everything I ever
| do around it! Before this very post I never thought someone
| else could do that.
| greedo wrote:
| When I had much more energy (read younger), I finished my
| basement. 800sqft or so, put in a guest bedroom, a little
| library for the missus, a full bath and most importantly a home
| theater. I was talking with my neighbor who is a realtor and he
| said that if anything the home theater was a negative during
| resale. The only things that added value were the other rooms.
| Luckily, I built the theater so it could be converted into a
| game room etc, and most importantly, I built it for myself.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Another good trick is to label each outlet and light switch with
| the number of the circuit breaker its connected to. Things such
| as a big label on the valve: "MAIN WATER CUTOFF" are also a good
| idea.
|
| Centralized documentation is _great_ , but who reads manuals?
| nucleardog wrote:
| Locality of the information is important.
|
| People will see comments in the code. They may even bother to
| read a README.md dropped in the same folder as the files
| they're looking at. They probably won't look in a docs/ folder
| in the root and they're almost definitely not going to go
| search Confluence.
|
| Centralized documentation is great for high level information.
| "Here's an overview of the water treatment system." You know
| where I wanna see instructions for resetting the alarm after
| cleaning the filter? Beside the filter.
|
| Most of my "home documentation" is sharpied pieces of masking
| tape stuck around the place.
| bluGill wrote:
| Don't waste your time labeling each outlet/switch. While it can
| be useful at times, most of them will not be used before some
| other project requires moving the breakers to a different
| position in the box and then they are worse than nothing: if
| you trust them you get a shock!
| h2odragon wrote:
| nah, those projects get secondary, subsidiary boxes off one
| of the 6-0 feeders.
| bluGill wrote:
| You still need to have room for the breakers that feed
| those subsidiary boxes. Most breaker panels are only rated
| for those higher power breakers in a few of the slots (not
| anywhere), and thus you have to move lower power breakers
| around to make room for the higher powered ones.
| bmitc wrote:
| I have been considering this but haven't arrived at the right
| platform to use yet. I've considered Notion, Confluence, and
| other such things. Ideally I want calendar integration where we
| all know who has what appointment on what day and various other
| documented things about the house, mainly for our own needs, cat
| sitters, etc.
|
| What tools do people use for this stuff?
| RasmusMerirand wrote:
| We have built out home management platform https://dobu.me for
| more of the maintenace handling, but I would really appreciate
| if you could give it a go and let me know your thoughts :)
| renewiltord wrote:
| I just have a Google Doc with all of the stuff in there:
|
| - utilities and where they're paid and expected cost
|
| - issues if any with common appliances, e.g. -
| dishwasher occasionally needs to be manually spun with size 7 hex
| key (placed under)
|
| - who I've given keys to
|
| - where I pay rent to and when and how much
|
| - how to request access to the home lights and voice system
|
| I just call it a House Manual and since it's easy to put pictures
| and stuff into a Google Doc and you can put videos somewhere
| else. The primary consumer of this is me. My wife just remembers
| everything.
| alaskamiller wrote:
| Airbnb hosts do this.
|
| An engineering friend of mine has documented and labeled every
| aspect of his vacation rental in Hawaii.
|
| The only thing is, it's styled the same as the 1980s terminal
| systems he worked on down to the embossed black tape labels that
| gets attached to every switch, knob, and dial.
|
| Treat your house like a black box.
| dekhn wrote:
| Just thinking about those labels made me flash back to the
| 1980s. I hated the embossed black tape label aesthetic.
| tky wrote:
| The concept is spot on but the implementation seems awfully
| complex.
|
| My strategy that has scaled well over several homes: write
| install date/vendor/serial on the front of appliance manuals and
| keep them in a folder. Yes, you can scan them but it's often
| easier to look at a paper manual while troubleshooting an
| appliance.
|
| For notes, punchlists, "how I did it" reminders and details, a
| shared Apple note or Notion page or Google doc is great. Spouse
| acceptance factor high and participation factor higher.
| weirdkid wrote:
| Awesome advice and a great way to prepare for unexpected death or
| incapacitation (if you are the one in your family who usually
| handles all this stuff). I only would add that if you do go ahead
| with this, use tools or a medium that mere mortals are familiar
| with. Assume the person who needs to read it only knows git as a
| Larry the Cable Guy reference ("git 'er done!").
| yaky wrote:
| Exactly my thoughts as well. Labels and stickers in appropriate
| locations. E.g: my house has junction boxes with circuit labels
| in marker. Notes for appliance specifics, filter sizes, etc.
