Meet Attic: a record for the house you live in
By Rob Chipman
I've owned my house for years and I can't tell you the paint color in my own living room.
Not the brand, not the finish, not the name on the little chip. If I want to touch up a scuff, I take a butter knife to the wall, pry off a paint flake, and drive it to the store. The furnace filter is the same story. I measure it every single time because I never write the size down. Who installed the water heater? When? Still under warranty? No idea. The answers exist. I just never kept them anywhere.
This is the thing about a house. It's the most expensive thing most people will ever own, and almost nobody keeps a record of it. The knowledge lives in your head until it doesn't, and then it's gone, or it walks out the door with the previous owner the day you move in.
So this month I started building the app I wanted. It's called Attic.
What it is
Attic is a home documentation app for iOS and Android. You walk your house and write it down, room by room, system by system.
The paint colors, with the brand and the sheen and where the leftover can is. The appliances, with model numbers and the date you bought them. The flooring, the fixtures, the furnace filter size you can never remember at the store. Your major systems: HVAC, electrical, plumbing, the roof, the water heater. Who serviced them and when.
Everything gets a dated log. Repainted the hallway, replaced the disposal, had the chimney swept. It builds up over the years you own the place into an actual history of the house.
And when you sell, you hand the whole thing to the buyer. Here's your house. Here's everything in it. Here's what we did and when. That handoff is the part I'm most excited about, because right now that knowledge just evaporates at closing every single time.
Why it's the second TFL product
If you've been here a while, you know Tiny Forest Labs as the place that makes AxiomWeaver, a writing tool for LitRPG authors. A home app is a hard left turn from that.
But it isn't, really. Both are the same problem wearing different clothes: you've got a complicated thing with a lot of moving parts and a long history, and the tools for keeping track of it are a spreadsheet and your memory. AxiomWeaver does it for the world inside a novel. Attic does it for the house you live in.
It also runs through the same filter every TFL product runs through, which I'll write more about soon. No tracking. No ads. No data leaving your phone unless you ask it to. A homeowner shouldn't have to trade their house's blueprint to a server farm to keep a list of their own paint colors.
Where it's at
Early. I started the scaffolding a few days ago and I'm building it in the open, the same way I built AW. It's going to move fast, because I work with a small team of AI tools that lets one person cover a lot of ground. I'll post progress here as it comes together.
If you own a home and you've ever stood in a hardware store aisle trying to remember a measurement, this one's for you. More soon.
-- Rob