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.
We found 100 year old recipes from magazines for christmas cookies. It was funny/crazy to see steps like ‘whisk for 30 minutes’ before they had mechanical kitchen utilities.
> 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.
Sure, this is possible, but without any precedent for this, from her, I suspect you might want to sharpen your Occam's razor, or just step closer to it when you shave.
Interesting that your first thought upon reading something like this is that it could have been faked, complete with reason. I think that says more about you than that it does about the person described in the story.
Or it says more about the state of modern Twitch/Youtube, which is completely filled with people faking drama for views. It happens so much that it’s not unfair for viewers to have doubts.
Maybe consider not questioning motives or disposition ? My first thought was that it was staged. The lack of critical thinking in todays world is appalling and enables the exploitation of the vulnerable.
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.
I put in a bunch of Caseta smart switches. They are indistinguishable from normal light switches without any smarts, but if I want to, I can also control them via local network. It's nice to go to bed and turn off the entire house with one button. Lights turn off automatically when we all leave.
The thermostat is an ecobee, which is a pretty polished IoT device but I'm frustrated i couldn't get something _more_ local. It speaks homekit so I can do a number of actions entirely locally, and if the internet is down it still works, but I do wish it were more self-contained. So again, if I sell or get angry at technology and chuck my HomeAssistant Pi out the window, the thermostat will just work as a thermostat.
Likewise, my blinds are motorized--but they have a working remote paired directly to them. It's incredibly convenient to raise the blinds in the morning for some sunshine automatically and close them after sunset, but they'd work perfectly well without a smart home.
If you purchased my house, you probably wouldn't even know to rip out the "smart home" components because they fail over to just being normal components.
It is not particularly hard to make this method of operation happen, although it admittedly requires a budget above "dirt cheap."
The new(ish) Caseta paddle switches are pretty indistinguishable visually from normal paddle switches, and operating them is natural even though they don't stay toggled up and down. If that's the sum total of my concession to "these switches are smart", I can't say I care.
I love the Caseta paddle switches. Even more that (strangely belatedly) they introduced the three/four way 'dummies' (each three/four way needs a smart switch, and the dummies can tell it about the state change, and reflect it, but they can't/don't talk to the 'hub').
The kind of switches described are rocker switches with a small led to indicate state. In-person they provide every feature of a toggle switch, while also having a remote state change capability.
> The kind of switches described are rocker switches with a small led to indicate state.
Also, in most applications, a big LED to indicate state. Often installed on the ceiling in a central location where it's easy to see from any point in the room.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I love the status lights on Caseta switches, there's no 'ambience' to them, you can see it's on, but even in a dark room it's not obtrusive, not even remotely (it's like a barely lit off white LED, and I do mean barely).
On my office desk with my computer setup, I have a pair of Vanatoo Transparent Zero speakers, which had a bright blue obnoxious LED that was way over the top... until I looked in the manual for some other reason and discovered you could actually hold one of the rear switches and turn a knob to dial the intensity all the way down, or off. I love that.
I have six can lights in my living room, 2 x 3 layout.
My partner has a corner desk and works from home 3 days/week. I also have a backlight "rope light" behind the TV.
During the day, when she's working in that space, the lights are 100% intensity daylight white, and the backlight a cool turquoise. At sunset the lights go to about 70% warm white.
Automations are also hooked up to my Harmony (I really hope someone dives in to this space, but I don't hold up hopes - there are a couple of options, but right now no-one seems interested in picking up from Logitech unless you're going to the ultra heavy, and ugly, last I checked, offerings from Creston, etc.), such that if you turn on the TV, then it turns off the front row of lights (parallel to the TV wall) so there's no reflection, and the second row, which is just behind the couch back, goes down to about 10-15%, slightly warmer still, giving a movie theater vibe. And the backlight on the TV turns off. I debated the Hue accessory to match color to HDMI output, but I think that seems like more of a distraction than an aesthetic.
Lights. In my living room I have two spotlings over book cases, a bright center light, two standing lamps and a light illuminating my electric piano. I touch one button and they all come on together. Another cycles through modes (bright, movie, reading). I have the same type of setup in the kitchen. On my upstairs landing, the light illuminates dimly of someone triggers the movement detector (so they don't get blinded at 4am). In my bathroom if I walk in at night, a single spotlight illuminates very dimly directly over the "throne", but if i tap the light switch all spotlights light up.
So in some rooms I have many separate lights operating together, and in my bathroom I have a one of 6 spotlights (which are all in the same electric circuit) operating independently.