| This way the information can be found at the relevant location,
| does not get deleted, or goes behind a paywall.
|
| Us tech people love to over-complicate things sometimes.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| I think this overly technical approach from the OP is terrible
| for a handover. You're now tied to this exact stack of
| technologies and after your death, it won't be updated even
| once.
|
| I tape the manual and the transit bolts of a dishwasher to the
| top of it and that's it. For heating and stuff, a laminated
| sheet of paper attached to the pipe does the trick. If you love
| all things digital, create a shared online folder filled with
| .docx documents. For those you'll find a tool to open and edit
| them in 40 years time.
|
| Sure, for some the creation of the digital stack _is_ the
| purpose itself. But documentation that lasts decades? I don 't
| believe it.
| walteweiss wrote:
| Why don't do both? I do both. Long digital documentation and
| short one printed on a piece of paper attached to the thing.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Wow! I love this. I'm going to copy the hell out of this.
|
| I'm a proud "organized person" and have documentation for family
| and relatives. I've got the "Inventory" for most major appliances
| and long-term items in the house. On my wife's side, they are a
| massive Indian family with 20+ cousins across each generation
| living in large mansions spanning a tiny community. Most of the
| time, the wife or I would call from across the country to ask
| where "that was kept," which services go where, and which cable
| (I labeled most of them) to look for when the Internet goes down.
| The in-laws would keep a list of what to set up, fix, and
| organize when I visit next.
|
| I'm not in favor of using any software or tools for these. I want
| to stay with OpenFormats, plain-text, PDFs, etc, organized in
| files. Since the pandemic, I have been slowly documenting and
| collecting the medical records of my immediate family. This has
| helped a lot when the father-in-law had to go through an
| extensive heart-related treatment last year.
|
| Thanks for doing this. This is a big inspiration, though a tad
| more micro and technical than I wanted. I suggest others who
| haven't started something -- stay simple and keep it to files --
| something that would have worked 20 years ago and will likely
| work in the next 50 years. If you use a tool, it should be like a
| varnish on top; the contents should work on its own.
| tomcam wrote:
| > On my wife's side, they are a massive Indian family with 20+
| cousins across each generation living in large mansions
| spanning a tiny community.
|
| Well I want to see the Bollywood musical about that family,
| preferably with a triumphant return of Priyanka Chopra, and
| music by Devi Sri Prasad.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| LOL! It is indeed a masala of everything. ;-)
|
| Once, the Father-in-law had to be told to stop his speech
| mid-way the 30-min mark at a family gathering. Yes, the
| family often had to organize big meetups and the elders had
| to give speeches. This is a family spread across countries,
| embracing multiple religions, languages, and beliefs - so
| speech-lot-happens-a-lot.
| jairuhme wrote:
| I see a few comments describing how their documentation that they
| handed over went without love. I'll add a different perspective.
| I bought a fixer upper (really just needed a face lift) from a
| couple who's parents lived there but passed away. The only thing
| left behind was a plastic bag of appliance manuals, some old
| receipts, and most importantly, a sheet of paper with dates, when
| things were updated, and how much it cost. This has been
| extremely valuable to me, allowing me to take the guesswork out
| of figuring out how old my A/C or furnace is, when the basement
| was remodeled, or how much carpet was ordered for the spare
| bedroom. This was a blessing to have as a first time homeowner
| and I am very grateful to have had that handed down.
| dekhn wrote:
| We got the same when my parents moved into their current house
| (about 35 years ago). I thought it was a very grown-up thing-
| not just appliance manuals, but actual hand-written
| explanations of where all the important things were and details
| on the history of the house. It felt uncommon and special but I
| guess it isn't!
| bombcar wrote:
| I don't bother writing documentation, I write on the pipes and
| walls and equipment.
|
| My furnace has the install date in sharpie on it, along with
| maintenance dates.
|
| The main sewer line has the last time it was cleared, who
| cleared it, and where the blockage was.
|
| An industrial label printer makes these easy.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I think it is a great startup to provide a repository that pulls
| from public records as well as any private details you provide
| and centralizes this information.
|
| For example, your HVAC, water heater, central circuitboard, and
| central air system can have maintenance schedules and technical
| info, but that can be hard to know, because all you usually have
| is a model number.
|
| Likewise with the coming home solar revolution and home storage
| systems, there will be other major systems that will be long
| lasting and major cornerstones of your house.
