At work, nothing important is allowed to live in someone's head.
Every machine has a record. It has a service interval, a history of what's been done to it, the certificates that prove it, and a date in the future when someone has to look at it again. If a piece of kit fails, the first question isn't "who knew about this?" — it's "what does the system say?" That isn't bureaucracy for its own sake. It's the only way a small number of people can look after a large number of things without all of it resting on one person remembering.
Then I go home.
At home, the boiler service certificate is in an email from a company whose name I can't remember. The washing machine warranty is in a drawer, or possibly the other drawer. The house insurance renews at some point in spring and I find out when it does. The car's MOT is in my head. Three of the four utility accounts are on websites I have to reset the password for every single time, because of course I do.
If I ran a site like that, I'd be having a very different sort of conversation with someone.
The bit that actually broke me was the school emails
I'm a dad doing this on my own, and I work long hours. House admin is annoying, but it's slow-moving — you can be quite bad at it for months before it bites.
School is not slow-moving. School is a constant, low-level stream of information, most of which doesn't matter and some of which absolutely does, arriving in the same inbox as everything else in my life. Non-uniform day. Trip payment deadline. Term dates that don't line up with the other one's term dates. An INSET day announced in paragraph four of a newsletter about the harvest festival. Six weeks of summer to fill, planned from an email I read once, on my phone, standing up, three weeks ago.
Nobody is being unreasonable. Every message is fine on its own. It's the accumulation — and the fact that there's no system underneath it. Just me, and my memory, and a phone I read things on while doing something else.
That is exactly what a maintenance system is for. Not for the crisis. For the accumulation.
So I built the thing I already knew how to build
The HouseHOLDER is, underneath, an asset register with a planner bolted to it. Not because that's a thrilling way to describe an app, but because it's the shape of the problem.
Your house is a collection of things: a boiler, a roof, a car, a set of appliances, some insurance policies, and a pile of documents that prove things about all of the above. Each has a history and a next date. Several of them cost money on a cycle you didn't choose. That is an asset register, and I've spent my working life around them. The difference between a house that's looked after and one that isn't usually isn't money or effort — it's whether anything is written down.
The rest of it points the same idea at the parts of a home that aren't machinery. Paperwork that lands somewhere sensible instead of a folder called "scans". School and club emails that get read once and turned into dates and to-dos, filed against the right child. Spending that tells you something over a year, instead of being a number you flinch at. The house I live in came with three lever-arch files of previous-owner paperwork, and I can now find any page of it from my phone in about four seconds, which is the single most satisfying thing I have ever built.
I didn't build it to start a company. I built it because my own admin was in a state my employer would never have tolerated, and I already knew what the fix looked like.
What I'd like from you
It works. I use it every day, for my actual house, with my actual school run in it. That's a very different thing from it working for you — and I'm well aware that a system designed around one man's mess has one man's blind spots built into it.
So I'm opening it up to a small number of households: people who'll put their real house into it for a month and tell me where it falls over.
What you're signing up for
- It's free while you're testing, and I won't charge this group by surprise. It'll be a paid product eventually — you'll know long before that happens.
- You can leave with your data. There's a "download everything" export built in from day one. I'd rather you trusted the exit than took my word on the entrance.
- I want the bad news. Confusing, broken, or just quietly annoying — it all counts.
Telling me is deliberately easy: Settings → Feedback → Report a problem, inside the app. Say what you were doing and what happened, and attach a screenshot if you can — one picture saves an hour of guessing. Please scribble out anything with a name, an address or a policy number on it first. I need to see my own broken layout, not your family's details.
I can't promise to build everything anyone asks for. I can promise every message is read by the person who wrote the code, which is the one real advantage of this being very small.
If your house admin is currently spread across a drawer, four websites and an inbox you're slightly afraid of — I'd like to hear from you.
Come and break it.
A small group of households, testing the most boring app in the world on their own real houses. Free while it's in testing, yours to export at any point, and built by someone who will actually read your complaint.
From the boring shelf: the UK home maintenance calendar, month by month and how long to keep receipts, warranties and paperwork. Questions about the app itself? The FAQ answers them plainly.