July 9th, 2024

The Butler's Book: How to Create the Instruction Manual for Your Home

The article explores the concept of a Butler's Book, inspired by Victorian butlers, as a guide for efficient household management. It emphasizes organization, offers templates, and suggests customization for effective home management.

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The Butler's Book: How to Create the Instruction Manual for Your Home

The article discusses the concept of a Butler's Book, inspired by the practices of Victorian butlers, which serves as an instruction manual for managing a household efficiently. The author, influenced by the idea of household management from ancient Greece, emphasizes the importance of maintaining a well-organized home for overall well-being. The Butler's Book contains information on household systems, appliances, maintenance schedules, emergency protocols, and event planning details. The author shares insights on creating a personalized physical Butler's Book to streamline home management tasks and avoid unnecessary hassles. The article provides a free template for readers to create their own Butler's Book, emphasizing the benefits of becoming familiar with one's home through this process. Additionally, it highlights the practicality and usefulness of such a manual for current and future homeowners, suggesting it as a valuable gift for the next resident. The author encourages readers to tailor their Butler's Book to their specific needs and preferences, making it a dynamic and evolving resource for efficient household management.

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Link Icon 2 comments
By @teeray - 3 months
I have something like this for a rental property, but I designed it like an aircraft QRH (Quick Reference Handbook). It’s organized by system, like in the article (Electrical, Plumbing, Telecom, etc.), but the subtopics are problems: “Internet Outage”, “Water Leak”, “Loss of Heat”, etc. The checklists within are ordered to get quick diagnosis—for example, the “Loss of Heat” one starts with something like:

—-

Propane Tank Gauge -> greater than 15% (if less, skip to “Fuel Exhaustion”)

Check Pilots

* relighting procedure *

Fuel Exhaustion

* instructions for setting up space heaters *

* instructions to page propane company on-call *

—-

The idea is that I can literally tell anyone to flip open the book and have them save the house in whatever way it needs saving. There are also more mundane things in there too which end up being annoyances like “Lost TV remote” with instructions to program a spare from scratch.

By @euroderf - 3 months
Perfect timing. Recently thinking of a Runbook for a weekend place. Cheers for this item.