The best suggestion I've seen on this is to set up an e-mail address for the house and to then use it for signing up for registering appliances and so forth.
Writing documentation for your house
181–190 of 326 posts
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Home automation is for me exactly the same as designer kitchen or designer day room. Yeah it was great for the previous owner but it sucks for me as I have different tastes and needs. I am going to rip it all off and do what I want. But in reality I just don’t buy anything that is advertised “one of a kind” because I know it will be more of a hassle to deal with it even if it looks cool. For me cool looking fancy stu…
Home automation is a mystery to me. I have a coffee maker I can program to turn on in the morning, some ring cams for deterrence, and an automatic thermostat. I feel like everything else is overkill. Also starting and maintaining a fire in the wood stove is something I enjoy.
Big use cases can be overkill, but I like to take on the small things as automation projects. Easy one - if everyone has left my house for a time, turn off all the lights. If we have left but the dog is home and the sun sets, turn on a few lights for her (my dog has a wifi collar). If I arrive home after dark and open the garage door, turn on the mudroom lights so I don't walk in to a dark house, then turn it back off 10 minutes later when I forget. I've left town before and had to let my parents in my house, and it was nice to be able to let them in without a key, and see that it was them on a camera. Then there are the fun ones, like setting the lights or closing blinds when I start a movie.
I'm glad you enjoy maintaining a wood stove. I like asking my house to turn things on and off when my hands are full, or automating my bad habits and forgetfulness away.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#183Re: Writing documentation for your house
#184For 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…
There's a pretty enormous gulf between what you did and nothing (also it sound like you went a bit wild with home automation). I think you'd be doing your due diligence by just providing a list of products littered around the house, without also spending dozens of hours.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
nah, those projects get secondary, subsidiary boxes off one of the 6-0 feeders.
You still need to have room for the breakers that feed those subsidiary boxes. Most breaker panels are only rated for those higher power breakers in a few of the slots (not anywhere), and thus you have to move lower power breakers around to make room for the higher powered ones.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#186Earlier 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.
It's totally reasonable to be sad someone tore it down, but you also have to accept that you lose any say over a house when you sell it.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#187So, 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…
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 probably worked when life expectancies were lower, where are people supposed to live the other 25+ years of housing?
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#188I would set up a wiki but also make regular printed backups: on-site for when the electricity is out, and off-site in case of fire.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Home automation is for me exactly the same as designer kitchen or designer day room. Yeah it was great for the previous owner but it sucks for me as I have different tastes and needs. I am going to rip it all off and do what I want. But in reality I just don’t buy anything that is advertised “one of a kind” because I know it will be more of a hassle to deal with it even if it looks cool. For me cool looking fancy stu…
Home automation is a mystery to me. I have a coffee maker I can program to turn on in the morning, some ring cams for deterrence, and an automatic thermostat. I feel like everything else is overkill. Also starting and maintaining a fire in the wood stove is something I enjoy.
> Also starting and maintaining a fire in the wood stove is something I enjoy
Funny that, I'm sitting on my boat and it's soooo pretty, but one thing I really won't miss about moving off it is maintaining the fire in the stove. And especially the temperature when it burns out or dies out...
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of those things that adds a ton of value for the right person, but for the wrong person is equally negative value (it takes up 64 square feet of yard space!). While most people won't really care. And so while it can add a lot of value to the right person, overall it is zero value. Even to the right person it won't be as much value as you would expect - unless they are putting a more than normal down on the house…
thats why you should remodel while you live there so you're actually getting value out of your expenditures, not just upgrading everything right before you move out.
Renovating before moving is the worst (excluding clean up (fresh paint, etc) - I feel like most people have horrible taste and use cheapo contractor grade materials, last time I was buying a house I couldn’t believe how many newly renovated homes I saw where I thought “wow this needs a ton of work”