Live data from Hacker News

Writing documentation for your house

luke.hsiao.dev

111–120 of 326 posts

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#111

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…

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 moved into it. The eldest lives there, and a few of the aunts and uncles have shares from inheritance so they might move into it eventually. Most of them made their lives elsewhere, and their kids went even further afield.

On the other side, the grandparents came down from the mountain, built a house, the kids made their own lives throughout the country. The house was sold when my grandmother died a few years back. And she died in that home, for most of my friends the houses were sold when the elder had to move to assisted living (or worse when the house was lost for lack of income).

Generational homes were a thing when people didn’t need to move around, but my own parents moved 4 times just in my lifetime. So far.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#112
Regarding documentation of physical objects... I am blind. For some time in my life, I was able to remember the layout of various devices in my household. I mean, which button does what, and which jack is for what... But after a while, and especially when I started to pick up a eurorack habit, I realized I need to document front/back panels of devices I don't use on a daily basis regularily. All the layout tools I looked at were totally useless to me, since they assume (understandably) that drawing graphics is the way to go. However, as a Braille user, I'd much rather prefer something that can output ASCII in such a way that the 2D relations between items is at least vaguely preserved. Also, it would be great if the data entered were somehow searchable. I never found anything remotely resembling what I need, so I went for hand-crafted .txt files for now. It works, but it is unsatisfactory. I'd much rather specify the position and function of panel items in some kind of DSL, and have the necessary 2d layout ASCII diagrams and legend generated automatically. Does anyone know of some tools I might have missed whiich could help with this? I was tempted to invent my own DSL, but that felt like reinventing some wheel that must be lying around somewhere...

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#113

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…

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”?

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#114

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…

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”?

Because the land under the house is worth so much more than the "improvements" on top of it that the improvements might as well not exist.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#115
post #52

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.

If I bought a house that had a bunch of IoT junk, my first step would be to rip it all out.

[deleted]

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#117
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for history. Current values are available without internet on the esp32.

why not use a local server, even just an RPi?

Mainly visions/delusions of a water monitoring SaaS, but it would probably run just fine on a pi

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#118
post #38
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…

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 incredibly thorough inspection. Every outlet tested for proper ground, every nook and cranny looked at, wood moisture content, HVAC pitot readings, masonry, roof … just a super-duper detailed inspection that took about 6 hours to complete.

At the end of the inspection, he summed up by saying the house was good and that he had no qualms recommending the house.

Two days later, he stopped by with a three-ring binder that contained his inspection report. It first contained a summary that concisely covered the positive and few negative aspects of the house. Then there was a section about the history of the house: the year built, the name of the builder, changes in the neighborhood since it had been built, earthquakes it had gone through, flood events in the area, and so on. It also included the manufacturer names of things such as the windows, door hardware, etc.

The third section was lengthy, covering the precise state of the electrical, plumbing, structural, envelope, etc, and included all the notes his wife had taken during the course of the inspection. It included a sub-section with warnings about certain materials that likely contained asbestos and would need to be dealt with if we ever did remodeling.

Finally, the largest section was what he called a "maintenance work order" arranged as a schedule for the ongoing, recurring upkeep of the house but beginning with things he thought needed to be done immediately, replacement of the circuit breaker box, splash blocks under each outdoor faucet, tuck-pointing some of the chimney's brickwork, etc. And then his estimates as to when he thought systems might need to be replaced, the water heater, furnace, roofing, etc. As I discovered when the water heater burst, his estimates were pretty much spot-on. Over time, I added notes as we upgraded things, added low-voltage wiring, and remodeled the basement.

Nine years later, when I sold the house, the buyer was elated to have this owner's manual and I am fairly certain that the book was key to a very fast sale of the house which we did without a realtor.

As I look back on it now, I realize that inspection was perhaps the best $350 I have ever spent.

When we bought our next house, the inspection took about an hour and produced a few page report, most of it boilerplate.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#119
post #82
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…

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 makes it just as easy to turn off/on as before. But now they're dimmable and remotely controllable which is a plus in my books. Also my apartment is dumb and barely has a single built-in light so it's just lamps everywhere; without smart bulbs I'd probably have to flick a million switches or lamp-ropes.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#120

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…

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”?

You're buying the land and location. There's always someone willing to make you a new house for the right price, and you can get it done exactly the way you want it. There's nobody that can make new land, particularly not in the place you want it. You can change anything about a house except its location.
Post reply on HN