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 the only can you have left, the paint has slopped over the label.
I also had a separate notebook for The Move and The Purchase. It had all the contacts - mortgage lending officer, realtors, inspectors; appointments, vendors, dates of major events; move-in punch list, move-out punch list, inventory with what to keep, what to toss, what to donate. Expenditures, documents to drop off at which municipal offices along with addresses and phone numbers.
It's really empowering to have all that information literally at your fingertips.
> 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.
The original paint chip with the name on it doesn't need to be matched because they can just look up the formula.
A chip as in a sample of the drywall... that I've found to be much more of a mixed bag. My last "matched" paint was nowhere close once the sun was shining on it.
A big step for me was just figuring out which hardware store the previous owner frequented.
Each major line of paints has slightly different colors, so figuring out of it was Sherwin Williams, Behr, Valspar, etc let me identify the right color collection and narrow things down enough for me to guess what he was using.
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 the only can you have left, the paint has slopped over the label.
I also had a separate notebook for The Move and The Purchase. It had all the contacts - mortgage lending officer, realtors, inspectors; appointments, vendors, dates of major events; move-in punch list, move-out punch list, inventory with what to keep, what to toss, what to donate. Expenditures, documents to drop off at which municipal offices along with addresses and phone numbers.
It's really empowering to have all that information literally at your fingertips.