|
| Also, your utlities can provide info. All of it can be
| centralized into a dashboard.
|
| What I want to avoid though is the geewhiz smarthome. Sure it can
| integrate with that eventually, but I think people would like
| better info about a basic dumb home.
|
| Maybe provide a service where someone comes (or they send you a
| kit) to scan the house with those things that can see through
| drywall, scan for heat maps/leaks, or just scan the shape of each
| room and form a map of the house. Of course this provides
| opportunities for upsales and the like.
| mrmlz wrote:
| https://www.homer.co/
|
| Pulls data from Swedish public records - not sure how it
| handles other countries.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I made a manual for my house and have been fortunate to meet
| previous owners. My house hasn't changed hands often but it's old
| so naturally a variety of things have been done. Myself, I've
| made massive changes.
|
| The future owners will have a manual detailing everything worth
| knowing as I judge it.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| I buy a small moleskine notebook for every house we've bought,
| that becomes the 'house book'. Major appliance purchases, dates
| and serial numbers. A 'local' copy of the circuit breakers.
| Renovations with dates, costs. Room diagrams with measurements.
|
| But also things like the paint codes and finishes for every room,
| trim, ceilings, etc. That really comes in handy when you have to
| do a drywall repair or something and the only can you have left,
| the paint has slopped over the label.
|
| I also had a separate notebook for The Move and The Purchase. It
| had all the contacts - mortgage lending officer, realtors,
| inspectors; appointments, vendors, dates of major events; move-in
| punch list, move-out punch list, inventory with what to keep,
| what to toss, what to donate. Expenditures, documents to drop off
| at which municipal offices along with addresses and phone
| numbers.
|
| It's really empowering to have all that information literally at
| your fingertips.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| > the paint codes and finishes for every room, trim, ceilings
|
| Paint codes alone are so worthwhile. My current house has three
| light greys in it that are all subtly different and when I
| moved in there was just one grey paint can in the basement with
| no indication which one of them it was.
| grogenaut wrote:
| can you not just take a paint chip to sherwan williams or
| equivalent and have them match it? That's what we did when we
| repainted our house just to make sure and we had done the
| previous paint as well.
| mrmlz wrote:
| The O.G paint-code can be hard to find if its been awhile
| and exposed to the elements etc.
| saalweachter wrote:
| A big step for me was just figuring out which hardware
| store the previous owner frequented.
|
| Each major line of paints has slightly different colors,
| so figuring out of it was Sherwin Williams, Behr,
| Valspar, etc let me identify the right color collection
| and narrow things down enough for me to guess what he was
| using.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The original paint chip with the name on it doesn't need to
| be matched because they can just look up the formula.
|
| A chip as in a sample of the drywall... that I've found to
| be much more of a mixed bag. My last "matched" paint was
| nowhere close once the sun was shining on it.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Unless the wall was painted 20 years ago and the paint code
| you have no longer matches the current paint.
|
| Source: this happened to my mom and she ended up with
| slightly discolored spot that people always assumed was a
| reflected light source.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| I've always done this for my cars\trucks, every oil and filter
| change, tires and other assorted parts. Since I never trade in my
| vehicles and keep them at least ten or more years, the list can
| get long. (I give the vehicle away when I want to upgrade.) On
| appliances for the home, I always keep the owners manuals and
| make notes in them as needed. (Sadly, some newer appliances don't
| have paper manuals any longer.)
|
| The only flaw in my system is I tend to use a kind of short-hand
| in my record keeping. Thus, when I gave my Mazda 5 minivan to my
| daughter and son-in-law, I had to explained a few things. :-)
|
| A word of caution: Never give away a vehicle that isn't in safe
| working operation! I put a lot of money in the above Mazda to
| keep it safe for myself. I would still be driving it, I just
| needed a truck.
| superultra wrote:
| This didn't happen to me but to a friend. She lives in an old
| home and has a neverending list of projects, many of which she
| took up during the pandemic. She would often livestream her rehab
| at nights just to connect to people as she worked.
|
| One night she was streaming the teardown of a bathroom wall.
| There, in between the walls, was a clipboard with some notes. She
| slowly took the clipboard up and started reading. Of course we
| couldn't see what she was reading, but she started to cry and
| sniffle.
|
| The clipboard had a list of wiring and installations. Had been
| written in the 70s. But the front page was a note, she told as
| she started crying, that said that rehabbing is hard and
| sometimes lonely work. But to keep at it because one day it's
| worth it!
