Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Writing documentation for your house

luke.hsiao.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 326 posts

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#171

Post by RasmusMerirand »

bmitc wrote: post #29

I have been considering this but haven't arrived at the right platform to use yet. I've considered Notion, Confluence, and other such things. Ideally I want calendar integration where we all know who has what appointment on what day and various other documented things about the house, mainly for our own needs, cat sitters, etc. What tools do people use for this stuff?

We have built out home management platform https://dobu.me for more of the maintenace handling, but I would really appreciate if you could give it a go and let me know your thoughts :)

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#172

Post by RasmusMerirand »

lawgimenez wrote: post #132

As a new homeowner myself, this is a neat idea! I have a lot of notes of my house, etc but they are scattered everywhere in my almost 2k+ Apple notes, calendar (for logging) and Day One (for additional logging). I need a system.

We created a home management platform https://dobu.me just for this, I would really appreciate if you could give it a go and let me know your thoughts :)

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#173

Post by RasmusMerirand »

phanimahesh wrote: post #62
dools wrote: post #21

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…

I'm building a recurring reminder system to scratch my own itch for this, with a checklist centered approach for home maintenance.

No need for that, we built dobu.me for this, currety completely free as we are gathering feedback :)

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#174

Post by sokoloff »

bowmessage wrote: post #124
Wistar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

After some length of time, there’s a reasonable likelihood that the anode rod has corroded to the threaded boss and attempting to replace will condemn the water heater. (If you’re not DIY, it’s also a $200+ trip charge and a $75 marked-up part.)

When we bought this place, the water heater was old and I decided it was a better plan to just leave it alone and replace when it leaked. (There was nothing valuable on the mechanical room floor.) A year later, we had a new heater and 15 years after that, it’s about due again.

I can definitely understand the “do nothing” approach, particularly if the rod is 10+ years in situ.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#175

Post by znpy »

I do this, but I run a private instance in MediaWiki which is only reachable either from the home network or via the VPN.

The nice thing about this setup is that editing is pleasant (and fast in iteration), I can use categories to group pages together and I can use some interesting plugins, like the one to embed PDF files into wiki pages.

The latter (embedding PDF files into wiki pages) is particularly useful because I can browse appliances manuals directly from the wiki page itself or download them if necessary, and I have a "Manuals" category where i can find all the manuals I have collected so far.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#176

Post by saalweachter »

ryandrake wrote: post #89
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…

Less sentimental, but just as infuriating (to me): My last house we bought had an old hot tub out back from the early 90s. My agent said don't price that POS into your estimate of the home's worth--it's probably never worked. We bought the house and lo and behold it did not work, but I carefully rehabbed it, replaced the pumps and sensors and cleaned everything up, made a custom topper for it, and went on to enjoy 8…

When I bought a house, the prior owners requested I return the front door to them within N days, the contract had a section keeping $500 in escrow to be returned to me upon receipt of the door (by the shipping company, I believe).

My realtor was like, "this basically means the house costs $500 more", but I went ahead and returned the door.

If you're faced with that situation in the future, you could try including a clause like that in the contract; the $500 wasn't really the motivation for me to immediately replace the door and pack up the old for shipping, but putting a little money on the line might motivate the buyer to at least value the feature you'd like returned if they don't care for it.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#177

Post by mikepurvis »

grogenaut wrote: post #96
mikepurvis wrote: post #72

Earlier 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 original paint chip with the name on it doesn't need to be matched because they can just look up the formula.

A chip as in a sample of the drywall... that I've found to be much more of a mixed bag. My last "matched" paint was nowhere close once the sun was shining on it.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#178

Post by saalweachter »

mrmlz wrote: post #127
grogenaut wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A big step for me was just figuring out which hardware store the previous owner frequented.

Each major line of paints has slightly different colors, so figuring out of it was Sherwin Williams, Behr, Valspar, etc let me identify the right color collection and narrow things down enough for me to guess what he was using.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#179

Post by saalweachter »

lwhsiao wrote: post #68
mtillman wrote: post #66

OP mentions using robots.txt to avoid crawling but even google ignores this now correct? 1. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-robots-txt-noinde...

OP here. I'm not sure about the details in your link, but basically my understanding lines up with [1]; robots.txt isn't guaranteed to be respected, but generally is. FWIW, what I specifically have in robots.txt is User-agent: * Disallow: / which seems to work well for me so far (i.e., I do not find my house documentation site on any search engine). [1]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

If I understand the details of the link, it was a particular feature of robots.txt that was considered undocumented/unsupported that Google dropped support for.

I think the point of it was that you could tell Google to crawl some pages (for links) but not index them?

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#180

Post by lawgimenez »

RasmusMerirand wrote: post #172
lawgimenez wrote: post #132

As a new homeowner myself, this is a neat idea! I have a lot of notes of my house, etc but they are scattered everywhere in my almost 2k+ Apple notes, calendar (for logging) and Day One (for additional logging). I need a system.

We created a home management platform https://dobu.me just for this, I would really appreciate if you could give it a go and let me know your thoughts :)

It’s not even opening.
Post reply on HN