As for "hassle", i probably spent a week setting up Home Assistant on a raspberry pi a few years ago and haven't touched it since, apart from replacing switch batteries whenever they get low.
I'm never going back.
Having said that, I'm not interested in automating anything else. Maybe home heating. I have an old 2 zone system, so adding smart thermostats to my radiators would provide completely independent control from every room in the house, whereas right now I just have a dumb-dumb "upstairs" / "downstairs" setup.
> 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.
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.
> 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...
I feel the exact same way about car modifications. I know you spent a fortune on those rims and you love them but I don't. Now it's a liability to have to replace them.
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.
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.
You got a good inspector. Most give you a binder that’s mostly boilerplate legalese how the inspector does nothing, a few photos, and a list of very obvious defects that usually aren’t much.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
For myself HA has been the best thing since, like, forever. I personally love it, if not obvious.
The hardware part is still complicated because of this pull-down stuff and just a mix of randomness as everyone is developing all kinds of things to do "stuff". HA ties it together enough to be useful and more. Just this morning I was thinking it's really cool I can try to correlate my waking with CO2/humidity levels and what happens when the furnace runs? For the curious, having furnace run helps everything
Exactly. What little smart home stuff I have that is still operating smartly will be ripped out when I sell, or just left to rot.
It definitely changes my decisions on further purchases. No smart switches that don’t revert to being dumb if the smart stuff fails (as it always does).
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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 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.
most of them, totally. The issue is that in some room there is no way to control directly the power to the bulbs, they are always on and you can switch them off only from central electric panel (because they are all zigbee bulbs)
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.
But ... you might have to tear open a wall. Climb a ladder. Unscrew a plate cover and hope you can see it. Oh crap, now you have to remove it from the wall. Might as well tear out everything.
And this is on the hardware side. Software? Did the former owner have passwords and everything tied to HIS ACCOUNT? Does he hand over some account? What personal info is in that former account. NOPE, big nope.
The problem with smart home is this:
- if the company wants to make money on the software, it will go with lock-in or fake open, which is what it is today. And that is a miserable failure
- if the company wants to make money on the hardware, the software is a cost so it sucks.
The solution is PROBABLY that the hardware vendors can only implement protocols, but CANNOT implement middleware. It can basically only provide information and take commands.
The a software company makes the hub. It cannot have any interest in any particular devices, it cannot "partner" with a hardware firm.
But of course that's only one part of the problem, with security and the central account. The software hub would need to provide some way to "move" an account with transparency on historical data reset.
But the industry is so effing far from this. Maybe SmartThings was close, but they got acquired by Samsung and now push Samsung products and basically discontinued everything pre-Samsung. They highlight that there's no good money in pure middleware.
The device vendors have to come together and do some sort of independent software company that they all can't meddle in. But then there's still soft pressure to only support devices in the "in group", so that still doesn't work.
Really, this is an operating system + driver problem. The central core is the OS, and the devices are "drivers". A consumer OS can be priced at about $50 tops, and it needs about 10 million people a year buying it. THen it gets the critical mass.
The other option is that some group close to the core of Linux take this on as the next big project. This could have important implications for Linux desktop, because it would create a Linux-aligned group that all the device manufacturers have to prioritize, and that provides the outreach to them also supporting device drivers for the Linux OS.
I mean, that is a BIG undertaking. It would take someone like Torvalds with talent, hard work, and some form of charisma (not necessarily Torvalds' brand)
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.
You’re (presumably) an informed tech geek based on hanging out here - so your view makes sense. I do not believe that’s the case for the general not tech-informed public though. When I think of friends and family not in tech most of their view seems to be “neat, would love it, don’t want to put in any effort to make it work, so I’m fine without”
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.
I agree that smart home stuff can be excessive however I really like the Hue white ambiance bulbs. I live in Vancouver and so in the winter it gets dark early - and the days are often gloomy too. I can have cool. Lighting from morning to evening and then have it get warmer as it gets towards the evening. That alone is worth it for me.
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.
I bought a new-construction place, and I was around during the process. After they were done with all the plumbing/wiring/etc, but before they filled in the insulation and sheetrock, I walked the whole house and took cellphone pictures of every bare wall to show where all the pipes and wires are run, and then labelled it all up by room. I plan to hand those off if I ever sell the place! I don't know why builders don't just deliver such a set of photos to everyone by default, it's been super handy!
Also keep in mind that wall studs are usually a standard distance apart (600mm or 450mm in Australia), so such pictures have an "inbuilt" tape measure.
The three-ring binder is vastly underused as a personal organizational tool. It folds up and shelves nicely, and when you stuff it with accessories, it will hold every small gadget, manual, extra screw and receipt.
