Household Organization on Jesse Builds Software

Household Organization: Home Assistant on Wall-Mounted Tablet

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 19:38:41 -0700

I’ve written before about our hallway whiteboard. It’s been helpful, and we still use it, but we are now transitioning to a digital display mounted on our refrigerator.

The digital display has two major advantages over the whiteboard. We can access it from anywhere, even outside the house. And it can include dynamic elements that are updated automatically, such as the weather, our calendars, and various bits of information from our home automation system.

Household Organization: Hallway Whiteboard

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 21:35:01 -0800

A couple of years ago I received my Makeway kit. It was a kickstarter project that included an assortment of tracks and tricks for marbles, all suspended on a vertical surface by magnets. For this reason, I mounted a large whiteboard (with a metal backing) in the hallway of our apartment.

About a year ago, after conducting the household organization surveys, I started using the whiteboard as a physical weekly calendar for my family. I used some thin black masking tape to make a grid that would withstand the whiteboard eraser. I also got some small magnetic dry-erase rectangles to simplify rescheduling common recurring tasks.

Abandoning Household Organization

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 07:02:12 -0800

I have been trying to improve the organization of my household for years. My wife and I have been using shared Google calendars for over a decade, but there are plenty of issues we could still improve. It was only minor challenges when it was just the two of us, but once we had a child, the systems we had started to show their limits.

I quit my job with the dream of building my own product, but I started without any particular ideas about what to build. It didn’t take long before I was considering working on this exact problem. Not only was it something I would benefit from, but it was also something I would find interesting, and could enjoy building and maintaining by myself.