Owner's Manual for odd lives

Something we all forget when we are designing our non-standard lifestyles is that we may sell our house or land, or someone other than us might have to take over the upkeep, or that we may get spacey and forget what we knew last year. I'm making an owner's manual for my house and life, with stuff about how often to change the filters (and where I keep the new filters,) how to maintain the power systems (with the manuals for the technology,) where pipes are buried (with pictures!) what the plants are, and what they need, and which parts are edible.

We have all heard horror stories about "I sold my house, and they mowed down all the baby trees I planted, they thought they were weeds" or "Oh lord, WHY was this wired this way? or "This place HAS to have cleanouts, but where? And how DO you shut off the gas or the main breakers?" I think the solution to this is a book of the house and property.

I got the idea from some high end builders who are doing this for the houses they build, they take pictures of the pipes as they are installed, and of the power runs in the wall before they put the sheetrock on, and include a set of blueprints, with notes for what what was altered during construction, and so on. They say that not only the new owners are thrilled, but the next buyers are, and some repair people charge less if the book is there, as they don't have to figure it all out from scratch.

And as we get older, or ill, or stressed, we forget things. I had an appliance apart the other day, have done it before, was REALLY glad when I put it back together I had written inside it with sharpie where the wires go, because I thought "oh, I'll remember that!" as I pulled them off. And earlier this week I was careful to watch my drill as I drilled a screw into a wall of this rental that has a power outlet in it, but the wires could be anywhere near it (trust me, I have opened up the walls here, could be anywhere within a foot of that outlet, some horrifying wiring here) so I was prepared for that screw to hit a power line. This could have been avoided if I had a schematic (or admittedly, if the construction was better, but that's a different issue!) And I DID hit a buried wire with my tractor here, and had to power down the whole house (there apparently is no shut off at the meter either) because nothing in the breaker box was labeled anything that looked relevant ("Amy's room" I HATE when people label breakers that way, Amy hasn't lived here for at least 10 years, I have no CLUE what room was hers!)

If you have animals, notes on their care, so if you leave someone else to take care of them they will know how (and you don't always have the option of whether you leave them or not, something like a car wreck can leave things having to be done suddenly by people you didn't talk to about it.) What tool you use to get the snow off the solar panels (before someone puts a rake through the panel face,) what faucets to open for winter so the pipes don't break, and which ones you left open last fall. The things we are used to knowing we don't think about, until it's needed information, then we REALLY wish it was written down someplace. A log of when maintenance was done last is useful too.

It's an interesting concept, you get a manual with a toaster when you buy it, why not with the most complex thing you will ever buy or build in your life?

Do you have a manual for your house or land? Is it written in such a way that others can understand it? Is it all in one place that's easy to find?  Questions worth thinking on....

:D

Edit: My mom says "and not in a computer that others can't get into without a password!"  Wise mom!!

Mine is in process. It will be a while. Large structure and LOTS to do...including answering several of those questions for myself. I'm labelling as I go though,

A similar concept - though not usually including the construction info, used to be standard, in pretty much all middle and upper income families, and especially with castles and such. It's a practice I think needs to be brought back, and having purchased this place, so recently (1 1/2yrs ago), there is much about it - like wiring, several plumbing issues, and lack of a septic clean out - that doesn't make sense, to us. Things like keeping track of filters, chimney cleaning, and other important maintenance info would have been great. Thankfully, the builders/owners of this place did at least keep their receipts, spare parts, and many business cards of their subcontractors, as well as owners manuals. I consider us lucky to have it.

Pearl- what a great idea! I wouldn't have considered adding how to use plant instructions.

My mother does a version of this. She has all her receipts for major repairs/systems, warranty docs, etc in a binder. She gives the binder to the next owner (she may remove the receipts). A typed description of what was done for each. When it comes time to sell, it's really impressive to potential purchasers, the real estate agent, inspectors,  etc. She also leaves written instructions on how the pump works, where shutoffs are, etc. All plant tags are saved in a folder, and she is bugging me to do a labeled diagram of where things are planted as well.

My dads house... well, I wish the previous owners had done this. So many questions, and the original owners are long dead.

When I eventually  manage to buy - stupid COVID!- I hope I am organized enough to something even vaguely similar.

