Spoiler: it was still chaotic and tiring.

Overall I think this move went fairly well given just how big of a move it was for us.

Quick Links

• Movers vs DIY

• Prep-work

• A ‘Day One’ Bag

• Our moving strategy

• By the numbers

• Reflection

Movers vs DIY

This was a tough one: in the past, we’ve always DIY’d our moves but they’ve always been relatively simple moves - down the street or a couple of highway exits away. This move was about an hour away and so, we did consider movers. Our options were:

• Professional movers

• Via containers (like Big Steel Box or PODS)

• Via U-Haul or a ‘better’ option like Enterprise

• Via places like Home Depot Truck Rental

• Slow trickle-move via our own vehicles

At the end of the day, professional movers, we felt, were just a bit too pricey (likely due to COVID); realistically we only had two super tricky things to move (the computer walls!) and that was only due to the sheer awkwardness of the basement where they were deployed. The shipping container route sadly wasn’t an option since we needed a certain amount of clearance to drop off the [large] bin (and we were a few feet short) and there was an acute shortage on bin availability for most providers.

Looking at the traditional truck rental options, the U-Haul route becomes super expensive since you’re paying for mileage and it adds up. With the more premium options like Enterprise, while you’re still paying for mileage, you do get access to some better trucks.

In the end, we settled on a big truck with a lift gate from Enterprise; due to scheduling issues, we followed up with a Home Depot van rental as well. More on that later…

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Prepwork

After our last move, I made it a goal to make this move a lot easier. I had three main approaches to try and make the move more organized

1. Everything I built would be modular and, if needed, could be disassembled

2. Bins, bins, and more bins. Over the years, whenever there were sales on bins (usually, ‘back to school’), I would pick up a handful of bins here and there. The nice thing about bins is that they stack easily — and while moving, we’re often limited by effective use of vertical space rather than by weight

3. Labels! I started with single-line, basic labels but I planned to move to a label-printer before we moved - this lets you print out a basic contents list for each bin

Since most of our stuff isn’t particularly heavy, the overall plan here was to leverage the stacking of bins to transfer the bulk of stuff and then relying on the labels to make unpacking and random-access easier. By using bins, there will be ‘wasted space’ — but this is a good thing, it allows for random-access in and out of a bin without having to spend time meticulously putting things back into the bin when done.

Over the years, we settled on six different bins:

1. Tuff Store 63L Nesting Tote. We bought this as a cheap-bin option - going for sheer quantity and for things that don’t need a ‘heavy duty’ bin

2. Rubbermaid Roughneck, 68L. This is our baseline ‘heavy duty’ bin

3. Rubbermaid Roughneck, 37L. This occupies the same floor footprint as the bigger bin, but comes up about half as high - great as an in-between bin

4. Rubbermaid Roughneck, 11L. This is a super compact bin - perfect for all sorts of tech doodads

5. Plano Sportsman Trunk, 102L. This half-wheeled trunk is perfect for camping equipment or for items that need a bit more heavy-duty. The dimensions are good for longer items as well

In total, we probably have closer to 100 bins since we use many of them to keep things organized.

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For years, I would just have a basic label as a title for the bin because that was all I needed — I knew where all my stuff was: I knew which bin it should be in and which room that bin would be in so it was just a matter of finding the bin. Of course, during a move, everything is now everywhere so I finally bought a label printer (Brother QL-800) to help tame this mess: I could now make labels that provided a title for the bin as well as a highlight of what the contents of a bin were as well as what room the bin should go to (handy for moving!)

