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Writing documentation for your house

luke.hsiao.dev

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Re: Writing documentation for your house

#131

Post by pjerem »

natmaka wrote: post #52
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…

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.

Even as a tech-savvy person,'smart home stuff' does totally means bugs and backdoors everywhere if you just plug and play things.

Of course there are available possibilities to take somehow full control of your automation with some Home Assistant or the likes but honestly, it’s really not that easy if you are not already a tinkerer.

Great automation will also require more work and knowledge. As soon as you start playing with heating or venting, you are doing work that could require some background. It’s something to buy a nice smart thermostat, but it’s something else to understand where you may place it, how you may program it …

It’s an interesting topic for those who like to tinker, but it’s very understandable that most people aren’t going to invest their time on it.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#133

Post by sghiassy »

superultra wrote: post #65

This didn’t happen to me but to a friend. She lives in an old home and has a neverending list of projects, many of which she took up during the pandemic. She would often livestream her rehab at nights just to connect to people as she worked. 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. O…

What a fun story. Thanks for sharing :)

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#134

Post by hoseja »

mgsloan2 wrote: post #108
Larrikin wrote: post #78

Earlier 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…

Whoah, that interpretation seems pretty wild to me. They put a lot of effort into building a pizza oven and someone else tore it down, and they should feel nothing about this?! If an artist sells their painting they shouldn't care if the new owner paints over a section? Beyond the sentimental attachment to the pizza oven, I'd be bothered by the sheer inefficiency of it.

You are allowed to be inefficient with things you own. Again, shouldn't have sold the house if they wanted to keep control of it.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#135

Post by Terr_ »

Larrikin wrote: post #78
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…

>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…

> Honestly this kind of mindset is a huge problem in the US.

It sounds like less of a problem than its opposite: "Nothing matters but how much money I can make."

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#138

Post by varjag »

masklinn wrote: post #111
htss2013 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just odd from the perspective of a non American, because in much of the rest of the world houses are usually kept in families multi generationally. So your dream of passing on the oven would have worked most other places. It's just your desires are incompatible with the American treatment of houses as commodities to be frequently traded in bidding auctions.

That’s not been the case for a while in developed economies. The vagaries of modern life and work means most people can’t live where they grew up, make their life elsewhere, possibly multiple elsewhere, and only go back to visit. Unless there’s a real business to inherit e.g. a farm or hotel or some such. That was already the case in my grandparents generation. On my father’s side is a large farm, but my grandparents…

I think it's not even the case in developing economies, with substantial economic and population growth. It simply can't work like that.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#139

Post by Larrikin »

peebeebee wrote: post #122
Larrikin wrote: post #78

Earlier 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…

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.

I actually agree with this statement, but people should be allowed to build the sentimental value. They shouldn't have the sentimental value of someone else's past ideas dictate the new.

An awful local law may have dictated that the OP should not have been allowed to build a pizza oven in the first place, because people want to preserve the look and feel of the neighborhood when they moved in. But I also view it as equally bad if the new owner couldn't tear it down because of some HOA regulation saying that structures built before some arbitrary date, conveniently a time after they moved in and did their renovations, can't be torn down. The only real reason being the sentimental value they have to that past.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#140

Post by fsckboy »

superultra wrote: post #65

This didn’t happen to me but to a friend. She lives in an old home and has a neverending list of projects, many of which she took up during the pandemic. She would often livestream her rehab at nights just to connect to people as she worked. 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. O…

next time you post change the story, say that the clipboard had half of her current to do list!
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