|
| That moment arrived at a particularly lonely part of the pandemic
| for her and those of us watching. Whoever wrote that note and
| left that documentation from 50 or so years ago of course had no
| idea how it would find the reader(s) but could there have been a
| more perfect, beautiful moment than the moment my friend found it
| in the wall?
| kaycebasques wrote:
| My uncle lives in an old house in Lodi. He took down some
| kitchen walls for a major remodel. Somehow, a bunch of letters
| from the 1920s had slipped between the cracks and got stuck in
| the wall. It was a bunch of heartwarming, innocent
| correspondence between the family members now living in
| California and the ones who stayed back in Oklahoma (or
| somewhere like that). Uncle chokes up every time he reads those
| letters.
| mavhc wrote:
| Behind the wallpaper I removed was a marriage proposal to the
| previous owner, her relatives still live next door so I got
| to show them
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Marshalls ?
| bombcar wrote:
| All I found was lots of empty bottles of "medicinal" alcohol.
| sghiassy wrote:
| What a fun story. Thanks for sharing :)
| fsckboy wrote:
| next time you post change the story, say that the clipboard had
| half of her current to do list!
| agumonkey wrote:
| unless the previous owner was a rockstar renovator who only
| left "the work is self documenting" on a postit
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| the real 10xers used asbestos everywhere, the magic material
| that gets it done quick
| taneq wrote:
| npm i radium
| moffkalast wrote:
| "If it was hard to build it should be hard to maintain"
| apwell23 wrote:
| She couldve planted that herself to make livestream more
| interesting with some sentimental drama.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Interesting that your first thought upon reading something
| like this is that it could have been faked, complete with
| reason. I think that says more about you than that it does
| about the person described in the story.
| js2 wrote:
| She could write a movie from her story:
|
| > On 31 August 1997, startled by the news of the death of
| Diana, Princess of Wales, Amelie drops a plastic perfume-
| stopper, which dislodges a wall tile and accidentally reveals
| an old metal box which contains childhood memorabilia hidden by
| a boy who lived in her apartment decades earlier.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A9lie
|
| > While filing, Craig discovers a small hidden door. He crawls
| through it into a tunnel and finds himself inside the mind of
| actor John Malkovich.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_John_Malkovich
|
| > A woman (credited as "M") mentions to her musician husband
| (credited as "C") that as a child, she moved residences
| frequently and took to hiding little notes wherever she lived.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Ghost_Story
| jacquesm wrote:
| I totally get that vibe. I've rebuilt an old farmhouse on my
| own and it was one of the most exhausting things I've ever
| done. It got to the point that I could hardly look at it for
| fear of sinking down furhter so I made the smallest room (2x2
| meters) into a refuge from the insanity and I made it picture
| perfect. So the rest of house was in various stages of
| demolition and reconstruction but that one room survived
| through all of it and it really helped me to stay sane. In the
| end it all worked out but that was an insane amount of work.
| The worst bit was that all of the floor joists had either given
| out or were so rotten that they had to be replaced so there was
| a point when you just had a empty space with the roof on top
| and some bracing to stop the walls from pushing out. It would
| have probably been better and faster to knock the whole thing
| over and start from scratch but I was dead set on keeping the
| outside without any visible modification other than a single
| tilt window added in one of the roof surfaces.
|
| After that I've done two more major jobs on other houses but
| I'm at the end of my enthusiasm for this kind of work.
| cdchn wrote:
| Interstitial home spaces are the 20th century's message in a
| bottle.
| mtillman wrote:
| OP mentions using robots.txt to avoid crawling but even google
| ignores this now correct?
|
| 1. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-robots-txt-
| noinde...
| lwhsiao wrote:
| OP here. I'm not sure about the details in your link, but
| basically my understanding lines up with [1]; robots.txt isn't
| guaranteed to be respected, but generally is.
|
| FWIW, what I specifically have in robots.txt is
| User-agent: * Disallow: /
|
| which seems to work well for me so far (i.e., I do not find my
| house documentation site on any search engine).
|
| [1]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-
| indexing/...
| saalweachter wrote:
| If I understand the details of the link, it was a particular
| feature of robots.txt that was considered
| undocumented/unsupported that Google dropped support for.
|
| I _think_ the point of it was that you could tell Google to
| crawl some pages (for links) but not index them?
