The House File — What Is In This House, How Old It Is, and Who Touched It Last

Nobody walks you through a house.

You get a ring of keys, a garage remote with one button that does nothing, and a drawer of manuals for appliances that may or may not still be here. Thirty seconds of handover on the driveway, and then the sellers drive away with everything they knew about the place. Which breaker is actually the dishwasher, because the label says GARAGE and has always been wrong. That the upstairs faucet has to be turned the other way. The man who did the roof, and whether he was any good. None of it is written down anywhere, and you will rediscover it one inconvenience at a time — usually at eleven at night, usually while something is running down a wall.

The House File is where you write it down instead: what is in this house, how old it is, what is already wrong with it, and who touched it last.

The method: the First Four Walks

Walk the house four times. Each walk looks for one thing and ignores everything else, which is the only reason it works — a single walk looking for everything finds nothing.

One: how to turn it all off. The water main, every local shutoff, the gas valve, and the panel with every breaker actually tested and labeled, by two people shouting from opposite ends of the house. Twenty minutes, now, with the lights on and nothing going wrong. This is the walk that makes a supply line letting go at two in the morning into a wet floor rather than a ceiling on the floor.

Two: what you actually own. Make, model, serial, roughly how old, where the manual is. Photograph every data plate as you go. This is the walk that turns a vague worry about the furnace into a date.

Three: what is wrong today. Every stain, drip, draft, sticking door and smell, written down without deciding which ones matter. Deciding is a separate job for a separate person, and doing it now is how you stop looking.

Four: everything outside. Roof, gutters, where the ground slopes, trees near the house, the driveway, and anything with a lid. Outside is where the expensive problems start, and where nobody looks until something inside goes wrong.

What is inside

Eight fill-in worksheets. Shutoffs and panels. Systems and appliances, with their ages. The defect log. Outside. A service record, so that in two years you can answer whether the furnace was serviced, who put that valve in, and whether anything is still under warranty. Your own seasonal round — the year this house actually has, not a generic checklist. Who to call, found before you need them instead of at eleven at night off a search result.

And one page you do not fill in. You hand it to the first contractor who works on the house, and they write down what they saw, what they did, and what they would keep an eye on.

Plus a quick reference page for the front of the file: the dozen facts you will otherwise look up forty times.

What it will not do

It will not tell you how to fix anything, what code requires, how serious a defect is, or what a repair should cost. It records what is there and what was done. Judgment about a defect belongs to the trade standing in front of it. Where something could hurt you while you are doing the walks, the book says stop — and that is the end of its advice.

The inspection report is not this, incidentally. It is a snapshot taken by a stranger on one afternoon before you owned the place, written to a format that protects the inspector. Worth keeping and worth copying from. Out of date the day after it was written.

Format: 24 pages, US Letter. Print it at home or fill it in on screen. One PDF, instant download, yours to keep and reprint.

Educational use. Handbook House guides are materials for organizing your own records. They are not building, engineering, electrical, plumbing or legal advice.