A renovation, remembered

A renovation is a few months of decisions and a decade of consequences. Every choice arrives with a number attached — a colour code, a batch, a size, a finish — and every number is on packaging that goes in a skip on the day it stops being useful.

Then the wall gets scuffed, a tile cracks, the boiler needs a part, and the number is gone.

What to photograph as you go

None of this takes a system. It takes two seconds each, at the moment the thing is in front of you and about to be thrown away.

• Paint, before the tin is recycled — the brand, the colour name, the code, the finish
• Tile and stone, off the box — the range, the shade, the batch, the size
• Plaster, grout, adhesive, sealant — the exact bag, because “grey” is forty greys
• Taps, handles, sockets, switches — the model, so the next one matches
• Appliance and boiler plates, before they go behind a cabinet forever
• Certificates — gas, electrical, building control — as they’re handed over
• The trades — the card, the quote, the invoice, so the person who did it’s findable

The moment it pays

It’s never during the work. It’s eighteen months later, when somebody puts a chair through the hallway wall and you need one small tin of exactly the right green.

Ask for it in ordinary words — the green paint in the hallway — and the tin comes back with the colour, the finish and the size still legible on it.

It sorts itself while you work

Collections form out of what you’re keeping without you naming anything, so a renovation ends up grouped roughly the way you thought about it — documents in one place, appliances in another, the finishes together. You won’t have filed a single thing.

Afterwards

What you built during the work becomes the record of the house: what is behind the walls, who fitted it, when it was signed off, and what to buy when a piece of it fails. That’s the same record an insurer asks for after a flood, and the same one a buyer’s solicitor asks for at the end.

Start with the next tin you open.