Pearl, you mention a great point about photographing the insides of walls before drywall goes up.  When we were building the house we live in now (ok, actually a contractor built it, but we designed the floor plan), I took copious pictures during construction.  As in I took pictures daily for most days of construction, and sometimes took pictures morning, noon, and afternoon.  My pictures covered every conceivable aspect of the house including different angles of the same point.  All said, I took well over a thousand pictures throughout construction.  

I did this partly because I was sentimental, but I also wanted to have a photographic record of every phase of construction.  I know where wires and pipes run.  I know where twisted pieces of lumber are.  By being so fastidious, I caught several errors before they got “baked in.”

Just as a general piece of advice to anyone building a home, carefully inspect it on a regular basis.

Eric

The present house has less oddities than the last one, that one had a lot of power switches that didn't appear to do anything, and some light switches were in very odd places, it took us months to find the front outside light switch, it was in the living-room in the middle of a wall behind a curtain. at the opposite end of the house from the door.
For this house the only odd thing is really the heating, the plumbing is strange and you need to fill it in two places and have a torch so you can read the pressure gauge. There's some machinery in the barn (old milking equipment, an old walk in fridge, a grain crusher several augers, automatic muck raking system) that we have no idea about and neither does the person we bought it from. Putting up curtain rails means the slowest drilling ever. carefully carefully with the power off as we have no idea where the cables run, and no cable finder has been able to find them, (though the sockets work so they are there!) drilling 2 inches into the wall we're still in the plaster so they may be buried very deep. We also have around 15 keys they have labels but they refer to things like barn door 2 or cow door and since the barns doors are not numbered, it doesn't really help, I suspect that several of the keys no longer have locks that go with them.
As to breakers someone has handily written "kitchen" "bryggers" on the switches, but we have discovered that while the kitchen fuse does indeed do the kitchen, it also does some in the dining room, old master bedroom and living room, whereas the bryggers also does one in the kitchen and 2 in the livingroom... To make it more interesting the house has 3 x230V and 1x400V fuses plus a main breaker, and the barn has 2x 400V and it must also have at least 1 230 but we have no idea where that may be. the fuse box out in the barn only has the 400v in it and the house fuses do not turn off the 230 circuits in the barn.. There is a way to turn it off by turning off the power to the entire place.  We're not sure where the barn drains empty to, possibly the old pee tank but maybe not, who knows! and I suspect the washing machine may also empty into that, since it's suspiciously on the wrong side of the house from the septic and the drain leads out the wrong way.

There's nothing really domestic to write down other than electrics (which we don't know) and heating.(remember to turn on BOTH pumps) houses are not sold with appliances and none of ours are strange in any way if someone needed to house sit. We are about to bury a water pipe out to the field so that will need recording where it runs, I checked very carefully with the sellers that there were no existing pipes around the place.

As for plants I don't really record anything, I assume people can recognise the plants they want and will tear out anything else. Fruit tree types would be a good thing to record, but I can't say I even do that for myself! so far I know we have an mid season eating apple, a early eating pear, a greengage, 2 plums of different types, a sweet cherry tree, purple gooseberries (sweet), red and black currents, curiously tasteless raspberries and a ton of feral strawberries. I think the only way to label trees would be with those little signs arboretums use. no matter where I write it down I'll lose it!

I realized the need for some kind of map or manual when I planted a hosta by my back porch. I jumped on the shovel barefoot and got knocked off by a jolt when I hit a wire. I didn't know the previous owner had run the electrical wire right there to the storage building.

There are so many things about this property and the stuff on it that I have no clue about. It's all in the heads of my husband and father-in-law. This thread has given me some good ideas of things to ask them, as having a manual of sorts makes a lot of sense.

Hubby has mapped every switch and socket in this house back to the breaker - but that's the easy part! (He uses a folder with a page per breaker, as some are quite complicated.)

Soooo... for those in North America, there's a beast called a "paired breaker". That's two regular breakers which are tied together with a bit of plastic, so you have to turn them both on or off at the same time. Things like electric baseboard heaters have 2 live wires, and the live wires are supposed to lead to the same paired breaker. But this was an owner built house and the owner didn't know how to follow basic instructions and the inspector must have been high on something, because this basic rule wasn't followed and we've got no idea where the fault lies. We simply removed many of the heaters and put a metal plate over the wires after putting caps on them. Photographs of the wires in the walls *might* give us a clue where to look, so I think that's an excellent suggestion.

Then there's this small breaker panel on the north wall of the bathroom which we have *no* clue where it goes - if it goes anywhere???

