Rooms and items¶
A home is made of rooms, and a room holds items: the equipment (boiler, smoke detector, oven) and the surfaces (the north wall, the floor) that you will have to maintain, repair or replace one day. This guide shows how to describe them. Every field is optional except the name, so you can start with a name and complete the rest when you have the document in hand.
Add the rooms¶
Open Rooms in the navigation, then Add a room. Give it a name and, if you like, a type. Use Change the order on the list to put the rooms in the order you want, for example the way you walk through the house. An area such as the garden or the cellar is a room like any other.
Write down the room memory¶
On the page of a room, Edit the memory keeps what you would otherwise search for later: the paint (colour, brand, reference, batch, how much is left and where), the floor and wall coverings, and free notes. Take photos before closing a wall or a duct and add them under Open walls: in ten years, they tell where the cables run.
Add the items¶
Add an item on the page of a room. Note the brand, the model, the serial number, the installation date and the end of the warranty, the maintenance contract and a link to it, and any link worth keeping, such as the manual online. The item page shows a label that tells whether the warranty is still running.
If you put an item in the wrong room, edit it and choose another room: the item moves with its photos.
Add photos¶
Photos can be added to a room or to an item, from a phone or a computer. HouseCairn keeps the picture and nothing else: the location, the date and every other piece of information hidden in the file are removed, and a large picture is reduced to 2,560 pixels on its longest side. Only JPEG, PNG and WebP are accepted. HEIC pictures, which some phones save by default, are not accepted: set the camera to its most compatible format (JPEG) or convert them first.
The default limit is 10 MB per photo. The administrator changes it with the
HOUSECAIRN_PHOTO_MAX_BYTES environment variable, in bytes, between 10,240 (10 KB)
and 104,857,600 (100 MB). A reverse proxy in front of HouseCairn may have its own,
lower limit on the size of a request: raise it as well. Photos are stored in the
data volume, in media/photos/, and are included in the backup of that volume
(see Data and backups).