Usage guide

1. Getting started

The app opens on the neighborhood — your own lot plus five model homes (The Classic, The Estate, The Townhouse, The Ranch, and The Penthouse condo tower) gathered around a central green, with the main road looping around the outside of them and footpaths running from each home to the park. Tap any home to preview its exterior and floor plan, then press Mine to claim it — or claim your own lot as-is. Either way you'll be asked for the year built and year purchased.

Your claimed home saves automatically on-device and reloads every time you open the app. There is no account and nothing is uploaded — see the privacy policy.

2. The maintenance hub — how it actually works

Open it with the wrench icon — it's on every scene: Exterior, Floor Plan, Room, Driveway, Attic, and Neighborhood. The hub's model in one paragraph:

The shortcut: status icons in the scene

You rarely need to open the hub to answer "does anything here need me?". The Room, Driveway, and Attic panes — all three the same pane now — each carry a short strip of red / amber / green icons, one per thing in that place with recurring upkeep, worst first. One tap opens that item's maintenance card, which lists its due tasks with dates and a mark-done button beside each.

• Kitchen: fridge, dishwasher. Laundry: washer, dryer, water heater. Driveway: your vehicles and the garage door. Attic: HVAC, ductwork, insulation, solar, EV battery — with a second row beside it saying which of those your home actually has (see 3a).
• Rooms with nothing to maintain — most bedrooms and living rooms — show no strip at all. That's expected, not a bug.
• Amber means "due soon or never done", so a home you've just claimed reads amber across the board. That's the "get started" state, not a warning.

Tip: this is the fastest way to record install years. Walk the house, tap each coloured icon, fill in the year you remember. It beats scrolling the Score tab room by room.

To-Do tab

• Each row is one line — priority dot, title, due label, check — tap it to open the full detail: description, frequency/priority/cost chips, what it's tracked against, and a View repair guide button when the task has one.
• Order is severity-weighted: the most overdue, highest-priority tasks rise to the top; muted tasks always sink to the bottom. It's not simply soonest-due-first.
• Snooze 14d (in the detail popup) pushes a task's due date out two weeks without marking it done — use it for "I know, not this week." Mute reminders stops a task competing for attention entirely while keeping it visible in the list; un-mute any time.
• The list follows you. Standing in a room, on the driveway, or in the attic scopes the list to that place's own tasks — a header names the scope and offers Show all to see everything anyway. Exterior, Floor Plan, and Neighborhood always show the full list.
• Tasks are anchored to real seasons, not rolling countdowns: monthly tasks roll continuously; quarterly tasks anchor to March / June / September / December; biannual to March + September; annual tasks to the single season that fits the job (water heater flush before winter, HVAC service before cooling season, boat winterization in October).
• Mark Done (on the row, or in the detail popup) records today locally and recomputes the next due date.
• Doing a job early still counts for that season. Complete it in the season's own month or the month before, and the app treats that season as done and schedules the next one — a quarterly task ticked off in late August comes back in December, not September. Finish it earlier than that and it counts against the season just gone, so the next one arrives on schedule.
• Some tasks prompt less often than the ideal. Where the manufacturer asks for something monthly but it doesn't warrant a monthly reminder — a dishwasher filter, a washer drum, a pool filter, mini-split filters, an HVAC filter — the app prompts each season and the task carries an "Ideally monthly" note beside its frequency. The advice isn't watered down; only the nagging is. Smoke and CO detectors and pool water chemistry stay monthly, because at those two the reminder is the point.
• Add to calendar, from the detail popup, hands the task to your own calendar app, pre-filled — you press save there. The app itself never touches your calendar.

Tip: don't try to zero the list in one weekend. The seasonal anchors exist so three or four tasks surface at a time; a green To-Do list in March says nothing about September.

Tip: scoping means most single rooms show an empty state — that's expected. Only the kitchen, laundry, and driveway carry place-attributable tasks; everything else lives at the home level and shows up under Exterior / Floor Plan or via Show all.

