Writing documentation for your house

Airbnb hosts do this.

An engineering friend of mine has documented and labeled every aspect of his vacation rental in Hawaii.

The only thing is, it's styled the same as the 1980s terminal systems he worked on down to the embossed black tape labels that gets attached to every switch, knob, and dial.

Treat your house like a black box.

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 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.

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.

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.