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Writing documentation for your house

luke.hsiao.dev

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Re: Writing documentation for your house

#221

Post by walteweiss »

knallfrosch wrote: post #144
weirdkid wrote: post #34

Awesome advice and a great way to prepare for unexpected death or incapacitation (if you are the one in your family who usually handles all this stuff). I only would add that if you do go ahead with this, use tools or a medium that mere mortals are familiar with. Assume the person who needs to read it only knows git as a Larry the Cable Guy reference ("git 'er done!").

I think this overly technical approach from the OP is terrible for a handover. You're now tied to this exact stack of technologies and after your death, it won't be updated even once. I tape the manual and the transit bolts of a dishwasher to the top of it and that's it. For heating and stuff, a laminated sheet of paper attached to the pipe does the trick. If you love all things digital, create a shared online folder…

Why don’t do both? I do both. Long digital documentation and short one printed on a piece of paper attached to the thing.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#222

Post by jonah »

We have an architecturally significant, historic house (built in the 1930s) for our office.

I was tasked with replacing the Eero WiFi mesh with something that actually worked. We needed APs both upstairs and downstairs to provide sufficient coverage - especially through the lath-and-plaster walls.

It was _really_ frustrating for a couple reasons - first, the original design left no open risers to run cabling between the floors and even thought there was a nice 3' tall attic between the ceiling and flat roof, there is no access to it save a 1x2' port in a closet which is blocked by framing members and retrofit HVAC ducting. Secondly, over the years, multiple generations of cabling had been installed allover the building - several sets of coax - presumably for TV as well as CCTV, and bundles and at least 5 different generations of CAT-5e and CAT-6 had been run from the equipment closet across the house through the crawlspace and up through the walls to the second floor and attic. In all cases, the bundles of cables had been clipped off and shoved back through the floor or the cables were cut off, their wall boxes removed, and the holes plastered over leaving it all essentially useless. It made the interior nice and slick, but completely wasted all the effort of the generations of previous installers and perfectly good cabling.

Why couldn't they have just left everything in place and used block-off plates, or plastered over but left the wiring un-cut and documented the spots where the cables were. Or something, anything.

I was able to tone out a cable that I could reach from the ceiling access port and another in the crawlspace, re-terminate them and poke the other ends back up through the floor in the equipment closet and get a couple APs installed, but what a PITA.

/rant

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#223

Post by datadrivenangel »

sghiassy wrote: post #136

Good idea The cynic in me, says entropy will destroy your house and your documentation … but I also read a touching comment on this thread to the contrary, so what do I know :)

All we can do is rage against the dying of the light and decrease entropy locally to try and maintain our house and documentation.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#225

Post by bombcar »

kaycebasques wrote: post #76
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…

My uncle lives in an old house in Lodi. He took down some kitchen walls for a major remodel. Somehow, a bunch of letters from the 1920s had slipped between the cracks and got stuck in the wall. It was a bunch of heartwarming, innocent correspondence between the family members now living in California and the ones who stayed back in Oklahoma (or somewhere like that). Uncle chokes up every time he reads those letters.

All I found was lots of empty bottles of “medicinal” alcohol.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#226

Post by walteweiss »

lwhsiao wrote: post #87
iJohnDoe wrote: post #71

I like the site layout, theme, and functionality. Can some please tell me which system it is? Thanks!

OP here. First, thank you! The site is a simple statically generated site (I use Zola [1]). The theme of the site is inspired by Researcher [2], a theme for Jekyll (another static site generator). I've been meaning to open source my version and add it to the official list of Zola themes [3], but just haven't gotten around to it quite yet. I also use openring-rs [4] for the pseudo webring at the bottom of the posts. […

I was about to ask the same, and here is your reply already! Thanks.

I would be glad to use your theme whenever it is ready.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#227

Post by apwell23 »

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…

She couldve planted that herself to make livestream more interesting with some sentimental drama.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#228

Post by bombcar »

Wistar wrote: post #118
c22 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incredib…

You got a good inspector. Most give you a binder that’s mostly boilerplate legalese how the inspector does nothing, a few photos, and a list of very obvious defects that usually aren’t much.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#229

Post by bombcar »

Gigachad wrote: post #97
natmaka wrote: 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.

Exactly. What little smart home stuff I have that is still operating smartly will be ripped out when I sell, or just left to rot.

It definitely changes my decisions on further purchases. No smart switches that don’t revert to being dumb if the smart stuff fails (as it always does).

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#230

Post by bombcar »

walteweiss wrote: post #212
darkwater wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a (mostly) DYI smart-home, I mean, DYI as in "a Frankenstein of vendors and devices glued together by Zigbee, MQTT and Home Assistant", with some hard-deps on it in a couple of rooms and that gave me some bad nights when thinking about "what if I sell the home one day?" but reading the threads here I feel reassured: they will probably just rip it away and put some low-tech solution and call it a day.

Is it possible to rip off the devices and use it at your new location?

By the time you sell they’re likely all scrap value or worse, and the time to remove would be more than the cost to buy new.
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