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Writing documentation for your house

luke.hsiao.dev

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Re: Writing documentation for your house

#91

Post by bigiain »

beachy wrote: post #35
efitz wrote: 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…

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…

Nah, sell them a monthly subscription for the cloud service. Or put ads in their dashboard and alerts. (Or both. Then work out how to sell their water usage data to 700 "partner" 3rd parties...)

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#92

Post by ajkjk »

Larrikin wrote: post #78
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…

>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…

What's wrong with minding? A person does something they're proud of, they obviously care about its future. Just because you completed some financial transaction doesn't mean any of that emotional attachment goes away.

Honestly it is kinda depressing that anyone thinks otherwise! like somehow we should respect capitalism and $business$ more than, like, feelings.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#93

Post by grogenaut »

Sakos wrote: post #75
edrxty wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Seeing a setup like this would cause me to start walking away from a house. But to be fair I'd be walking away from just about any smart setup.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#94

Post by grogenaut »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #48
efitz wrote: 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…

To be fair, smart homes absolutely suck. Especially about four or five years removed, or, in this case, an owner change. This is like writing code vs figuring out someone else's code. Those are totally different things, and code is a bunch of readily accessible text files. Smart homes? Some device in the attic, some device in the basement, some wiring that goes who knows where, where does all this info go? What was t…

I have trouble finding the right code for my hardware projects and I check things into github including schematics, gerbers and code. then come back 3 years later and realize yeah I forgot to push that last actual commit. now I imagine someone else debugging that.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#95

Post by grogenaut »

bluGill wrote: post #50
argc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#96

Post by grogenaut »

mikepurvis wrote: post #72
hotsauceror wrote: post #63

I 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.

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.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#97

Post by Gigachad »

natmaka wrote: post #52
efitz wrote: 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…

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.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#98

Post by arcanemachiner »

bigiain wrote: post #91
beachy wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

Nah, sell them a monthly subscription for the cloud service. Or put ads in their dashboard and alerts. (Or both. Then work out how to sell their water usage data to 700 "partner" 3rd parties...)

Then go out of business and leave them with an expensive paperweight.

Re: Writing documentation for your house

#99

Post by acherion »

rootusrootus wrote: post #24
donatj wrote: post #20

I live in the house I grew up in. My dad designed the second floor, an addition. He knows the skeleton of this house in a way I never ever will. He lives 50 miles away now, but I still have him as an amazing resource about my house. I wanted to run cat5 to my office on the second floor a number of years ago. "Oh just drill a hole in the floor right here in this corner, there's a void that goes all the way from the se…

Best thing I ever did when our house was built was go through the entire house the day before the drywall went up, and take many pictures of everything I could see. So now, when I want to do something, I know exactly what the framing looks like, where the water lines run, drains, electric, everything. It's very handy.

I did the same, before our plasterboard went up, I went around with a video camera and videod everything (borrowed my brother in law's digicam). It has helped heaps!
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