151–160 of 326 posts
This guy worked for 2.5 years and already bought a house in the Bay Area Granted, he has a PhD, but must be nice…
My mortgage is less than the rent of our previous 1 bedroom apartment in Sunnyvale!
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…
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…
unless the previous owner was a rockstar renovator who only left "the work is self documenting" on a postit
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 t…
I'd really like some kind of standard for model IDs. Maybe something like a domain name and a model number.
It would also be good if devices came with a QR code printed on them that linked to the manual.
And for running the house - Jeffery Epstein's Household Manual: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21128538-gx-606
This is extremely organized and admirable. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A hand scribbled note taped to the appliance or somewhere logical nearby beats no documentation at all.
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…
If OP loved it so much then he should have moved it. Once he's sold the house then it's not his business anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think I could bring myself to extensive home automation installed by a previous owner, especially if there are cameras in the system. I have no way to know they're not maintaining access somehow without re-installing / re-flashing everything and linking to "fresh" cloud accounts.
They could even install something that isn’t necessarily connected to the internet but can be remotely accessed from nearby.
While organizing the documentation is very nice your future self should be able to find what they are looking for if there is just a log/journal. I don't think it needs to be very organized unless it is consulted frequently.