Areas

Areas represent how you think about and organize your house. Each Area card displays the number of Issues and Inventory items linked to it, along with a progress bar showing how many Issues have been resolved.

What are Areas?

Areas can be:

• Individual rooms — kitchen, bedroom, half-bathroom, garage
• Parts of rooms (especially bigger rooms) — a dining area, a connected bathroom
• Groups of rooms — upstairs, downstairs, wings
• Connections & ambiguous spaces — staircases, hallways, roofs
• Organizational features — closets, bins, crawl spaces
• Systems — HVAC, plumbing, heating

By creating Areas for any of the categories above, you can start to organize and track your house in dynamic, granular detail. This happens in two ways:

1. Link your Issues to an Area
2. Link your Inventory to an Area

Tip: Create an area called "Whole House" or "Entire Home" to cover work that extends to every room (like wall painting, light bulb replacement, etc.).

Linking Issues to an Area

Benefits

1. Pattern-finding: by creating links between Areas and the Issues that occur, you'll start to notice when similar problems keep occurring, or when solving one issue triggers another. Patterns like this can help you get ahead of problems before they become bigger.
2. Prioritization: with an Area-based list of Issues, you can know exactly which parts of your house require your attention. You can prioritize to take care of multiple problems in a single space over the course of an evening or weekend.
3. Clarity and control: an unorganized list of house problems is usually daunting and demoralizing. By associating Issues with Areas, you instantly create a clear sense of where problems actually exist, broken down in concise buckets that are much more manageable.

How to Link Areas to Issues

There are two ways to link an Issue to an Area:

1. When you create or update an Issue, you'll see an option for "Related Areas". You can either select Areas that you've previously created from the list, or create a new Area on-the-fly. To remove an Area, just click the "- [Area Name]" tag.
2. From the "Areas" section, you can add an Issue directly to any given Area. Just click the menu dropdown and select "Add Issue".

Linking Inventory to an Area

Benefits

1. Resale: Inventory tracking can give you a sense of the value of your belongings, and let you know when it might be beneficial to sell or donate.
2. Stocked Supplies: Tracking basic supplies like lightbulbs, water filters, batteries, and cleaning supplies can be a huge convenience when you're out shopping.
3. Insurance: In the event of an emergency, having a list of important items ready-to-go will make replacement and reimbursement significantly easier.
4. Paints: As soon as a painting project is done, you'll almost immediately forget which paint you used. Link paints to their rooms to avoid touch-ups that use the wrong color.
5. Organization: Taking time to link important tools, manuals, appliances, and rarely used goods to the Areas where they're stored can save you hours of searching in the future.

How to Link Inventory to Areas

Inventory items support two types of Area relationships:

• Used In: Where the item is actively used (e.g., a chandelier is "Used In" the Kitchen)
• Stored In: Where the item is kept when not in use (e.g., paint is "Stored In" the Garage)

To link an Inventory item to an Area:

1. Navigate to the Inventory tab and click on the item to open its detail page.
2. Select a new or existing Area from the "Used In" or "Stored In" fields.