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Writing documentation for your house

luke.hsiao.dev

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Re: Writing documentation for your house

#41

Post by xyzelement »

chezball wrote: post #25

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 wat…

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.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#42

Post by jairuhme »

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.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#43

Post by yaky »

weirdkid wrote: post #34

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!").

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.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#44

Post by pfd1986 »

chezball wrote: post #25

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 wat…

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.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#45

Post by thangalin »

djbusby wrote: post #16
supportengineer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

KeenWrite[1], my Markdown text editor, was written with variables in mind. I've made a "theme" for the documentation for my house, called Domus.[2] You could get something producing PDFs in an evening.

Profile has my email.

[1]: https://keenwrite.com

[2]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/-/tree/main/d...

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#46

Post by tomcam »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #40

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 acros…

> On my wife’s side, they are a massive Indian family with 20+ cousins across each generation living in large mansions spanning a tiny community.

Well I want to see the Bollywood musical about that family, preferably with a triumphant return of Priyanka Chopra, and music by Devi Sri Prasad.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#47

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#48

Post by AtlasBarfed »

efitz wrote: post #17

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…

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.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#49

Post by Brajeshwar »

tomcam wrote: post #46
Brajeshwar wrote: post #40

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 acros…

> On my wife’s side, they are a massive Indian family with 20+ cousins across each generation living in large mansions spanning a tiny community. Well I want to see the Bollywood musical about that family, preferably with a triumphant return of Priyanka Chopra, and music by Devi Sri Prasad.

LOL! It is indeed a masala of everything. ;-)

Once, the Father-in-law had to be told to stop his speech mid-way the 30-min mark at a family gathering. Yes, the family often had to organize big meetups and the elders had to give speeches. This is a family spread across countries, embracing multiple religions, languages, and beliefs - so speech-lot-happens-a-lot.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#50

Post by bluGill »

argc wrote: post #39
chezball wrote: post #25

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 wat…

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…

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.

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