Score tab

Grouped so the actionable things sit on top:

• Needs Maintenance — every item with a recurring task, per room, with both badges. Multiple copies are independent: three bathrooms means "Toilet 1/2/3", each with its own install year and rating.
• Vehicles — every car, boat, and motorcycle parked on your lot, tracked individually ("Car 1", "Boat 1", …). Tapping a row opens its card; tapping the vehicle in 3D opens its actions bar instead (paint color, gas/electric, Track → card, Remove).
• Structural — home-wide assets that aren't 3D objects: Roof, Siding, Plumbing, and Electrical Panel always; Garage Door, Smoke & CO Detectors, Windows & Doors, Fire Extinguisher, Deck, Lawn Equipment, Pool Equipment, and Balcony when they apply to your home.
• Not in my home on any card removes the item — and for structural assets also drops its tasks from the To-Do list entirely. Removed structural assets wait in Available to Add at the bottom; tap to restore.
• Other Items — tracked items with no recurring schedule; tap to record install year and condition anyway.

Tip: work through the inventory once, room by room, marking what you don't own and setting install years for big-ticket items (water heater, HVAC, roof, appliances, car). Fifteen minutes of setup is what turns the ratings from generic averages into your home's truth.

Note: plain furniture carries no recurring tasks — nothing about a sofa or a desk needs doing on a schedule, so they never reach the To-Do list. They do appear under Other Items, where an install year gives them a lifespan rating like anything else.

Your own appliances and tasks

The built-in inventory can't know about your water softener or your espresso machine, so you can add both the thing and the work it needs.

• Add an appliance: the Score tab ends with a Custom Appliances section — tap the + beside it, give it a name, and it gets a card like anything else, with an install year, documents, and its own upkeep badge.
• Add a task: any item's card — built-in or custom — has a + beside its Tasks section. Give it a title ("Check salt level") and pick how often it repeats. That's the whole form; priority is set for you.
• Your tasks sit at the top of the To-Do list, above the built-in ones regardless of due date, on the grounds that you added them for a reason.
• They repeat from the day you mark them done, not on the seasonal calendar — a task you wrote has no natural season, so a quarterly one you complete in August is next due in November rather than being pulled onto the December anchor.
• They survive claiming a different model. Custom appliances and tasks belong to you, not to the house, so they carry across when you move.

Guide tab

Step-by-step DIY guides (HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, Exterior, Appliances) with warning signs, numbered steps, safety notes, and — read these — when to call a professional.

Tip: if a To-Do task already has a guide, its detail popup has a View repair guide shortcut — no need to go hunting through this tab first.

Pros tab

Your own list of service contacts (name, trade, phone, email, notes), typed in by you and stored only on-device.

Tip: add the tech's name right after a good service visit, and in the notes put what they charged — future-you will thank you.

Documents

Any item card can attach warranties, manuals, and receipts via the system file picker. Tap a document to open it in whatever app on your phone reads that file type; the trash icon beside it deletes the attachment. The app stores references, not copies, and includes the files in backups you export — after which it holds its own copy, so the document keeps opening even if you move or delete the original.

Backup & restore (premium)

From the home icon: Backup App Data exports one .zip (database + documents) wherever you choose; Restore App Data overwrites everything from a backup after confirmation, then restarts the app. These two features require a one-time in-app purchase to unlock.

Tip: export a backup right after your initial Score setup and after any big edit — the file is small, and restore is all-or-nothing.

3. Vehicles and the driveway

• Vehicles are added on the driveway, not from the exterior. You walk onto it like a room: the Garage icon in the exterior pane (next to the Attic icon), the garage door in the exterior, or the garage slab in the floor plan.
• Once there, long-press the car, boat, or motorcycle icon and drag it onto the lot. A car dropped on the garage parks inside — that slot holds exactly one; everything else takes a free driveway spot (vehicles never stack). Tap the door to close or open it — when it's open a lip stays showing at the top of the opening, so you can close it without moving the camera; drag vehicles around the driveway; drag one to the street end to remove it.
• Your cars stay where you put them, and show up everywhere. One lot in real coordinates: the car halfway down the driveway is in the same spot in the exterior, in the floor plan, and seen through the wall from inside the house. Only the driveway lets you move them.
• The garage isn't just for cars. Its walls are see-through, so you can see what's in there from outside. On the driveway, the tray offers what a garage holds — water heater, spare fridge, washer, dryer, gym gear, keepsakes — and a drop lands inside the garage, not on the tarmac. How much fits is the garage's own floor, so another car never makes room for another freezer. If your garage is a room in the floor plan (Townhouse, Classic), it's the same garage either way: drop something from the driveway and you'll find it in the room, and vice versa.
• No garage? You still get the lot. A condo — which can own neither a garage feature nor a garage room — parks in the open: the same lot, driveway, and street, without a shell or overhead door, and its tray stays vehicles-only since there's nothing to put a water heater in. The same goes for a house before you've dragged a garage onto it. Every home can own and track vehicles.
• Every vehicle is a tracked inventory instance: tapping it in 3D opens its actions bar (paint color, gas/electric, Track → maintenance card, Remove).
• Each vehicle keeps its own schedule. Tasks are generated per vehicle from that vehicle's own drivetrain, so a gas car and an EV in the same garage list different work and completing one says nothing about the other. Titles are numbered ("Car 1: …", "Car 2: …") when you own more than one of a kind.
• Switching a car to electric swaps only that car's tasks: oil & filter and battery & fluids give way to an EV battery & charging check and brake fluid & caliper service (regenerative braking barely wears the pads, but calipers seize from disuse and the fluid still ages). Tires and annual service are shared by both drivetrains. A motorcycle swaps oil & chain for a battery & belt check. Anything already marked done keeps its date.

