Water is coming through the kitchen ceiling. The one person who knows where the stopcock is has gone to their sister’s for the weekend and is not answering.

That is what a house handbook is for. Not the boiler’s forty-page manual. The sentence “under the sink, behind the bleach, it is stiff, turn it clockwise” that lives in exactly one head.

Search for one and you are told to buy a three-ring binder, some sheet protectors and a pack of zip bags for the spare screws. Then fill it with appliance manuals. Every one of those manuals is already on the manufacturer’s website. The stopcock is not.

Why the binder of manuals never gets opened

The binder approach treats a house handbook as a filing job. Collect the paper, put it in plastic, put the plastic on a shelf. It feels thorough. Then nobody opens it for three years, because nothing in it answers a question you actually have.

Think about the last five times something in the house went wrong. Nobody needed the washing machine’s spin-cycle table. Somebody needed to know which switch on the fuse board is the kitchen, whether the boiler was serviced this year, and the number of the plumber who was good.

A manual tells you how a boiler works. A house handbook tells you how your boiler works, and who to ring when it doesn’t.

So keep the manuals out of it. If you want them to hand, save the link to the manufacturer’s PDF and move on. The handbook is for the knowledge nobody else could have written down.

Three answers only your house has

Every useful entry in a house handbook is one of three things. Where it is. How it behaves in this house. Who last did something to it, and when it is due again. The diagram above is a real-shaped example, four systems by those three columns.

The first two are short sentences that rarely change. In Chirpy they go in Notes. Stand in the kitchen, open the app and post “Stopcock: under the sink behind the bleach. Stiff. Clockwise to close.” It is a sticky on the dashboard of everyone in the household before you have stood up, with your name on it, and they get a notification that it went up. Notes cap at 240 characters, which is a feature here: one fact per note, readable while water drips on the phone.

The third column goes in Home. Add a record called “Boiler” under Maintenance, put the engineer’s name in Provider, add a Model row and a Serial row under Details, and set the Renews / due date to next October. Paste the manufacturer’s manual into the Link field. That is the binder’s whole job done in one entry, and it does a thing the binder never could, which comes up further down.

What to put in a house handbook

Ordered by what causes the worst evening if nobody can find it. Do the first four tonight; the rest can wait for a quiet Sunday.

1. Water. Where the main stopcock is, which way it turns, and any isolating valves under sinks and behind the toilet. Where the water meter is.
2. Power. The fuse board, which switch is which room, and the known trips (“kettle and toaster together”). The electricity meter and where its reading is.
3. Heat. Where the boiler or furnace is, how to reset it, how to top up the pressure if yours needs that, and where the thermostat schedule is set.
4. Doors and keys. Who holds a spare. Which doors have a trick. Where the window keys live.
5. The weekly stuff. Bin and recycling days, guest Wi-Fi, the parking permit rules.
6. Finishes. Paint colours by room, with the brand and the code off the tin. Flooring and tile, with a note of where the leftover boxes are.
7. The trades you trust. Plumber, electrician, heating engineer, the handyman who turns up. Name, number, what they did.
8. History. When the roof, boiler, windows and big appliances went in, and their warranty end dates.

If that list looks like it overlaps with an emergency binder, it does, a little. Important household information in one place covers the insurance policies, the legal papers and the medical side. The house handbook is the building’s half of that file.

The column that goes stale: who did it last

The first two columns are close to permanent. The stopcock does not move. The third column is a date, and dates go out of date while the binder sits on the shelf looking complete.

This is where the Home record earns its place. Once the boiler record has a due date, Chirpy tells every member of the household 30 days before it, a week before, the evening before and on the day. Not just whoever typed it in. So the service gets booked in early October, when the engineer still has slots, rather than in the first cold week when the boiler stops.

When the engineer has been, change the date to next year and add a line to the record’s notes: “Oct 2026, new pressure valve, Dave.” Over a few years that becomes the service history buyers and insurers ask for. For the full set of jobs and when each one comes round, a home maintenance checklist by season lays them out by cadence.

Paper, a shared doc, or an app on everyone’s phone

A shared document is better than a binder, because it is searchable and lives off-site. It is still one long page that one person wrote and one person updates, and nobody else is told when it changes.

Paper wins on one count, and it is a real one. When you sell, a folder left in the kitchen drawer goes with the house, and an app does not. But a folder written in the week you move out is written from memory in a hurry; the one you kept in Chirpy for five years is what you copy it from, with every date already right.

Whatever you choose, apply one test. Can the other adult in the house find the stopcock entry in under a minute, on their own phone, without asking you? If not, the handbook still lives in your head.

On Chirpy Plus, when it opens, you will be able to photograph the boiler’s data plate and have the model and serial read into the record. On Basic you type them, which takes about as long as finding the torch to read the plate.

Handing it over: sitters, guests and buyers

The same handbook does three jobs depending on who is reading it.

• A sitter for the evening needs a small slice: the address, who to call, the stopcock and fuse board. Our guide to the babysitter information sheet splits that into what is always true and what is only true tonight.
• A house-sitter for a week needs the weekly stuff on top: bins, plants, the heating schedule, the pet. Copy the relevant notes into one message. Do not add them to the household, because members see everything.
• The buyers want the history: the boiler’s age and services, the roof, the paint codes, the trades. That is your Home records, written up once. If the move is yours, the moving house checklist covers the clocks that start on the day you leave.

Keeping it true for years

Two habits, both tiny.

Write the entry at the moment of change, from wherever you are. The electrician is packing up and you post “Fuse 4 is now the loft” while they are still in the hall. Your partner sees it tonight. Nobody has to remember to tell anybody.

Keep the receipt with the job. When something new goes in, the warranty and its end date belong on the same Home record as the model and the installer. How to do that without a shoebox is in keep track of warranties and receipts, and deeds and the insurance policy go in Vault, next to the rest of the household’s documents.

Once a year, when the boiler reminder comes round, read the notes out to each other. Anything that makes either of you say “that’s not right any more” gets fixed there and then.

Common questions