We are pretty good at keeping manuals for things like the stove and dishwasher, but many of them have been significantly dumbed down in the last 10 years. It used to be fairly standard to have an exploded parts diagram, but rare nowadays. Everything is just supposed to be tossed when it breaks! Not in this house.

Nikki Roche wrote:I realized the need for some kind of map or manual when I planted a hosta by my back porch. I jumped on the shovel barefoot and got knocked off by a jolt when I hit a wire. I didn't know the previous owner had run the electrical wire right there to the storage building.

There are so many things about this property and the stuff on it that I have no clue about. It's all in the heads of my husband and father-in-law. This thread has given me some good ideas of things to ask them, as having a manual of sorts makes a lot of sense.

I used to hate that they don't bury power lines here. Now I kind of appreciate it.

I hope you didn't get burned from the electrocution? I've fortunately never had more than a tingle... Scary even then.

L. Johnson wrote:

Nikki Roche wrote:I realized the need for some kind of map or manual when I planted a hosta by my back porch. I jumped on the shovel barefoot and got knocked off by a jolt when I hit a wire. I didn't know the previous owner had run the electrical wire right there to the storage building.

There are so many things about this property and the stuff on it that I have no clue about. It's all in the heads of my husband and father-in-law. This thread has given me some good ideas of things to ask them, as having a manual of sorts makes a lot of sense.

I used to hate that they don't bury power lines here. Now I kind of appreciate it.

I hope you didn't get burned from the electrocution? I've fortunately never had more than a tingle... Scary even then.

No burns, fortunately. That was a few years ago and the plant really needs to be divided, but I keep putting off digging in that spot again. I'm pretty sure the wire goes past only one side of the plant, but with the way things are rigged over here, who knows what else I may encounter.

Nikki Roche wrote:

L. Johnson wrote:

Nikki Roche wrote:I realized the need for some kind of map or manual when I planted a hosta by my back porch. I jumped on the shovel barefoot and got knocked off by a jolt when I hit a wire. I didn't know the previous owner had run the electrical wire right there to the storage building.

There are so many things about this property and the stuff on it that I have no clue about. It's all in the heads of my husband and father-in-law. This thread has given me some good ideas of things to ask them, as having a manual of sorts makes a lot of sense.

I used to hate that they don't bury power lines here. Now I kind of appreciate it.

I hope you didn't get burned from the electrocution? I've fortunately never had more than a tingle... Scary even then.

No burns, fortunately. That was a few years ago and the plant really needs to be divided, but I keep putting off digging in that spot again. I'm pretty sure the wire goes past only one side of the plant, but with the way things are rigged over here, who knows what else I may encounter.

Dig with a wooden spike or trowel instead of a metal shovel just to be safe.

Hey, there's a BB for that: Homesteading Straw Badge - Set up a reference document for the homestead

Pearl Sutton wrote:
I had an appliance apart the other day, have done it before, was REALLY glad when I put it back together I had written inside it with sharpie where the wires go, because I thought "oh, I'll remember that!" as I pulled them off.

I wish I had one of these the time I tried to fix my electric stove, got shocked, called a repair guy, and after he put the stove back together...there were 2 screws left over.

Hmm...!

We were just talking this morning about doing this so we can keep track of when filters were changed and other maintenance items like that.

I keep tons of notes and maps of my plants but they are all digital. I probably should print out a copy once a year.

I wish we had some info about the house from the previous owners who built it. One was an electrician and did a lot of extra stuff... We have outlets every two feet for example. 😆 The house has a network and wired-in speakers in a couple of rooms but we don't know how to use any of it.

Jenny Wright wrote:
I wish we had some info about the house from the previous owners who built it. One was an electrician and did a lot of extra stuff... We have outlets every two feet for example. 😆 The house has a network and wired-in speakers in a couple of rooms but we don't know how to use any of it.

I suggest any time you figure out any of the system, notate it, as time goes on you may see the pattern of how it was done.
I'm doing this in the rental I'm in, just to make it easier to cope with. The wiring here is ... interesting. Notating it gives me a half a clue about where to look when things go weird. Things like the hall light is on the ground fault circuit for the bathroom was non-intuitive.

