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?
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.
> On 31 August 1997, startled by the news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Amélie drops a plastic perfume-stopper, which dislodges a wall tile and accidentally reveals an old metal box which contains childhood memorabilia hidden by a boy who lived in her apartment decades earlier.
> A woman (credited as "M") mentions to her musician husband (credited as "C") that as a child, she moved residences frequently and took to hiding little notes wherever she lived.
I totally get that vibe. I've rebuilt an old farmhouse on my own and it was one of the most exhausting things I've ever done. It got to the point that I could hardly look at it for fear of sinking down furhter so I made the smallest room (2x2 meters) into a refuge from the insanity and I made it picture perfect. So the rest of house was in various stages of demolition and reconstruction but that one room survived through all of it and it really helped me to stay sane. In the end it all worked out but that was an insane amount of work. The worst bit was that all of the floor joists had either given out or were so rotten that they had to be replaced so there was a point when you just had a empty space with the roof on top and some bracing to stop the walls from pushing out. It would have probably been better and faster to knock the whole thing over and start from scratch but I was dead set on keeping the outside without any visible modification other than a single tilt window added in one of the roof surfaces.
After that I've done two more major jobs on other houses but I'm at the end of my enthusiasm for this kind of work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is also the option that she did read the binder and decided "No way am I going to deal with all the crap" and had all the "smarts" yanked out an replaced with something that requires much less maintenance. That would have been my reaction.
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.
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.
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.
When I was new to house shopping my wife and I found this house we loved. It had intricate patterns of mixed woods in the hardwood, French doors closing off a super nice dining room with wainscotting, and this super cool mid century river stone fireplace.
We had made all these plans to renovate the upstairs which was all that was needed. Then the day of the sale came, we got massively outbid, it sold at a silly price. We figured whoever bought it loved it equally.
Nope, a year later it was back on the market. The dining room had been torn out to make the ground floor open plan, the hardwood was completely replaced with cheap grey vinyl floor boards, and the fireplace was replaced with a small dining area.
It was painful to look at was clearly a well finished house turned into a cheap looking listing on AirBnB.
The binder I wish I had would have schematics for the structure and systems, maintenance records, checklists, vendor receipts, and manuals. No such luck.
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.
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.
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.
She did herself and the next owners a favor by ripping out the smarthome crap.
It's like shag carpet: faddy, kitsch, and high maintenance. Smarthome stuff in particular is just so overkill. I don't want to overengineer my home. I don't want apps and QR codes and documentation just to water my garden or operate the lights. I'm not a nerd who enjoys tinkering with this stuff. I have shit to do. I want my hose to work like a hose, my washing machine like a washing machine, etc. And that's the case for most people.
Playing with smarthome gadgets is a fun niche hobby, but it's not a hobby most people want.
Many stories from people creating documentation only for it to get thrown away. Let me share an opposite one:
I bought a house that was empty after divorce, both had moved out some months before. We mostly dealt with the agent, only saw one of the previous owners for a very short time at the signing meeting with the notary.
Then in the house we found a "congratulations on your new place" card, a bottle of sparkling wine, and a binder with everything about the house. Building plans, updated plans for changes made, exactly where every cable and connection was, and manuals, invoices and warranty certificates for equipment in the house. And a hand drawn map of the garden with what type of plant was where, and links to plant care instructions for some of the more exotic plants.
Super nice of the previous owner to arrange these things, and I'm still thankful every time I need to get a cable somewhere or do some small construction things. Having detailed and accurate plans and overviews saves a lot of time.
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.
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.
When I built my house, I took a Matterport scan before the drywall was put in, and again after. Best decision I ever made. It's like X-ray vision for walls.
It's handy to know where wiring runs are, how many studs are between windows when mounting tv's, and a dozen other electrical, ac, or plumbing issues. I used it once a week initially and probably once every two months now that we're settled.
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.
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.
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!").
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have an architecturally significant, historic house (built in the 1930s) for our office.
I was tasked with replacing the Eero WiFi mesh with something that actually worked. We needed APs both upstairs and downstairs to provide sufficient coverage - especially through the lath-and-plaster walls.
It was _really_ frustrating for a couple reasons - first, the original design left no open risers to run cabling between the floors and even thought there was a nice 3' tall attic between the ceiling and flat roof, there is no access to it save a 1x2' port in a closet which is blocked by framing members and retrofit HVAC ducting. Secondly, over the years, multiple generations of cabling had been installed allover the building - several sets of coax - presumably for TV as well as CCTV, and bundles and at least 5 different generations of CAT-5e and CAT-6 had been run from the equipment closet across the house through the crawlspace and up through the walls to the second floor and attic. In all cases, the bundles of cables had been clipped off and shoved back through the floor or the cables were cut off, their wall boxes removed, and the holes plastered over leaving it all essentially useless. It made the interior nice and slick, but completely wasted all the effort of the generations of previous installers and perfectly good cabling.
Why couldn't they have just left everything in place and used block-off plates, or plastered over but left the wiring un-cut and documented the spots where the cables were. Or something, anything.
I was able to tone out a cable that I could reach from the ceiling access port and another in the crawlspace, re-terminate them and poke the other ends back up through the floor in the equipment closet and get a couple APs installed, but what a PITA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] superultra|2 years ago|reply
One night she was streaming the teardown of a bathroom wall. There, in between the walls, was a clipboard with some notes. She slowly took the clipboard up and started reading. Of course we couldn’t see what she was reading, but she started to cry and sniffle.
