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Writing documentation for your house

efitz
53 replies
15h39m

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.

ozim
11 replies
7h14m

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
10 replies
5h21m

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
3 replies
4h27m

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
2 replies
3h6m

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.

tivert
0 replies
28m

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.

njarboe
0 replies
1h11m

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.

notahacker
1 replies
3h16m

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
0 replies
2h51m

Everything is more fun when it is opt-in

eddieroger
1 replies
3h32m

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
0 replies
1h44m

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.

digging
0 replies
1h12m

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.

caseysoftware
0 replies
2h42m

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/CaseySoftware/status/1728507279001923983

abraae
9 replies
15h1m

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
6 replies
13h28m

Why would you use AWS for that? That seems like an extremely strange external dependency for a house running on rainwater.

abraae
3 replies
12h51m

Just for history. Current values are available without internet on the esp32.

SpaghettiCthulu
2 replies
12h27m

why not use a local server, even just an RPi?

j45
0 replies
11h37m

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
0 replies
10h14m

Mainly visions/delusions of a water monitoring SaaS, but it would probably run just fine on a pi

Sakos
1 replies
13h19m

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
0 replies
12h17m

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.

bigiain
1 replies
12h26m

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
0 replies
11h51m

Then go out of business and leave them with an expensive paperweight.

c22
7 replies
14h58m

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.

Wistar
3 replies
10h13m

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
2 replies
9h36m

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?

tivert
0 replies
22m

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.

sokoloff
0 replies
4h13m

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.

20after4
1 replies
14h19m

That sounds like $600 well spent. My pre-purchase inspection didn't even uncover some fairly obvious unsafe wiring.

Cthulhu_
0 replies
4h40m

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
0 replies
14h4m

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.

natmaka
6 replies
14h20m

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.

Gigachad
2 replies
11h53m

If I bought a house that had a bunch of IoT junk, my first step would be to rip it all out.

j45
1 replies
11h39m

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
0 replies
4h49m

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

xyzzy123
1 replies
13h36m

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
0 replies
5h59m

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.

pjerem
0 replies
9h5m

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.

AtlasBarfed
5 replies
14h29m

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.

darkwater
1 replies
7h26m

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
0 replies
42m

Is it possible to rip off the devices and use it at your new location?

j45
0 replies
11h36m

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.

grogenaut
0 replies
12h13m

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.

chimprich
0 replies
6h40m

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.

Nzen
2 replies
12h54m

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
1 replies
10h0m

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
0 replies
9h36m

Could you share a link to your found solution? Thanks!

waveBidder
0 replies
15h16m

nothing productive to add, but man that sucks.

somehnguy
0 replies
43m

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.

mock-possum
0 replies
7h1m

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.

mikepurvis
0 replies
13h34m

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.

mhh__
0 replies
14h3m

Some people just aren't the type.

delecti
0 replies
3h28m

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.

StingyJelly
0 replies
8h26m

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.

chezball
38 replies
15h22m

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.

Larrikin
20 replies
13h8m

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...

mgsloan2
5 replies
10h52m

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
2 replies
10h45m

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.

taude
0 replies
2h53m

You're assuming they like pizza and want an 8x8' pizza oven taking up space in the back yard....

mozey
0 replies
7h37m

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.

hoseja
0 replies
8h56m

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.

delecti
0 replies
3h22m

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
4 replies
10h34m

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”?

toast0
0 replies
9h16m

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.

nostrademons
0 replies
9h52m

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.

mavhc
0 replies
7h27m

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

Fatnino
0 replies
10h16m

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.

Terr_
3 replies
8h53m

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
2 replies
2h52m

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
1 replies
2h26m

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
0 replies
2h9m

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.

peebeebee
1 replies
9h47m

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
0 replies
8h37m

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.

ajkjk
1 replies
12h19m

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
0 replies
9h40m

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.

dataengineer56
0 replies
6h4m

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.

argc
4 replies
14h57m

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
2 replies
14h25m

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
1 replies
12h9m

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
0 replies
3h14m

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”

Gigachad
0 replies
13h25m

Because it takes up space and is mostly pointless vs a portable propane or electric one.

htss2013
3 replies
14h24m

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
1 replies
10h40m

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
0 replies
8h42m

I think it's not even the case in developing economies, with substantial economic and population growth. It simply can't work like that.

balderdash
0 replies
3h21m

That probably worked when life expectancies were lower, where are people supposed to live the other 25+ years of housing?

ryandrake
1 replies
12h36m

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
0 replies
4h3m

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.

xyzelement
0 replies
14h48m

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.

walteweiss
0 replies
33m

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.

swells34
0 replies
13h2m

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.

pfd1986
0 replies
14h39m

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.

eddieroger
0 replies
14h18m

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.

alexandre_m
0 replies
13h3m

Unless you're selling to a family member, you just can't expect these things to last.

I share the feeling though.

superultra
9 replies
13h47m

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?

agumonkey
3 replies
7h23m

unless the previous owner was a rockstar renovator who only left "the work is self documenting" on a postit

quickthrower2
1 replies
6h41m

the real 10xers used asbestos everywhere, the magic material that gets it done quick

taneq
0 replies
3h32m

npm i radium

moffkalast
0 replies
57m

"If it was hard to build it should be hard to maintain"

kaycebasques
2 replies
13h17m

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.

mistrial9
0 replies
2h16m

Marshalls ?

mavhc
0 replies
7h39m

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

sghiassy
0 replies
8h56m

What a fun story. Thanks for sharing :)

fsckboy
0 replies
8h33m

next time you post change the story, say that the clipboard had half of her current to do list!

justinlloyd
7 replies
16h16m

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
5 replies
16h0m

Business idea - House Documentation as-a-service.