Eric Hanson wrote:Pearl, you mention a great point about photographing the insides of walls before drywall goes up.  When we were building the house we live in now (ok, actually a contractor built it, but we designed the floor plan), I took copious pictures during construction.  As in I took pictures daily for most days of construction, and sometimes took pictures morning, noon, and afternoon.  My pictures covered every conceivable aspect of the house including different angles of the same point.  All said, I took well over a thousand pictures throughout construction.  

I did this partly because I was sentimental, but I also wanted to have a photographic record of every phase of construction.  I know where wires and pipes run.  I know where twisted pieces of lumber are.  By being so fastidious, I caught several errors before they got “baked in.”

Just as a general piece of advice to anyone building a home, carefully inspect it on a regular basis.

Eric

I designed our next to last house and had an architect do the plans.  A contractor built the house and I took photos like you did, Eric.  I took hundreds, but thousands would have been better.  

The BIG POINT I want to make about those photos is that they need to be captioned immediately to describe what has been photographed and also numbered so the corresponding location on the plans can be numbered, too.

Give each room or area of large rooms an ID as well and preface each photo with the room ID as well as the photo location number.  It's easier to find a photographed location on the plans when the photo ID says it's the master bathroom photo location 7 (MB-7) than it is to hunt for where in the house photo 352 was taken!

I was casual about my photos.  I don't own the house anymore but I ended up through out a bunch of photos of outlets that could have been anywhere in the house.  I thought they'd always stay in the order they were taken and I would remember what I took photos of.  I mean, really -- we built the place in 1977!  

I wrote out all sorts of instructions for the first house I ever bought and sold. It was an old house with "oddities." I left them in a kitchen drawer when I moved. A couple of years later, I was driving past and saw the new owners out doing yard work. I stopped and introduced myself. They were enjoying the house. Yay. Had they done anything with the upstairs plumbing? (I'd had a second bathroom plumbed in ... it was all in the notes I'd left.) What upstairs plumbing? It turns out they hadn't received any of the notes I'd left. Boo.

I was pretty upset with the realtor. My first winter in that house, the temperature hit –40ºC for 6 weeks straight and I was without water that whole time. The pipes had frozen right away. When I called the woman I'd bought the house from, she said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I should have told you that you have to run a small stream of water in the bathtub when the temperature hits –35." I hadn't wanted that same thing to happen to the people who bought my house, so it's a good thing I met them when I did (plus climate change had warmed the winters there; phew).

Anyway, if you take the time to write out instructions, also take the time to make sure your instructions get into the right hands!

This is a super cool idea: I have a bunch of fruit trees and shrubs. I would love for the next owner to know what they are. In my first house, I had layered a bunch of blueberry bushes. They were producing lots and lots of really good berries. When my first husband sold the house, he sold it to folks who just wanted to live 'the rural life' and be out of town. You guessed it: They killed all the blueberry bushes to install... a lawn. AAaarrrgh! It broke my heart.
In the house we live in now, there is some wiring we still do not quite understand.  I'd love to know where the wiring to the former pool was buried so I can move some dirt. [I'll have to call the hotline when I'm closer to tackling that project.
Creating a "book of my house" would also enhance the prospect of selling the house for a better price.
I was told that in the assessment of a property, only the buildings count. The establishment of a garden, of fences, of garden beds, of trees planted, irrigation systems etc. are not taken into consideration. Even the 3 new pumps won't count.
When you think of the price tag of even a few trees, it is a scandal IMHO that this is totally discounted. I just do not understand it. I kept the receipts of the improvements, like fencing, trees. But how do you assess correctly the value of soil, when you started with barely one inch of it, and now I have over one foot of it? there should be a way to put a dollar amount to it.
I suspect that part of the problem is that realtors are "suits" not arborists or even gardeners, so the sweat and the money that we sink into a property over the years is harder to quantify? They know buildings but they do not know sh*t ... hmmm... squat about growing stuff, therefore the true value of the land or what can be grown on it.
My husband's first wife wanted a garden. He didn't want to bother. After the divorce, his first move was to bulldoze her garden. [I'm doing all I can to outlive him!].
There is just such an incredible lack of appreciation of nature and how we can exist intelligently on this earth. As a permie, it is hard not to get discouraged.

Hi Pearl,

We created such a manual a few years back. Our motivating force was  all the what “what ifs” in life such as death or hospitalization. So, we began with information on all our pets and livestock. Our primary concern was a cat we had with an outrageous personality that we knew no one else could tolerate.