Tip: the coloured icons at the start of the garage pane are your vehicles and the garage door, tinted by how current their upkeep is — one tap opens a card. The plain icons after them are the drag tray, which places a new vehicle instead.

3a. The attic

• The attic is a place you walk into, reached by the Attic icon — in the exterior pane, the floor plan's, and every room's, so it's one tap from anywhere in the home. Back returns you where you came from. Same pane, same camera presets, same maintenance strip as any room; orbit and you're looking down at your own street.
• Attic or utility closet? Tap the bare attic floor (or use the Home icon's dialog) to switch. A full attic is your whole footprint — rafters, joists, a framed gable end at the far wall, ductwork, and insulation batts either side of a boarded walkway you can stand on (and tap). A utility closet is a small cupboard holding just the air handler. Houses start as the first and condos as the second; change either any time. Your roof still decides whether the space is pitched, so a condo's full attic is flat-ceilinged.
• Choosing a closet never removes a task. It says what the space is, not what your home has. What your home has is the row of icons in the pane — HVAC, Ductwork, Insulation — tap one off and it leaves your To-Do list, the Score tab and the attic itself; tap it back on and it all returns, including anything you'd already marked done. Same toggles as the hub's Score tab.
• Tap the floor hatch to close or reopen it. Tap any item — air handler, a duct run, a batt — to open its maintenance card.
• Stash keepsakes up there: long-press Treasure in the tray and drag it in, like furnishing a room. It's tracked under Custom in the hub's Score tab, and a floor-plan edit downstairs can't delete it.
• Your things aren't deleted when the house changes. Remove a room, shrink the floor plan, or claim a different model, and anything in it that was yours — a keepsake, or anything with an install year or a document attached — moves to the garage if a garage can hold it, and to the attic if not. It keeps its maintenance history; only ordinary furniture goes with its room.