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| I like the site layout, theme, and functionality. Can some please
| tell me which system it is? Thanks!
| lwhsiao wrote:
| OP here. First, thank you!
|
| The site is a simple statically generated site (I use Zola
| [1]). The theme of the site is inspired by Researcher [2], a
| theme for Jekyll (another static site generator). I've been
| meaning to open source my version and add it to the official
| list of Zola themes [3], but just haven't gotten around to it
| quite yet. I also use openring-rs [4] for the pseudo webring at
| the bottom of the posts.
|
| [1]: https://www.getzola.org/
|
| [2]: https://ankitsultana.com/researcher/
|
| [3]: https://www.getzola.org/themes/
|
| [4]: https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs
| walteweiss wrote:
| I was about to ask the same, and here is your reply already!
| Thanks.
|
| I would be glad to use your theme whenever it is ready.
| avikalp wrote:
| Wow, I had been thinking about this for so long! I have had the
| same problems and was thinking of solutions on the same line.
|
| Although, even as a developer, I am not a big fan of how much
| time and energy we need to spend maintaining documentation. So
| while I build something to work towards automating documentation
| in software (with my effort at vibinex.com), I have also been
| thinking about home documentation automation.
| RasmusMerirand wrote:
| What thoughts have you had?
| cyberax wrote:
| The best advice for me was: get a label maker. Centralized
| documentation is great, smart home stuff is usually not a big
| deal to factory reset in the worst case.
|
| But tracing all the Cat5 cables, and security sensors (if you
| have a hardwired security) is a PITA. And you WILL need to tinker
| with them eventually.
| guidoism wrote:
| This is exactly what I do. I call it my "Homeowner's Operating
| Manual" and it's based on the idea of an individual aircraft's
| POH. It's all there. Everything I've done to the house.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| At the risk of giving landlords too many ideas, I think it would
| be great if landlords provided documentation to tenants as well.
| There's a lot of maintenance that tenants would frankly be more
| than happy to carry out, but don't because they don't know what
| to do, and they don't want to be blamed by their landlord if they
| stuff it up. Many things I see landlords complain about seem like
| they could be fixed by simply providing clear advice for tenants.
| But again, most landlords have pretty warped ideas about wear and
| tear and what their legal and/or ethical obligations are twloward
| tenants. Most landlords would probably take this advice and run
| with expecting their tenants to do constant unpaid maintenance.
| So I dunno what the solution is there.
| zubairq wrote:
| This is a good idea, and something that I need, although I think
| I will just go for a google doc to document my house since it
| needs to be edited by non techies too
| laowantong wrote:
| As an Airbnb host, I have done this sort of thing for my guests
| and my own usage, but with a "flat" structure: a simple,
| searchable inventory (https://maisonrougevernet.fr/inventaire)
| which doubles as technical documentation for some items (with
| optionally links to PDFs, videos, etc.).
| otikik wrote:
| This amount of organization feels alien to me. The title of the
| article might as well have been "how to fly by moving your ears
| really fast"
| pelasaco wrote:
| So good, I would love to do it, but I guess I wouldn't have the
| necessary discipline. I will add it to the todo list
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Did this last summer. Started as docs for friends taking care of
| the house for a couple of weeks. Used the multi-language feature
| of some Hugo theme to switch between 'guest' and 'inhabitant'
| docs.
|
| Was great when my youngest wanted to make her first coffee
| herself. "Open your phone and go to home.family.tld and click on
| howtos!"
| lynx23 wrote:
| Regarding documentation of physical objects... I am blind. For
| some time in my life, I was able to remember the layout of
| various devices in my household. I mean, which button does what,
| and which jack is for what... But after a while, and especially
| when I started to pick up a eurorack habit, I realized I need to
| document front/back panels of devices I don't use on a daily
| basis regularily. All the layout tools I looked at were totally
| useless to me, since they assume (understandably) that drawing
| graphics is the way to go. However, as a Braille user, I'd much
| rather prefer something that can output ASCII in such a way that
| the 2D relations between items is at least vaguely preserved.
| Also, it would be great if the data entered were somehow
| searchable. I never found anything remotely resembling what I
| need, so I went for hand-crafted .txt files for now. It works,
| but it is unsatisfactory. I'd much rather specify the position
| and function of panel items in some kind of DSL, and have the
| necessary 2d layout ASCII diagrams and legend generated
| automatically. Does anyone know of some tools I might have missed
| whiich could help with this? I was tempted to invent my own DSL,
| but that felt like reinventing some wheel that must be lying
| around somewhere...
| jeron wrote:
| This guy worked for 2.5 years and already bought a house in the
| Bay Area
|
| Granted, he has a PhD, but must be nice...
