61–70 of 326 posts
The future owners will have a manual detailing everything worth knowing as I judge it.
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 mater…
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 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.
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?
1. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-robots-txt-noinde...
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?
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!
OP mentions using robots.txt to avoid crawling but even google ignores this now correct? 1. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-robots-txt-noinde...
FWIW, what I specifically have in robots.txt is
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
[1]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
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…
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.
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…