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Home Manual

Introduction

This repository contains advice and templates for documenting your home in a Home manual, for yourself as well as any other users of your home.

My goal is to encourage you to document important information about living in your home, for day-to-day purposes as well as when emergencies occur.

This repository contains templates outlining the recommended information to include in your Home manual.

Luke Mewburn, [email protected].
24 February 2023.

Motivation

Over recent years a couple of friends have unexpectedly lost their partners. Aside from their grief, important knowledge about how their home operated was lost or hard to find.

My beloved wife Inger (AKA Thesis Whisperer) and I discussed me writing a "Home manual" documenting important and useful information about our home, because most of the information was either in my head or spread across years of email messages in my personal mail account.

I wrote the initial version of our Home manual over the summer break of December 2022 - January 2023, and it's currently 34 pages of documentation and diagrams.

Templates

1. Home-Manual-Template.md

Home Manual Template, in Markdown

General advice

  • Keep the Home manual up to date.
  • Documentation:
    • Server provider information:
      • Contact information.
      • Account and/or customer numbers.
      • Plan details (if relevant).
      • Password manager entry.
    • Device information:
      • Description, model, location, serial number, purchase date, warranty expiry date, supplier, installer (if separate to supplier).
    • Don't store sensitive information such as passwords - use a password manager. A reference to the relevant entry in the password manager entry is sensible.
  • Diagrams:
    • These don't need to be architectural, construction, or engineering grade. The important point is to contain information useful to lay-people. My diagrams are specifically "not to scale".
    • Maintain layers (if your diagram software supports layers) for:
      • External property plan.
      • Internal home plan.
      • Services: electricity, garden, IoT, lights, network, water/sewer, (etc.)
  • Software:
    • Use software and tools that are useable and maintainable by your household. Our household all has at least one personal iOS or macOS device, so I used Apple Pages. Google Docs or Microsoft Word are other options.
    • Export to PDF and store in well-known locations.
    • Print the manual and store in a well-known location. Even just the first few pages with emergency and critical information can be helpful.

Password managers

Use a good password manager for your personal passwords and information.

Setup a "Shared family" section (... shared with your family) with entries including:

  • Household services (energy, internet, water)
  • Insurance documents (home, car)
  • Wifi passwords

We currently use 1Password, but other password managers such as Bitwarden are also well regarded.