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.
Writing documentation for your house
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Re: Writing documentation for your house
#12And for running the house - Jeffery Epstein's Household Manual:
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#13I 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…
Business idea - House Documentation as-a-service.
You fill in the blanks online and it generates the PDF for you.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#14I 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.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#15I'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.
I like this idea even more!
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#16I 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…
Business idea - House Documentation as-a-service. You fill in the blanks online and it generates the PDF for you.
I was just working on that w/a friend. Great minds and all that.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#17For 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.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#18And for running the house - Jeffery Epstein's Household Manual: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21128538-gx-606
Yikes. Well played.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#19After 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…
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#20I 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.