Could you share a photo (with any sensitive detail obfuscated) to give us an idea of what this looks like? We are hoping to produce something similar for our house.
The things like L1 and J4 etc indicate which switches are connected to each light fixture (the number matches) and on which breaker (the character) they're connected.
Similar for construction, a plan for where all the walls are, which ones are load bearing and which are not etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of the tale of the guy who was told by his realtor that he could put $20k in new windows and sell the house for $50k more. He did and it sold, and was immediately torn down.
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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
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.
This kind of mindset is why many parks and landmark exist, in the US and Europe. Someone owned a land or a castle, etc and then donated or sold it with strings attached to keep its purpose. Muir Woods is one example, private purchase with the intent to preserve it.
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.
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.
The latter can happen with historic designated buildings, and can often be applied widely in unexpected ways. Some will basically say you can’t modify the exterior look, others will say everything up to and including bulb changes must be approved by the historical society.
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.
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.
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.
A corollary of this isn’t you don’t mind things like random pizza ovens, you can ask the realtors to bring houses with “odd features” to your attention, because they often have no or negative value.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I had much more energy (read younger), I finished my basement. 800sqft or so, put in a guest bedroom, a little library for the missus, a full bath and most importantly a home theater. I was talking with my neighbor who is a realtor and he said that if anything the home theater was a negative during resale. The only things that added value were the other rooms. Luckily, I built the theater so it could be converted into a game room etc, and most importantly, I built it for myself.
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.
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.
Pools are worse - they are usually worth negative money when it comes time to sell, because you cannot just let it sit, unlike the pizza oven (at least in theory).
Not saying what should or shouldn’t be done, but the implication here seems to be that that’s a lot of yard space. Depending on yard size, that could be a crippling amount of space to lose, or just a drop in the bucket.
I don’t know anything about Seattle yards. I’d kind of expect them to be on the small side, but maybe his wasn’t? He obviously had some amount of land, but from his post I really can’t tell how much.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
This is my preferred method. "Permanent" things go on the thing with sharpie. Other stuff gets sharpied on some masking tape and stuck on.
If my furnace ever walks off and takes the install date with it... chances are the install date's no longer relevant. Otherwise the documentation for my furnace is... on the furnace.
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!
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.
Interesting - why do you say it would be nice if the posted stated that it was an affiliate link? Do you feel it takes away an option from you or reduces the link's value?
It reduces the link value to me since now the poster is financially motivated to post it. So do I trust that it really is a good product or is the poster just posting an affiliate link so that they can earn money or is it somewhere in-between.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It'll be a cold day in Hell before I put that much information into a venture-backed SaaS that is driven by the desire to monetize my life by any means necessary. It also over complicates what is a simple requirement by throwing unnecessary technology at the problem. The only tech I need with my three ringer binder solution to figure out how to restart a furnish when the power and internet are out across the county on a freezing winter night is a flashlight.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can hire a home inspector to do a pre-drywall inspection, and pay extra for full camera documentation.
If they’re good, they’ll know what you want and they will also help the builder avoid callbacks. Many things are insanely easy to fix before the drywall is up.
I also recommend that you do the same walkthrough, of course.
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!
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
One thing that won't work is the "what exactly is the paint" thing. Even if the paint is still made, and the colour code is still valid... the paint won't match it. Paint fades over time. So you might as well just take a chip of it to the paint store for matching, and resign yourself to having to repaint one "surface" (to the nearest corners).
As for hidden "time capsules" - I actually left one of those as a kid in a house that was being built at the time. About 45 years later, with me long moved to another continent, that wall was being modified and they found the note behind the paneling and sent me a photo of it. I hadn't remembered leaving it there.
Our startup https://dobu.me is solving just this problem. We are testing our product for free and currently you can upload your home documentation - with AI we will create products out of them and if something needs regular maintenance we automatically remind you. Plus we have an AI chat so you can "talk" with your home.
We based in Estonia and soon new real estate developments here will come with our platform instead of the paper documentation. We are currently looking into the US market and if you have any ideas or feedback, email me at: rasmus@dobu.ee
I do this, but I run a private instance in MediaWiki which is only reachable either from the home network or via the VPN.
The nice thing about this setup is that editing is pleasant (and fast in iteration), I can use categories to group pages together and I can use some interesting plugins, like the one to embed PDF files into wiki pages.
The latter (embedding PDF files into wiki pages) is particularly useful because I can browse appliances manuals directly from the wiki page itself or download them if necessary, and I have a "Manuals" category where i can find all the manuals I have collected so far.