You fill in the blanks online and it generates the PDF for you.

djbusby
2 replies
15h43m

I was just working on that w/a friend. Great minds and all that.

thangalin
1 replies
14h36m

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
0 replies
12h37m

Domus is our code-name too. LMAO

m463
0 replies
9h23m

Only later it has unskippable ads for replacement furnace filters, for water filtration, for solar systems, for appliance upgrades, ...

CountGeek
0 replies
11h24m

There's this https://github.com/hay-kot/home box "inventory and organization system built for the Home User"

zie
0 replies
8m

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.

hotsauceror
6 replies
13h56m

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
5 replies
13h29m

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
3 replies
12h7m

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
1 replies
9h27m

The O.G paint-code can be hard to find if its been awhile and exposed to the elements etc.

saalweachter
0 replies
3h55m

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
0 replies
4h0m

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
0 replies
3h4m

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.

h2odragon
4 replies
15h18m

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?

bluGill
2 replies
14h20m

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
1 replies
13h37m

nah, those projects get secondary, subsidiary boxes off one of the 6-0 feeders.

bluGill
0 replies
3h25m

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.

nucleardog
0 replies
15h0m

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.

donatj
4 replies
15h33m

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
3 replies
15h25m

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
1 replies
15h11m

And with a cheap projector you can shine those pictures on the walls for X-ray vision. BTDT.

rootusrootus
0 replies
12h47m

oooh, now that's an idea I had not thought of. Thanks!

acherion
0 replies
11h48m

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!

weirdkid
2 replies
15h3m

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
0 replies
14h42m

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
0 replies
7h28m

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.

pmags
2 replies
20h1m

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.

moduspol
0 replies
15h0m

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.

akira2501
0 replies
16h15m

Seems like the perfect territory for a wiki. "Appliances/Furnace/Yearly Maintenance"

mtillman
2 replies
13h43m

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
1 replies
13h36m

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
0 replies
3h49m

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?

mhb
2 replies
16h3m

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

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

xpe
0 replies
15h37m

Yikes. Well played.

quickthrower2
0 replies
6h26m

Sinister source aside... that is very detailed, 1980s vibe, but dated 2005. Talks about telephone directories, and picking up the phone in 3 rings.

lawgimenez
2 replies
8h57m

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
1 replies
4h25m

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
0 replies
3h37m

It’s not even opening.

grepfru_it
2 replies
15h47m

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.

teeray
0 replies
15h30m

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

gooseyman
0 replies
15h31m

This is awesome. Have you ever considered publishing these?

dools
2 replies
15h32m

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
1 replies
14h1m

I'm building a recurring reminder system to scratch my own itch for this, with a checklist centered approach for home maintenance.

RasmusMerirand
0 replies
4h23m

No need for that, we built dobu.me for this, currety completely free as we are gathering feedback :)

blakesterz
2 replies
16h36m

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
0 replies
16h31m

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
0 replies
15h45m

I like this idea even more!

Brajeshwar
2 replies
14h49m

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
1 replies
14h34m

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
0 replies
14h25m

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.

xnx
1 replies
16h4m

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
0 replies
6h15m

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.

splitbrain
1 replies
5h49m

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
0 replies
18m

Honestly, I thought I’m the only one who does that up until today!

rtpg
1 replies
9h34m

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
0 replies
9h9m

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.

jeron
1 replies
10h14m

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
0 replies
7h2m

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!

jairuhme
1 replies
14h44m

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
0 replies
14h11m

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!

iJohnDoe
1 replies
13h30m

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

lwhsiao
0 replies
12h38m

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

davesmylie
1 replies
16h29m

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
0 replies
16h27m

Make sure you log in occasionally, or Google will delete the account due to inactivity.

bmitc
1 replies
15h10m

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
0 replies
4h26m

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 :)

avikalp
1 replies
13h11m

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
0 replies
4h31m

What thoughts have you had?

alaskamiller
1 replies
15h7m

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
0 replies
14h3m

Just thinking about those labels made me flash back to the 1980s. I hated the embossed black tape label aesthetic.

WillAdams
1 replies
3h33m

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
0 replies
50m

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.

RasmusMerirand
1 replies
5h11m

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
0 replies
4h49m
AtlasBarfed
1 replies
14h31m

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
0 replies
5h40m

https://www.homer.co/

Pulls data from Swedish public records - not sure how it handles other countries.

zubairq
0 replies
11h43m

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

znpy
0 replies
4h7m

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.

zie
0 replies
10m

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.

zellyn
0 replies
15h33m

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…

tky
0 replies
15h6m

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.

squirrel23
0 replies
6h1m

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 :)

sghiassy
0 replies
8h53m

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 :)

renewiltord
0 replies
15h8m

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.

pelasaco
0 replies
11h11m

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

otikik
0 replies
11h23m

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”

nemo44x
0 replies
14h2m

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.

lynx23
0 replies
10h38m

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...

littlelady
0 replies
7h4m

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.

laowantong
0 replies
11h43m

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.).

kaffeeringe
0 replies
9h52m

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.

jwmoz
0 replies
7h18m

First known case of over-engineering for house documentation.

justinzollars
0 replies
16h10m

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.

incomingpain
0 replies
34m

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.

guidoism
0 replies
12h46m

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.

duck
0 replies
16h13m

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.

cyberax
0 replies
12h57m

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.

butz
0 replies
1h9m

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

bloomingeek
0 replies
13h55m

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.

bergie
0 replies
3h13m

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.

alkonaut
0 replies
1h18m

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.

alfnor
0 replies
3h18m

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.

UberFly
0 replies
8h52m

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

SuperNinKenDo
0 replies
12h41m

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.

JZL003
0 replies
1h44m

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

6510
0 replies
5h58m

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.

28304283409234
0 replies
10h42m

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!”

23B1
0 replies
4h34m

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.