| lwhsiao wrote:
| OP here, I, like many, cannot afford a home in the Bay. After
| our first kiddo, we moved closer to family in a much more
| affordable area and I work remotely now.
|
| My mortgage is less than the rent of our previous 1 bedroom
| apartment in Sunnyvale!
| kaffeeringe wrote:
| Sometimes a friend or my in-laws live in our appartment to watch
| our cat. I drew some how-tos. For feeding our cat, cleaning the
| litterbox. But also how to use the remotes to turn lights on and
| off.
| rtpg wrote:
| Since the just script has a virtualenv incantation, I will once
| again recommend direnv to any Pythonistas out there. Stick
| "layout python" at the top, have your python stuff be managed for
| you (modulo having to be within the directory or subdirectory of
| the project). It's so nice and helps me to avoid so many
| problems.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Direnv is my favourite tool I've discovered this year. Apart
| from Python I also use it for k8s config. You can store your
| cluster creds and namespace etc with the project so kubectl
| just works for each project.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| As a new homeowner myself, this is a neat idea! I have a lot of
| notes of my house, etc but they are scattered everywhere in my
| almost 2k+ Apple notes, calendar (for logging) and Day One (for
| additional logging). I need a system.
| RasmusMerirand wrote:
| We created a home management platform https://dobu.me just for
| this, I would really appreciate if you could give it a go and
| let me know your thoughts :)
| lawgimenez wrote:
| It's not even opening.
| sghiassy wrote:
| Good idea
|
| The cynic in me, says entropy will destroy your house and your
| documentation
|
| ... but I also read a touching comment on this thread to the
| contrary, so what do I know :)
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| All we can do is rage against the dying of the light and
| decrease entropy locally to try and maintain our house and
| documentation.
| UberFly wrote:
| Text files printed out in an easy to access location. Don't
| complicate the lives of those coming after you.
| jwmoz wrote:
| First known case of over-engineering for house documentation.
| littlelady wrote:
| I do this already. We have a binder that contains all of the
| projects that we have done since moving into our home sorted by
| area and then by year.
|
| I wouldn't do it digitally, because I also keep paint samples and
| notes that I've taken during the work in the binder. If I had to
| re-enter those notes I don't know that they would happen.
| squirrel23 wrote:
| The idea of writing up a documentation for your house is the most
| engineering thing I ever heard lol. On a side note, really good
| read :)
| 6510 wrote:
| Fun fact: Having great logs for a boat adds a lot of value to it.
| The value of a house in contrast is determined by people who know
| nothing about houses. They wouldn't see the value of it. A buyer
| might get it tho.
|
| While organizing the documentation is very nice your future self
| should be able to find what they are looking for if there is just
| a log/journal. I don't think it needs to be very organized unless
| it is consulted frequently.
| splitbrain wrote:
| As a first time home owner I fully agree. I set up a wiki and
| document everything.
|
| It's roughly organized by room. General Utilities have their own
| pages. Drawings, Photos, Invoices all get uploaded there. My wife
| writes down where which plants got planted in the garden and how
| they need to maintained.
|
| My hope is that this not only helps us when trying to remember
| where we put those cables or when an inspection is due but will
| also make selling in the far future a bit easier. And of course
| future owners will hopefully thank us.
| walteweiss wrote:
| Honestly, I thought I'm the only one who does that up until
| today!
| RasmusMerirand wrote:
| Our startup https://dobu.me is solving just this problem. We are
| testing our product for free and currently you can upload your
| home documentation - with AI we will create products out of them
| and if something needs regular maintenance we automatically
| remind you. Plus we have an AI chat so you can "talk" with your
| home.
|
| We based in Estonia and soon new real estate developments here
| will come with our platform instead of the paper documentation.
| We are currently looking into the US market and if you have any
| ideas or feedback, email me at: rasmus@dobu.ee
| 392 wrote:
| https://dobu.ee
| 23B1 wrote:
| We just keep everything in a big binder and have a dedicated
| email address for the house. When we sell, we'll just hand the
| whole thing over. No need to overthink ig.
| znpy wrote:
| I do this, but I run a private instance in MediaWiki which is
| only reachable either from the home network or via the VPN.
|
| The nice thing about this setup is that editing is pleasant (and
| fast in iteration), I can use categories to group pages together
| and I can use some interesting plugins, like the one to embed PDF
| files into wiki pages.
