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.
Writing documentation for your house
121–130 of 326 posts
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#122So, 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…
>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, whe…
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.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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, whe…
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.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 incredib…
Sounds like you found a good one.
Though I wonder why they didn’t recommend preventative maintenance on the water heater- if it was electric, why not replace the sacrificial anode?
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37860529
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 mak…
Could you share a link to your found solution? Thanks!
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#126Since 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.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 O.G paint-code can be hard to find if its been awhile and exposed to the elements etc.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#128I 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.
Only later it has unskippable ads for replacement furnace filters, for water filtration, for solar systems, for appliance upgrades, ...
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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, whe…
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.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#130Since 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.