I do it in Notion, and it's shared with everyone who either lives or hangs out in here a lot.
Biggest advantage is that Notion is pretty good with multimedia content — embedded photos / videos / PDFs, gallery view for databases... And the best documentation for a home is often just pictures and videos.
- Here's how the sauna guy wired the equipment
- This is what the old room looked like before we changed the walls
- These are the xmas ornaments we're storing in the garage, etc
PS: I love Obsidian but use it mostly in single-player mode
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.
I really like some aspects of this, but I don't understand the incentives. If I own a home, I want to know everything about it. However, if I'm selling a home, I don't want the buyers to know everything about it. I also don't want the sellers to learn something about it, that might be considered as having some bearing on the value of the house. In other words, I don't want to get caught knowing something that I should have disclosed but didn't. So as a home owner and potential seller someday, it's better not to make a record of everything because that could hurt me when I sell. It also doesn't benefit me at all to have helped the new owner.
This all might sound very cynical, but it really does seem like incentive misalignment.
I'm an ideal world, every home would have a permanent, up to date, digital record of all the relevant home info. Building planes, modifications, maintenance records, paint and shingle colors, wire and plumbing placement, maybe even a 3d model of the home with structure, plumbing and wiring info. Unfortunately, I don't see how a homeowner would be better off giving that info to the next owner.
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.
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.
As an IT professional for most of my life, I am very familiar with documentation and the benefits thereof. However, I never had given this idea any thought. What a great idea! This would have solved so many questions for me when I bought my first home. Would have also been helpful when selling my first home.
I will probably create this as a wiki or github for my home with markdown files. Thanks for the inspiration. Cheers!
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.
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.).
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.
One was related to smart cupboards (fitted with weight sensors and cameras) that can automatically account for every item you put in or withdraw from it.
Another one was related to furniture modifications so that it efficiently utilizes space according to the need (similar to many modular furniture concepts). One of these ideas, I have documented here: https://avikalpg.github.io/blog/articles/20210923_proj_dual_...
Simpler ideas were the same as the original post: an app for everyone in the house to keep track of inventory or chores.
I was thinking more about chores because someone might have done a chore I am unaware of - so I might either make duplicate efforts or procrastinate. But this is not a great idea because 70% of this can be solved using a WhatsApp group and asking everyone to update it whenever they pick or complete any chore.
Since I'm in a new home, partially self made (electricity, with p.v., part of the hot water and self-consumption related automation) yes, I've thought much, but so far did not do much on that topic.
If I'll die unexpectedly or fell ill seriously my family do not know how to handle Home Assistant and many parts of the home automation, even if it's not something exceptional an average electrician really likely can't as well understand how things works because... Automation is software and most only know pre-cooked tools by some well known brands...
However even if I'll document anything a day I'm not sure who can profit from such docs, essentially nobody would keep up a homeserver for third parties, at least not at a reasonable price...
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
I have a gmail account that I cc stuff to - receipts for any major chattels or work, engineering reports, wall cavities before lining (showing cable runs and nog spacing etc).
Probably not as usable as this system, but pretty low effort and able to be passed on to the next owner easily if/when we move
I 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.
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.
I recently had drama with a contractor... it went into mediation, and the contractor was able to say, "How do we know this damage wasn't caused before we got there?" Contractors are shady, and likely that wouldn't change, but I wish I had more photos of my house before the flood.
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.
As a project on my to-do list, I have a task to write out instructions for running the house if the power goes out, then print them out and put them in a binder. Depending on how long the power goes out, things get more involved.
For example, the fridge will continue to run on its UPS for another 18 hours. After that, items to be saved need to be moved to a portable fridge and plugged into the 12 volt outlet of the electric car.
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.
This is a good idea, and something that I need, although I think I will just go for a google doc to document my house since it needs to be edited by non techies too
I do this 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.
Over the last years I’ve mortgaged and maintained and sold 4 homes and in only one did anyone do any kind of documentation on the electrical that was functionally useful.
Home inspectors aren’t it either, as they don’t really give any idea of “technical debt” that isn’t glaringly obvious in my experience.
I’d pay good money for a static analysis of my home
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
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.
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.
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…
I have a steam-based heat and didn't understand, when I first moved in, what was required in terms of maintenance. You MUST flush the boiler at least every season and preferably once a month. 5 years later I needed a boiler replacement-- just shear ignorance on my part.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Yikes. My daughter, now age 18 and in college, is going to inherit our house in a few years, when we move out. Why have I not done this? [clears schedule for weekend to get on this]
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?