|
| The latter (embedding PDF files into wiki pages) is particularly
| useful because I can browse appliances manuals directly from the
| wiki page itself or download them if necessary, and I have a
| "Manuals" category where i can find all the manuals I have
| collected so far.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The best suggestion I've seen on this is to set up an e-mail
| address for the house and to then use it for signing up for
| registering appliances and so forth.
| vazkus wrote:
| I did exactly this when I bought my house in 2018. It's @gmail
| and I'm using the drive for storing photos and notes from my
| DIY projects or contractor work, whatever documentation have on
| appliances, etc. If I ever sell my house, I'll just pass the
| password for the email account.
| alfnor wrote:
| I would set up a wiki but also make regular printed backups: on-
| site for when the electricity is out, and off-site in case of
| fire.
| bergie wrote:
| We have a website documenting our boat, including systems and
| checklists for common operations. When we get sailing guests, it
| is easy to send them a link. https://handbook.lille-oe.de/
|
| That said, there are some good additional ideas in the post and
| this thread that we'll have to consider incorporating.
| JZL003 wrote:
| This is not the same, and might not get house-mate approval, but
| I like writing little notes in-situ where I need them. For
| laundry, little checklists of things I forget to wash (bathroom
| rugs smh), how long each cycle takes. Houseplants can keep when
| they were last watered nearby. Only works for high-use areas but
| still useful
| alkonaut wrote:
| The thing about docs is that it's tempting to write it and then
| forget it. And the only thing worse than no docs is outdated
| docs. Just like my password manager consists of 50/50 passwords I
| have since updated but not re-entered into the password manager
| (thus making it frustrating and useless) any big pile of docs
| will quickly become outdated and then first frustrating, finally
| useless. This isn't a one off weekend project to "document your
| home". It's a commitment that lasts as long as you live there.
| Unless you want to know the model of your _last_ dishwasher, you
| need to wonder if you really have a passion for this project.
| butz wrote:
| I've created github page for my house. Waiting for PRs now.
| incomingpain wrote:
| When I bought my house recently. I documented everything! I had
| everything in this blog! It was great, found an open source app
| to organize it. Very wiki-like.
|
| I was so impressed with my accomplishment. Then I'm not sure what
| happened. The database wouldn't open anymore. None of my backups
| would work neither. Super confusing. 100% sure those backups
| ought to open but super wierd.
|
| Worse yet, it should have been plain text disk storage... it
| wasnt anymore? There isn't any encryption or passwords for this
| simple app.
|
| My tip: Make sure you use an app your familiar with.
| zie wrote:
| I start a fossil project for every house I work on (fossil-
| scm.org) I tend to use the Wiki function and set it up at some
| website somewhere, so I can refer to it while @ hardware stores,
| etc.
|
| I always hand a copy off to whoever ends up owning the house, I
| doubt they ever use it, but it's handy while I am doing it to
| keep track of stuff. I do it _for me_. If it 's useful for
| others, that's for them to determine.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| One thing that won't work is the "what exactly is the paint"
| thing. Even if the paint is still made, and the colour code is
| still valid... the paint won't match it. Paint fades over time.
| So you might as well just take a chip of it to the paint store
| for matching, and resign yourself to having to repaint one
| "surface" (to the nearest corners).
|
| As for hidden "time capsules" - I actually left one of those as a
| kid in a house that was being built at the time. About 45 years
| later, with me long moved to another continent, that wall was
| being modified and they found the note behind the paneling and
| sent me a photo of it. I hadn't remembered leaving it there.
| jonah wrote:
| We have an architecturally significant, historic house (built in
| the 1930s) for our office.
|
| I was tasked with replacing the Eero WiFi mesh with something
| that actually worked. We needed APs both upstairs and downstairs
| to provide sufficient coverage - especially through the lath-and-
| plaster walls.
|
| It was _really_ frustrating for a couple reasons - first, the
| original design left no open risers to run cabling between the
| floors and even thought there was a nice 3' tall attic between
| the ceiling and flat roof, there is no access to it save a 1x2'
| port in a closet which is blocked by framing members and retrofit
| HVAC ducting. Secondly, over the years, multiple generations of
| cabling had been installed allover the building - several sets of
| coax - presumably for TV as well as CCTV, and bundles and at
| least 5 different generations of CAT-5e and CAT-6 had been run
| from the equipment closet across the house through the crawlspace
| and up through the walls to the second floor and attic. In all
| cases, the bundles of cables had been clipped off and shoved back
| through the floor or the cables were cut off, their wall boxes
| removed, and the holes plastered over leaving it all essentially
| useless. It made the interior nice and slick, but completely
| wasted all the effort of the generations of previous installers
| and perfectly good cabling.
