Writing documentation for your house

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!").

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.

OP mentions using robots.txt to avoid crawling but even google ignores this now correct?

1. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-robots-txt-noinde...

And for running the house - Jeffery Epstein's Household Manual:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21128538-gx-606

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

I like the site layout, theme, and functionality. Can some please tell me which system it is? Thanks!

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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…

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.

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 :)

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 :)

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)

- 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.

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

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”

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.

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...

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.

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.).

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.

First known case of over-engineering for house documentation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've created github page for my house. Waiting for PRs now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Text files printed out in an easy to access location. Don't complicate the lives of those coming after you.

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.

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

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.

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!”

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.