Conversations with a House

A 1912 house has problems modern tech wasn't built for. So I gave it a brain, a memory, and a voice.

• 1890s. Captain William James, a Riverside farmer turned landowner, opens his acreage west of downtown Jacksonville for development. The county still codes the subdivision under his name: James S/D Riverside.
• 1901. The Great Fire burns 146 blocks of downtown. Families who lost their homes move out to Riverside, and building pushes west.
• 1912. Our house goes up on a lot carved out of the James subdivision.
• 1919. Riverside becomes part of the City of Jacksonville.
• 1985. The neighborhood is listed on the National Register as the Riverside Historic District.
• 1992. The city's preservation guidelines for Riverside and Avondale use our front porch as an illustrated example of how a porch in the district should look.
• 2026. We buy it.

This summer we moved to Jacksonville and bought a house built in 1912. It came with plaster and lath walls, a century of undocumented upgrades, changes, and repairs, and more backstory than anything I've ever owned.

On July 15th, before we'd even closed, I started a git repo for it. At first it was just a way to keep the purchase straight. Every lender doc, the inspection and the title work went in as a PDF with a Markdown summary beside it, and an AI agent in a terminal read it all, filed it, and kept track. Then we closed, and I didn't stop. Contractor bids went in, then the network, then the thermostats.

Fourteen weeks and 735 commits later, that repo is the best record of this house that exists anywhere. And because an agent can read all of it, I can ask the house questions.

For the first two months, that's all it was: a memory I could talk to. Then the house started reading its own sensors, and now it's started answering in real time.

Part One: The Memory

The Record

The repo is plain Markdown and source documents side by side: the purchase, the inspection, every contractor bid, the network, the climate readings. About 300 Markdown records next to about 270 PDFs. No smart home platform, no database. An agent reads the repo from a CLI, and the house talks back through a terminal.

The house has spoken through several models since July, mostly Claude, with a long stretch on Grok, and a short stint using ChatGPT Astra as an external consultant via Codex. Every swap was painless, because the LLM providers never held the memory, the repo did.

Are we going to close on time?

July 20th, two weeks before closing, I asked the house where the purchase stood. It pulled a number off a lender form, and gave me an assessment: "~85% chance of closing on August 3rd specifically. Closing at all is materially higher, around 97%+."

We closed August 3rd.

Who should I hire?

Google Maps star ratings don't mean what they used to. A 5-star average can be bought, and based on experiences I've had with some vendors over the past couple of years, I suspect that most are now more bought than earned.

So a sorted list stopped being a signal and started being a liability. Instead of solely relying on testimonials from trusted neighbors and friends (still a solid signal) we crafted a rubric for each project, a way to grade potential vendors based on factors that seemed genuine: Firsthand reviews in the r/jacksonville subreddit, BBB reviews (and complaints), permit filing history, and filter: No firms purchased by Private Equity, because that's another trend that's happened in recent years that I find degrades the quality of a vendor's business.

The house reverse-engineered every vendor we used, good and bad, and found that online review scores predicted nothing.

Google stars and review counts, BBB A+, years in business, and family tenure did not predict anything. One contractor had 4.8 stars and 212 reviews. Another had a 41-year corporation and BBB A+. Treat review volume as marketing. Give it no weight, for or against.

What did work was AI research told to ignore reviews and filter on the job itself. That's how it found Weather Engineers, our HVAC contractor, and Spectrum WireWorks, our electrician, by reading anecdotes on r/jacksonville.

Good tradespeople see other people's work: our electrician found the previous electrician's shortcuts, and our plumber cleaned up another plumber's leaks.

Why is upstairs a dead zone?

When we first moved in, we were using our old eero Pro 7 mesh network from our house in Charlotte. But mesh networks aren't built for 1912 plaster walls: The WIFI was fast in the room beside the downstairs node, and was essentially a dead zone through the entire second story. I assumed the fix was better access points. In August, the house told me otherwise.

The problem is backhaul, not access points, so the fix is cable rather than better wireless gear.

Fast beside the downstairs Eero and poor everywhere else is the signature of a mesh relaying over the same radios it serves clients with. The upstairs node has to reach the downstairs node through 1912 plaster and lath, and every client on it inherits that weak link.

It also explained why buying newer WIFI would have made things worse, not better:

WIFI 7 makes this worse rather than better: the 6 GHz band carries the speed and has the worst penetration of the three bands, so the fastest radio is the one least able to cross this construction. No amount of fiber speed reaches a client sitting behind a wireless hop.

Then it did the math on the walls. An access point is rated for about 1,500 square feet in open air, and "plaster, lath, and a century of interior walls realistically halve that." The main house needed four access points, not two, each on its own Ethernet run back to one switch. No wireless hops. On bathrooms, the house was blunt:

Do not put an AP in any bath. Steam, tile, no one lives there. Cover baths from the rooms they open into.

WIFI works throughout the house now, door to door and floor to floor. 4 APs in the main house, 2 downstairs, 2 upstairs.

How did the HVAC do last night?