4. Building and furnishing the 3D home

• Exterior pane: long-press a tray icon — garage, pool, deck, HVAC, solar panel, EV battery, tree, gazebo — and drag it onto the yard to place it (solar panels only while the camera's Angle is Top, for an unobstructed view of the roof). Tap anything you've placed to Remove it or Track its maintenance (HVAC / solar / EV battery jump straight to their own card; everything else opens the Hub); a pool can also be rotated to the next side. The deck is always the full width of the back wall. Tap the front door to go inside.
• Floor plan: tap a room to step into it (works even when the tap lands on furniture); long-press a room for options (enter / change type / reset). Toggle the pencil for all editing — wall modes (Solid / Open / Door / Window), selecting empty tiles to Create Room, adding or removing columns, rows, and floors, and removing a room, which is offered nowhere else; the gear icon stays camera-only. Adjacent rooms of the same type merge automatically into one continuous space.
• Making space to build: every model ships with its floors completely tiled, so there are no empty tiles to select at first. Add a column or a row (or remove a room) to make space, then select it and Create Room. A 1×1 offers only a foyer; 1×2 adds the narrow rooms — bathroom, laundry, pantry, storage, powder room — and 1×3 opens the rest.
• Stairs and the garage: stairs can only be changed or removed with the pencil on — every floor's flight sits directly above the one below, so altering a single storey's would strand that floor. Tapping them still walks you in. The garage opens the garage scene rather than a plain room: the overhead door and its upkeep, the fleet, and whatever's stored behind the door, in the one place vehicles can be parked. It can't be removed or retyped — it stays pinned to its corner of the ground floor.
• Hallways: rooms like any other — walk in, furnish them with a console or a bookshelf, change or remove them. A corridor is 1.4 m wide against a room's 2 m grid. Build a room that no corridor reaches and the home grows a hallway to serve it: a new corridor is inserted beside it rather than existing rooms being narrowed to make space, so nothing you already placed changes size. Closets and pantries are the exception — they're entered through their bedroom or kitchen, so they never trigger one.
• Room view: the tray offers the pieces that suit this room — a kitchen its counters and appliances, a bathroom its fixtures — plus the sensible crossovers (a garage fridge, a bathroom washer). Long-press an icon and drag it in; tap placed furniture for rotate / flip / remove; long-press-drag to move it; drag it out through a wall to remove. Positions persist automatically.
• Tap the bare floor for the room's card: change its type, or Reset it to the furniture it started with. A reset also brings back anything you'd marked "not in my home" here. Nothing you're tracking is lost — an appliance with an install year or an attached document hands its history to its replacement, and a keepsake with nowhere to go moves to the garage or the attic.
• Each tray icon shows a ×N count of what the room holds and dims when the room is full. The cap is floor space, not a fixed number: a small bedroom takes one bed where a large one takes three. The first of anything always fits, however tight the room. All items at the end of the tray reveals everything the filter left out, so nothing is ever out of reach.
• A room's walls are see-through, and the rest of the storey is drawn around it — every other room at its true position with knee-high walls and ghosted furniture — with your street, the park and the model homes beyond the home's boundary. Orbiting shows where you're standing; from upstairs you look down on the neighborhood. All of it is scenery: it can't be tapped or edited, and furniture dropped over any of it still lands in the room you're in.

Tip: the coloured icons above the tray are a different thing entirely — they open maintenance cards (see section 2). The tray's room-coloured icons place and remove furniture.

5. Camera

Moving something is always a hold, then drag — a short buzz tells you it's picked up, and it follows your finger from there. Dragging without holding first just looks around instead, so you can never nudge the furniture by accident while turning the camera.

Every scene's gear has its own settings (Orbit/Pan mode, gesture toggles, sensitivity, Reset view) and its own angle presets, all remembered per scene:

• Side — the oblique 3D overview. Every scene has one.
• Top — straight down, floor-plan style. Best for placing things accurately.
• Eye — standing inside at eye level. Room and garage scenes only.

Safety

Task and guide accuracy

• DIY guides and task descriptions are informational only. Manufacturer instructions and local building codes always take precedence over anything in this app.
• If you're unsure about a repair — especially electrical, gas, or structural — use a licensed professional (that's what the Pros tab is for). The app schedules reminders; it does not assess whether a task is safe for you to do yourself.
• Lifespan and upkeep estimates are industry averages combined with the dates you entered — a prompt to check something, not a certification of safety.

Safety — children

• Garage doors — a leading cause of child injury around the home. Keep the auto-reverse test current, keep remotes and keypads away from small children, and never let a child stand or play in the door's path — in the real garage, not the 3D one.
• Vehicles and driveways — never leave children unattended around a vehicle being serviced. Jacked-up cars, hot engines and exhausts, and running engines in a closed garage (carbon-monoxide risk) are all adult-only zones. Keep keys out of reach.
• Vehicle fluids — motor oil, coolant/antifreeze (sweet-tasting and highly toxic), brake fluid, and fuel must be stored locked away and spills cleaned immediately; the same goes for boat fuel stabilizer and battery acid.
• Pool equipment and chemicals — store chemicals locked away regardless of how current the water-chemistry task is, and maintain active adult supervision at the pool. Equipment maintenance is never a substitute for supervision or a proper fence.
• Fire extinguishers and smoke/CO detectors — installed, tested, accessible to adults, and out of reach of young children who could discharge or disable them.
• Tools, ladders, and chemicals for any task (gutters, deck sealing, HVAC coils, caulk, lawn equipment) — keep children and pets out of the work area while a task is in progress, and secure everything immediately afterward, not just once the checklist shows green.
• Electrical panels, HVAC, and solar — adult-only and, in most cases, professional-supervised. Keep panel access restricted at all times.

The DIY guides are informational only — follow manufacturer instructions and local codes, and when in doubt (especially with electrical, gas, or structural work), use the Pros tab for what it's for.