The clipboard had a list of wiring and installations. Had been written in the 70s. But the front page was a note, she told as she started crying, that said that rehabbing is hard and sometimes lonely work. But to keep at it because one day it’s worth it!
That moment arrived at a particularly lonely part of the pandemic for her and those of us watching. Whoever wrote that note and left that documentation from 50 or so years ago of course had no idea how it would find the reader(s) but could there have been a more perfect, beautiful moment than the moment my friend found it in the wall?
[+] [-] kaycebasques|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|2 years ago|reply
> On 31 August 1997, startled by the news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Amélie drops a plastic perfume-stopper, which dislodges a wall tile and accidentally reveals an old metal box which contains childhood memorabilia hidden by a boy who lived in her apartment decades earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A9lie
> While filing, Craig discovers a small hidden door. He crawls through it into a tunnel and finds himself inside the mind of actor John Malkovich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_John_Malkovich
> A woman (credited as "M") mentions to her musician husband (credited as "C") that as a child, she moved residences frequently and took to hiding little notes wherever she lived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Ghost_Story
[+] [-] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
After that I've done two more major jobs on other houses but I'm at the end of my enthusiasm for this kind of work.
[+] [-] agumonkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsckboy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sghiassy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdchn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apwell23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efitz|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] c22|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natmaka|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beachy|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] StingyJelly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrweasel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nzen|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37860529
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mock-possum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] data-ottawa|2 years ago|reply
We had made all these plans to renovate the upstairs which was all that was needed. Then the day of the sale came, we got massively outbid, it sold at a silly price. We figured whoever bought it loved it equally.
Nope, a year later it was back on the market. The dining room had been torn out to make the ground floor open plan, the hardwood was completely replaced with cheap grey vinyl floor boards, and the fireplace was replaced with a small dining area.
It was painful to look at was clearly a well finished house turned into a cheap looking listing on AirBnB.
[+] [-] hedgehog|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delecti|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somehnguy|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nonethewiser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waveBidder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikepurvis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VoodooJuJu|2 years ago|reply
It's like shag carpet: faddy, kitsch, and high maintenance. Smarthome stuff in particular is just so overkill. I don't want to overengineer my home. I don't want apps and QR codes and documentation just to water my garden or operate the lights. I'm not a nerd who enjoys tinkering with this stuff. I have shit to do. I want my hose to work like a hose, my washing machine like a washing machine, etc. And that's the case for most people.
Playing with smarthome gadgets is a fun niche hobby, but it's not a hobby most people want.
[+] [-] spikej|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0mas88|2 years ago|reply
I bought a house that was empty after divorce, both had moved out some months before. We mostly dealt with the agent, only saw one of the previous owners for a very short time at the signing meeting with the notary.
Then in the house we found a "congratulations on your new place" card, a bottle of sparkling wine, and a binder with everything about the house. Building plans, updated plans for changes made, exactly where every cable and connection was, and manuals, invoices and warranty certificates for equipment in the house. And a hand drawn map of the garden with what type of plant was where, and links to plant care instructions for some of the more exotic plants.
Super nice of the previous owner to arrange these things, and I'm still thankful every time I need to get a cable somewhere or do some small construction things. Having detailed and accurate plans and overviews saves a lot of time.
[+] [-] chezball|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jairuhme|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulgerhardt|2 years ago|reply
It's handy to know where wiring runs are, how many studs are between windows when mounting tv's, and a dozen other electrical, ac, or plumbing issues. I used it once a week initially and probably once every two months now that we're settled.
Also recommend a Dymo Rhino 5200 cable label maker with heat shrink tubing. I print the label on some heat shrink, attach it to a wire, and never wonder where anything goes again. Great for vehicle wiring harnesses too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LcUQeTzIo4&t=66s But I'd recommend the 5200: https://www.amazon.com/DYMO-Industrial-RHINO-Label-1755749/d... - non-affiliate link.
[+] [-] hotsauceror|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] justinlloyd|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] weirdkid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donatj|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] h2odragon|2 years ago|reply
Centralized documentation is great, but who reads manuals?
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grepfru_it|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jonah|2 years ago|reply
I was tasked with replacing the Eero WiFi mesh with something that actually worked. We needed APs both upstairs and downstairs to provide sufficient coverage - especially through the lath-and-plaster walls.
It was _really_ frustrating for a couple reasons - first, the original design left no open risers to run cabling between the floors and even thought there was a nice 3' tall attic between the ceiling and flat roof, there is no access to it save a 1x2' port in a closet which is blocked by framing members and retrofit HVAC ducting. Secondly, over the years, multiple generations of cabling had been installed allover the building - several sets of coax - presumably for TV as well as CCTV, and bundles and at least 5 different generations of CAT-5e and CAT-6 had been run from the equipment closet across the house through the crawlspace and up through the walls to the second floor and attic. In all cases, the bundles of cables had been clipped off and shoved back through the floor or the cables were cut off, their wall boxes removed, and the holes plastered over leaving it all essentially useless. It made the interior nice and slick, but completely wasted all the effort of the generations of previous installers and perfectly good cabling.
Why couldn't they have just left everything in place and used block-off plates, or plastered over but left the wiring un-cut and documented the spots where the cables were. Or something, anything.
I was able to tone out a cable that I could reach from the ceiling access port and another in the crawlspace, re-terminate them and poke the other ends back up through the floor in the equipment closet and get a couple APs installed, but what a PITA.
/rant
[+] [-] duck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splitbrain|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pmags|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moduspol|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blakesterz|2 years ago|reply
I like the structure laid out here, gives me a good idea on how to start on something that would work for me.
[+] [-] tky|2 years ago|reply
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.