The Home Maintenance System You Wish You Had

The setup that keeps our house running without living in our heads

We bought our house in 2025. Four bedrooms, two cars, a dog, and a baby who arrived shortly after.

At some point in the first few months, I remembered we didn’t have a landlord to take care of everything. Because now we’re homeowners… living the American dream, right?!

The house wasn’t falling apart, but I knew there were things we should be doing. I also couldn’t tell you the last time anyone checked the HVAC filter, or whether the gutters had been cleaned since we moved in, or whose job it even was to know that.

So I built a system. Here’s exactly how.

Step 1: Start with your home’s context

Before any tasks, I created a Home Operating System page in Notion. One place that links out to everything: groceries and meal planning, the cars, our baby’s stuff, the dog. Think of it as the landing page for your life that isn’t work.

Home has it’s own page, and this is what we’re talking about. I started with the basics: address, square footage, year purchased, beds and baths. I dropped in the Zillow link so Notion AI could pull additional context. Then the cars: make, model, mileage, last service date. Then a rough dump of whatever chores we were already doing like how often we washed sheets and towels, when we vacuumed.

The goal isn’t a perfect inventory. It’s just enough context so that when you hand it off to Notion AI in the next step, it has something real to work with instead of generating a generic list for a theoretical home that is not yours.

Step 2: Build your rhythm overview

This is the actual system, and this is where Notion AI does most of the work so you don't have to.

The prompt I used: “I want to build out a home maintenance schedule on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis of things we should be doing that are routine. If nobody remembered to do this, what would eventually break? Make the list exhaustive but focused on what really matters.”

Then we went back and forth a few times: why does this one matter, do we actually need to do that quarterly, what can we skip. Until the list felt right for our house specifically. Don’t try to make it perfect on the first pass. The whole point is to get it out of your head and into somewhere it can live on its own (and you can refine overtime).

Here’s an example of some of the tasks based on cadence (non-exhaustive):

• Weekly (52x/year): sheets, vacuuming high-traffic areas, wiping down appliances

• Bi-weekly (26x/year): duvet cover, deeper surface wipe-downs

• Monthly (12x/year): HVAC filter, garbage disposal, dishwasher filter, checking under sinks

• Quarterly (4x/year): dryer vent, deep rug clean, bathroom exhaust fans, leak check

• Semi-annual (2x/year): HVAC professional service, refrigerator coils, gutters, power wash

• Annual (1x/year): roof inspection, smoke detector batteries, deep oven clean, foundation check, submit taxes

Once the list was locked, every single item got a name next to it. Not “whoever has time.” A name. I asked Notion AI to suggest owners based on our existing task history, flagging anything contractor-based as mine to schedule. Then I reviewed and adjusted (which is done after having an actual conversation with your partner).

Step 3: Flow into database

The rhythm overview is really the map. The to-do database is where things live week to week.

Once owners were assigned, I prompted Notion AI: “Build out the to-do list for the rest of 2026 based on cadence. For each task add the estimated time to complete, helpful context on the best way to do it, and anything to look out for as new homeowners. For contractor tasks, include what to ask for when hiring.”

So now every task in the database has:

• Owner (Cam or me)

• Due date (auto-populated on the right cadence)

• Priority

• Time estimate — knowing something takes 10 minutes versus 45 minutes changes how you schedule it

• Notes — the actual helpful context on how to complete it

We each filter to our own view. I have a three-day advance reminder set for everything. And when I check something off, there’s an automation that notifies Cam it’s done. Closure! For both of us!

Setting this up took maybe a couple of hours spread over a few days. The Notion AI piece was fast: refining the list, prompting the tasks, assigning owners.

Once it’s written down, you can see it. All of it. The stuff that was previously living rent-free in someone’s head suddenly has a column and a due date and a name on it. That visibility either confirms things are fair, or makes very clear that they aren’t.

But here’s what I actually want to say.

We are all walking around with so much in our heads. Constantly overstimulated with making to-do lists or looking for productivity. The thing we need to do, the thing we forgot, the thing we’re pretty sure was supposed to happen two months ago. It’s constant. And it’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain.

So the idea of the system isn’t to add more to our lives. The dryer vent reminder isn’t living in the back of my mind. It’s in a database. It has a due date. It will surface when it’s time and ask nothing of me until then.

And that freed-up space? The idea is that it’s not going toward a longer to-do list… It’s going toward actually being present for the life we bought the house for in the first place.

(And yes, the next step is having Cowork reach out to the contractor companies directly to research and book. But that's a whole other post. 👀)