|
| Why couldn't they have just left everything in place and used
| block-off plates, or plastered over but left the wiring un-cut
| and documented the spots where the cables were. Or something,
| anything.
|
| I was able to tone out a cable that I could reach from the
| ceiling access port and another in the crawlspace, re-terminate
| them and poke the other ends back up through the floor in the
| equipment closet and get a couple APs installed, but what a PITA.
|
| /rant
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This is a great idea for all kinds of reasons, including setting
| your cost basis when you finally sell the house.
|
| I did some of this for my house sitters, since they need it.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Many stories from people creating documentation only for it to
| get thrown away. Let me share an opposite one:
|
| I bought a house that was empty after divorce, both had moved out
| some months before. We mostly dealt with the agent, only saw one
| of the previous owners for a very short time at the signing
| meeting with the notary.
|
| Then in the house we found a "congratulations on your new place"
| card, a bottle of sparkling wine, and a binder with everything
| about the house. Building plans, updated plans for changes made,
| exactly where every cable and connection was, and manuals,
| invoices and warranty certificates for equipment in the house.
| And a hand drawn map of the garden with what type of plant was
| where, and links to plant care instructions for some of the more
| exotic plants.
|
| Super nice of the previous owner to arrange these things, and I'm
| still thankful every time I need to get a cable somewhere or do
| some small construction things. Having detailed and accurate
| plans and overviews saves a lot of time.
| ff317 wrote:
| I bought a new-construction place, and I was around during the
| process. After they were done with all the plumbing/wiring/etc,
| but before they filled in the insulation and sheetrock, I
| walked the whole house and took cellphone pictures of every
| bare wall to show where all the pipes and wires are run, and
| then labelled it all up by room. I plan to hand those off if I
| ever sell the place! I don't know why builders don't just
| deliver such a set of photos to everyone by default, it's been
| super handy!
| Mtinie wrote:
| I agree it's very handy. To provide one answer to the
| question in your final sentence:
|
| "Closed walls hide many sins."
| danofsteel32 wrote:
| I am a custom home builder and we do this. It's very handy
| when the drywallers cover up an outlet or switch.
| nelsonic wrote:
| Could you share a photo (with any sensitive detail obfuscated)
| to give us an idea of what this looks like? We are hoping to
| produce something similar for our house.
| crq-yml wrote:
| The three-ring binder is vastly underused as a personal
| organizational tool. It folds up and shelves nicely, and when
| you stuff it with accessories, it will hold every small gadget,
| manual, extra screw and receipt.
|
| I have a whole stack of them for various things.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| When I built my house, I took a Matterport scan before the
| drywall was put in, and again after. Best decision I ever made.
| It's like X-ray vision for walls.
|
| It's handy to know where wiring runs are, how many studs are
| between windows when mounting tv's, and a dozen other electrical,
| ac, or plumbing issues. I used it once a week initially and
| probably once every two months now that we're settled.
|
| Also recommend a Dymo Rhino 5200 cable label maker with heat
| shrink tubing. I print the label on some heat shrink, attach it
| to a wire, and never wonder where anything goes again. Great for
| vehicle wiring harnesses too:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LcUQeTzIo4&t=66s But I'd
| recommend the 5200: https://www.amazon.com/DYMO-Industrial-RHINO-
| Label-1755749/d... - non-affiliate link.
| graton wrote:
| When you post an affiliate link it would be nice if you stated
| so.
|
| This has the affiliate tag of: pmg097-20
|
| Without any affiliate link it is: https://www.amazon.com/DYMO-
| Authentic-Industrial-RhinoPro-18...
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| Sorry, here's the source on the original:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LcUQeTzIo4
| crispyambulance wrote:
| This is VERY a good idea.
|
| I have a steam-based heat and didn't understand, when I first
| moved in, what was required in terms of maintenance. You MUST
| flush the boiler at least every season and preferably once a
| month. 5 years later I needed a boiler replacement-- just shear
| ignorance on my part.
| bjt12345 wrote:
| Good idea.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Really good to do this!
|
| I recently had drama with a contractor... it went into mediation,
| and the contractor was able to say, "How do we know this damage
| wasn't caused before we got there?" Contractors are shady, and
| likely that wouldn't change, but I wish I had more photos of my
| house before the flood.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anyone-have-connections-usaa-...
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