When was the boiler last serviced?

I couldn’t tell you when my boiler was last serviced.

Nor what the kitchen paint was — the colour, the finish, the brand. Nor whether the dishwasher was still under warranty, which became relevant at the point it stopped draining.

None of that information was lost, exactly. The boiler service was on a certificate in a drawer. The paint was in an email from a decorator. The warranty was in my head, badly. Every answer existed somewhere. None of them existed anywhere I could get to in under ten minutes, which for practical purposes is the same as not having them at all.

So I started keeping a list.

The list wanted to be an app

It began as the obvious thing. A note, then a longer note, then a spreadsheet with tabs. Rooms, the things in the rooms, dates.

The trouble with a spreadsheet is that it holds facts well and events badly. Recording that the boiler exists is easy. Recording that it was serviced in March, by a particular engineer, for a particular amount, and that it’s due again — that turned into columns I kept adding to and never quite got right.

At some point the list stopped being a list and started being a description of software I wanted. So I’ve been building it.

Inventory apps, to-do apps, and the gap between them

There’s no shortage of apps in this area. Broadly they come in two kinds.

Inventory apps know what you own. They’re built around the insurance question — a list of possessions with values attached, in case the worst happens. They’re good at the snapshot.

To-do apps know what’s next. Bleed the radiators, change the filter, book the service. They’re good at the horizon.

Neither records what actually happened, and what actually happened is the part I keep needing. Not “I own a boiler”, and not “service the boiler”, but “the boiler was serviced on this date, by these people, for this much”. The event, with its details attached, kept in order.

That’s what I’ve built it around. The log is the product. The rooms and the items and the reminders are scaffolding to hang the log on.

What it keeps

Spaces, described in your own words — not a fixed list of room types to choose from, but whatever you actually call the parts of your house.

Items, with the details that turn out to matter later: make, model, serial number, what you paid, when the warranty ends.

Recurring jobs, which tell you how overdue they are rather than just sitting there.

Details worth keeping that don’t belong anywhere else. Paint codes, filter sizes, which cupboard the stopcock is in.

A history for each thing, including what every service cost.

And one log across the whole house — everything that has happened, filterable, and exportable as CSV.

The decisions

It’s local-first, and that’s the decision the rest follow from. It reads and writes one file on your Mac. No account, no sign-up, no telemetry, no cloud.

Partly that’s the nature of the data. What you own, what you paid, when the house is empty for a service visit — none of it needs to sit on someone else’s computer. Partly it’s that a record of a house ought to outlive the software that made it, and a file you hold does that better than an account you rent.

It’s one person, one household. £34, once. Not a subscription.

macOS 14 or later.

Two things it doesn’t do, which are worth stating plainly rather than leaving to be discovered: there’s no sync between Macs in version one, and there’s no iPhone app. Both follow from one file on one machine.

Where it is

In development. There’s no launch date, and I’m not going to invent one — I’ve seen enough pages promising things imminently that were still promising them a year later.

There’s a site for it, which goes into more detail: My House, My Things.

It started because I couldn’t answer three boring questions about my own house. That’s still exactly what it’s for.