I like the site layout, theme, and functionality. Can some please tell me which system it is? Thanks!
Writing documentation for your house
71–80 of 326 posts
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#72I buy a small moleskine notebook for every house we've bought, that becomes the 'house book'. Major appliance purchases, dates and serial numbers. A 'local' copy of the circuit breakers. Renovations with dates, costs. Room diagrams with measurements. But also things like the paint codes and finishes for every room, trim, ceilings, etc. That really comes in handy when you have to do a drywall repair or something and t…
> 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.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#73For 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…
I have a home-built system for monitoring the levels in our water tanks (we live on rain water). Of course some people get by with a simple float indicator, but why would I do that when I could be using high accuracy hydrostatic sensors, esp32, influxdb, grafana, spring, keycloak and mysql running in AWS? I certainly wouldn't want to be getting support calls if we were to ever sell, so I would probably remove it myse…
Why would you use AWS for that? That seems like an extremely strange external dependency for a house running on rainwater.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#74So, 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…
Yeah sounds like the people who bought it suck. Why would you destroy a pizza oven? It would add a ton of value to the house for the right buyer. If you had sold it to me I would have absolutely kept the oven :) Also inspires me to follow a similar path for my house. I think the key is to price the house so only someone who values the work you've done would bother buying it, if you have the time to wait around. And I…
Because it takes up space and is mostly pointless vs a portable propane or electric one.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a home-built system for monitoring the levels in our water tanks (we live on rain water). Of course some people get by with a simple float indicator, but why would I do that when I could be using high accuracy hydrostatic sensors, esp32, influxdb, grafana, spring, keycloak and mysql running in AWS? I certainly wouldn't want to be getting support calls if we were to ever sell, so I would probably remove it myse…
Why would you use AWS for that? That seems like an extremely strange external dependency for a house running on rainwater.
Because they can, I guess? There can be fun had in over-engineering personal projects. It can also be educational. It's no more odd than
> grafana, spring, keycloak
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#76This 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.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#77Wow, I had been thinking about this for so long! I have had the same problems and was thinking of solutions on the same line.
Although, even as a developer, I am not a big fan of how much time and energy we need to spend maintaining documentation. So while I build something to work towards automating documentation in software (with my effort at vibinex.com), I have also been thinking about home documentation automation.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#78So, 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, where some locals feel the need to dictate neighborhood look and feel. You end up with regulations that don't allow new construction and can even dictate dumb things like paint color. All to preserve a memory of something that is only important to the people that got to enjoy it when it was new.
This is not say nothing should ever be preserved if there is actually something of historical importance that happened there, but it seems like there's a mindset to preserve things that are trivial to the many and important to the few. Then there are places with actual historical significance [1] people are willing to just rot.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/30/rosa-parks-h...
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#79So, 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…
Unless you're selling to a family member, you just can't expect these things to last.
I share the feeling though.
Re: Writing documentation for your house
#80So, 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…
Honestly, the singularly wonderful thing about purchasing a home is that you can do whatever you want with it. The sky is the limit, you can make the yard into a garden, build a pizza oven into your wall, turn the basement into a gaming pad. You did all of those cool things with it!
Now, don't begrudge the people coming after you for doing the same. It's their house, not yours, and they have the chance to make it how they like it. If you want control over a thing, don't sell it. Similarly, if you want to dictate what your employees do during non work hours, you have to pay them for it. You treat something as a commodity, and it becomes a commodity.