Brightnest: Digital home maintenance guide for dummies

By Natt Garun August 16, 2012

Image used with permission by copyright holder

I’d imagine as a New Yorker who’ve been renting all her life, when I become a homeowner, I would not know where to begin with home maintenance. How often am I supposed to check my dryer machine’s duct? What do I do with the pumps in my water heating system? When do I have to replace my furnace’s air filters? From first time homeowners to veterans who just want a digital organizer, Brightnest is an online tool to remind you of your scheduled home maintenance to-do list.

A free web service, Brightnest allows you to add tasks to keep track of home repairs and maintenance. The list can be anything from remembering to get a fire extinguisher for your kitchen, replacing the batteries on your smoke detector, replace air duct filters, inspect your roof, and more. You can organize these tasks by “Must Do” or “To Do” as well as view them all in a calendar interface to get a good sense of what’s coming up for the month. If you don’t know what you should be doing, the “Good To Do” tab also recommends a few upkeeping activities for various parts of your home, from window treatments to lawn and garden and even money saving tips.

If you are unsure of what each task means exactly, clicking the item also brings you to a separate page that tells you what equipments you may need, step-by-step guide of how to go about the task, and links to additional resources. It’s literally the dummy’s guide to home improvement, complete with a friendly and inviting interface that makes seemingly redundant tasks a little nicer to endure.

“Homeowners need more than a system to remind them what to do, they also need to know what their home needs and why,” Brightnest co-founder and president Justin Anthony told Wired.

If you want your housemates’ help, you can also add them to the household to get everyone on board with keeping your shared space clean, healthy, and maybe even prettier. The colloquial language (“De-stink your home”) makes it casual and easy to talk about between the people you live with. Now, no one has an excuse to have a terribly unkept home.

The service is, again, free and available now by signing up via e-mail. Perhaps a smartphone and tablet app will follow soon after.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

An avid gadgets and Internet culture enthusiast, Natt Garun spends her days bringing you the funniest, coolest, and strangest…

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