Cecile, for a few years we lived on an acre on the edge of town.  Even though we saw the situation as temporary, we planted an orchard and a number of fruit bearing bushes.   We also, of course, put in a garden and a greenhouse attached to the house.  We made the mistake of driving by it earlier this year. Big mistake.  Every fruit tree and bush is gone.  The Maple trees we planted are now a useful size, though I am sure it has not occurred to the owners what they were to be used for.  The greenhouse has been updated graded to a sun room.   Of yes, the neighboring fields that we did not own is a subdivision.   The one neighbor we did have, no longer lives there …..but the large pond they put in has now been filled in.

It is always sad to look at houses you used to own. We had one with a long garden, separated in two by a gate and fence/hedge. The hedge contained loganberry and tayberry plants which were really productive and the far part of the garden had been used for growing vegetables by the people before us as well as us. Last time it was up for sale I looked at it online and all the "useful" plants had gone including a huge rosemary bush. Now it is just lawn.
On a different note, we have just moved house and are still trying to work out the vagaries of the place. It has an oil fired Aga (range cooker) but no instructions. We know it needs a part before we can use it and no doubt I can find instructions online so that's not too much of a problem. I found some instructions for a closed stove with back boiler that is no longer here. They were on the top shelf in the pantry so I think they had just been forgotten. The oil tank has a transmitter to let you know how much oil is left but no receiver and we needed to "get a man in" to sort out the poor tv reception. He remembered the previous owner as he'd put in a booster for her some years ago. When we begin to do the serious renovation of both house and garden I will take lots of photos, print them out and write on the back exactly why so the next owners know where and what everything is for. How much easier it would be for everyone if we all kept records of what we do to our houses.

Info books for house and property aren't just for new owners.  I'm guilty of thinking I will always remember where my buried wires or pipes are.  Hah!  

Yeah, I hate seeing my old homes get trashed. My last home was bulldozed. The house I had renovated, all my perennials, probably the best garden soil in town, all gone. I almost threw up when someone laughingly sent me a text of it "Hey! look at your house! hahahah!"  Felt like I had been kicked in the stomach.

One of the best reasons I can think of for a book like this is, like Lif said, the "Oh of COURSE I'll remember that!" factor. Next year you stand there and stare at that 'What the heck did I do there? I know it made sense at the time, but then I moved this and that, and now I don't recall why I did it.  And the older we get the harder it is to recall stuff.

Another good reason is not always the same person will be doing things. When my sister's husband died, not only did she have no clue there was a filter on the air system that had to be replaced, she had no idea where it would be, or where to buy a new a one, or if there were a box of new ones in the garage. Someone had to figure it out from scratch to deal with it for her.

I also keep manuals for my appliances for the same reason. When I get rid of them, I make sure the manual goes with it.  I have bought some things second hand that I have been overjoyed had a manual, and I think it's a positive thing to do for the world. Keeps more things usable for longer, less things getting tossed because the person who bought it can't figure out how to make it work. I'll pay more for an item that has a manual with it. I am horrified by throw away culture, and I put a lot of effort into making sure I'm not part of it.

And our homes and land and gardens are the most valuable things we own, and the things that folks like us put so much sweat and money into, that letting sad things happen to it after we are gone just through lack of knowledge is heartbreaking. Your basic suburban tract house you can move in, adjust the thermostat, and have heat. I know someone who has a house that has a radiant floor heat system that doesn't work, they don't know why. Better info there would have helped them a lot.

Something I'd LOVE to see is real estate agents and cleaning crews who don't go through and throw everything out when people leave. I'd like to see it considered normal to leave a box for the new owners, with parts, and notes and receipts, and information, and know it will get to them. But the current culture is to throw anything like that out. It's a mental shift that needs to happen in the world, and I don't know how to make people make that shift. In places like Europe there is a cultural tradition of historical record-keeping, In the US there's a pattern of reduce a house to it's bare essentials before new people move in. I don't know how to shift it.

This is like succession planning in businesses! And in fact, your homestead might be a business too!

If anyone needs assistance with your documentation, I'm happy to help! I have experience documenting processes and I kind of have a passion for it! I haven't read through all the badges etc yet, but I'm sure there is something in there that I could earn by helping with this!

By the way, Nicole Sauce talked about documenting your fermenting processes for health inspections if you are selling your fermented goods. If I can find the exact episode again, I'll post the link.