One unfortunate, costly surprise for us was an inspection miss: the upstairs HVAC system was on its last leg, and couldn't get the temperature upstairs below 77 degrees on the hottest days of August in Jacksonville.

After several rounds of vetting different vendors for the project, we ended up going with Weather Engineers, who did an amazing job, and put in a brand new system and replaced all of the ducts. While it hurt spending that much cash on an inspection miss (thanks Lunspro!) it was worth every penny to have a good night's sleep in the dog days of summer.

Even better for the project, the new HVAC system had an interface the house could talk to. So five days after the new system went in, I asked it to grade itself.

Me, 7:43 AM, September 29th:

Tell me how the upstairs HVAC project has improved the comfort of our home. How much actual impact has it had?

The house:

Temperature has clearly improved. Humidity, which was the main problem before, hasn't improved yet. Part of the gain is outside what the data can measure. Five days of mild weather also make any comparison rough.

It came with a table. The Master Bedroom averaged 74.9°F before and 70.8°F after, though I'd also lowered the setpoint, which the house pointed out before I could.

I could now sit in my office at 2 PM and not break a sweat, but maybe that was the weather. Were there any hot days coming, or were we done until April?

Summer isn't over. The NWS forecast for Riverside has a full summer week starting today... So the weather caveat gets settled this week, starting with the office at 2 PM today.

I asked it to check back Saturday. It committed a line to the climate record: "Saturday, October 3rd: compare September 29th through October 3rd with September 10th-20th. Check the office at 2:00 PM per Chris."

On Saturday, it ran the check. Temperature passed: upstairs held setpoint every afternoon, peaking at 72.0°F every afternoon from September 29th through October 2nd, where the old system had peaked at 77°F most afternoons, and couldn't get the temperature in the Master Bedroom back down below 77 until sunset.

Part Two: The House Talks Back

The questions above all had the same shape: I asked, and the house read its own records. In October that changed. The house started tracking itself.

From Records to Readings

The thermostat collector was the first sense. Then came Shelly temperature & humidity sensors in the Living Room, the Master Bedroom and the 2nd Floor Office, which push a reading whenever something changes. In mid-October, an air quality monitor went into the Master Bedroom, reading particulates, CO2, VOCs and NOx every five minutes.

Getting a read on the indoor air quality was a high priority for us because with a 100 year old house, you never know what kind of surprises are hidden within the walls, the attic, and the crawlspace.

Three days in, the house had a baseline. It also had its first mystery: a Sunday morning spike to the top of the VOC scale. I gave it the answer, and it went in the record: Sarah's hair spray. The baseline came out clean enough that the house didn't see a strong case for an air purifier.

So we're good on air quality, backed up with actual data.

The House Watches Itself

A health agent on a 2021 M1 Mac mini runs 24 checks every ten minutes: the internet connection, every switch and access point, doorbell cameras, the thermostats, the air monitor, the lamps, even the AI-powered personal radio station I created for myself: Radio Chris.

The data started catching things I'd never have pieced together. In October, the office breaker kept tripping after some panel work. An electrician came out to fix it, and that night it tripped again.

Me, October 13th:

The office breaker tripped again last night, after they swapped the circuit/breaker.

The house:

That settles one thing: whatever [the electrician] changed yesterday didn't fix the office breaker. I wouldn't let that one go.

This is the third trip since the September 21st panel work, and the breaker never tripped before that.

A breaker that keeps tripping is doing its job, so this isn't an emergency. It is a fault, though, and it needs a real diagnosis, not more resetting.

The lamps in the office are on the network, so every trip left a timestamp, and the house lined each one up against the HVAC logs:

October 13th: the office breaker tripped again, per Chris. The office WiZ lamps dropped off the network from 8:22 AM to 1:31 PM; the upstairs system was idle in cool mode at 8:22 AM, so the heat strips were not running.

So it wasn't the new heater. Those logs went to a second electrician, who found a wiring fault at the breaker and replaced it two days later. It hasn't tripped since.

The House You Can Hold

To tie everything together, there's a custom iOS app for the house.

Tap the app icon and a 3D model of the house drops down, floor by floor. The lamps glow at their real state, and you can tap them to turn them on or off. A climate dial sits in the corner of each floor. The health checks stay out of sight until something is wrong.

The lights run on a schedule the mini owns, with no vendor cloud involved. This week it picked up Halloween: two ghosts on the front porch and six pumpkins on the steps, three a side, on 30 minutes before sunset and off at midnight.

How is the house looking this morning?

This morning I asked it the question I now ask most days.

Me, Friday, October 23rd:

How is the house looking this morning?

It didn't open a single Markdown file. It went to the mini and read the live status.

The house looks good this morning. All 24 health checks are green as of 8:30.

Then it walked the house. Network fine. Both systems idle. Upstairs 65°F, downstairs 66°F, the Master Bedroom 68°F, thanks to an assist from the glorious fall temps here in Jacksonville.

The Voice and the Memory

A house constructed in 1912 on the land of Captain William James, and a bash terminal, one hundred and fourteen years apart, and thanks to the age we live in, they work together in perfect harmony.