 

 

From our previous move, we took extensive measurements and photos during our previous visit(s) and put together graph-paper models of all of the rooms and figure out where to put all of our furniture. Nicole gets all the credit for this - and doing this on graph paper with paper-placeholders for our furniture allows for the planning process to be knocked out very easily. Due to the pandemic, we only had 30-minutes for the viewings so we needed to divide-and-conquer to capture all of the data needed to map out the house

 

 

For a few months leading up to the big day, we made an effort to sell off as stuff we weren’t keen on moving - a few of my benchtop and smaller power tools as well as selling the fishtank(s) and the fish. Stuff that was left-over was donated — there’s no point in moving what you’re not going to make use of! We got lucky and were able to sell our shed to the neighbors too — knock down the fence (which was coming down anyways) and brute force the [fully-assembled] shed one yard over! Of course this now meant that all the stuff that was in the shed would have to stage in the garage…

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Shortly after selling the shed View fullsize
Staging everything in the garage View fullsize
Miter saw stand cabinets View fullsize
Prepping

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A 'Day One' Bag

I think every guide on moving will suggest that you have a “day one” bag/box that consists of all of the essentials you think you’ll need so you' won’t need to scramble to figure out where everything in the midst of the chaos of moving. We already had some coverage of the basic day-one needs from our day-to-day life:

• emergency go-bag

• overnight toiletries bag (it’s a good idea to cram a change of underwear/socks in these too!)

• a toolbox with all the tools you’ll think you’ll need

Some of the things you’ll want to consider are, by category

• Cleaning: having a bin dedicated to cleaning (and laundry) supplies and equipment; things like garbage/compost bags would go here too! Don’t forget garbage/recycle/compost bins and buckets as well

• Power: power bars, USB chargers, power banks, USB cables, extension cords, power tool chargers, power tool batteries, AA/AAA/9V batteries/chargers etc.

• Clothing: a small carry-on suitcase can go in the makeshift bedroom so you it’s one less thing to think about

• Food: prepare some food/meals before the move so you don’t have to think about cooking (or alternatively, figure out our pizza options!)

• Lights: if you plan on (or need to) replace the lights in your place, do it as soon as you can, so you’re not stumbling around in a poorly lit space that you’re not familiar with

• Tools: shop scissors/knife, drill, basic multi-bit screwdriver, level, painters tape (to mark things), measuring tape, stud finder, electrical outlet tester, pliers, wrenches, teflon/duct/electrical/packing tape etc.

• Office Supplies: sticky notes, pen/marker, label maker (and refills), zip-lock bags

• Comfort: fans, heaters, small lamps, alarm clock, first-aid supplies, replacement air/water filters

Some larger/luxury/convenience items you might want to consider; some of which may be motivated by things you might need to do during your move:

• A laptop - sometimes it’s just easier to book/research things in a new place on a computer rather than a mobile device; this is also important if you have a limited time off and are going back to work during (or shortly after) the move

• Vacuums (including wet-dry vacs), a leaf blower or compressor can be handy as well

• Ladders, step-stools - you may need a ladder to help with replacing bulbs or to replace the batteries in the smoke detectors (who knows when they were previously replaced/recharged); you may need it to reach the reset/learn button on a garage door opener as well

• Folding tables: this gives you ‘free’ space to stack things further; pair this with folding chairs and you can have a basic dining table ready to go which can be a big morale booster

• Locks: in our case, we pre-bought replacement deadbolts and had them keyed-alike in advance

• Seasonal: snow removal or lawn-care equipment & supplies

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Our moving strategy

Our moving plan was broken down into four phases

1. Pre-move: using our vehicles to move stuff we’ll need right away and/or stuff that is delicate

2. The big-trucks: the plan was to have a lift-gate truck for one day and a non-liftgate truck the next day. With the big trucks, we would pair the big truck with my pickup (might as well); the priority for the liftgate-truck was to move all the stuff that was impractical to heave in and out of a pickup truck due to bulk

3. Leftover moves: after the big-truck day, the only stuff remaining should be movable with a pickup; after all our stuff was moved out, we could come back to leave the old place in a decent state and close off this chapter in our lives

4. Moving into the cargo container: this would hold the contents of the shop for a month or two

We had some plans to do some retrofitting to the garage to turn it into a more permanent workspace starting a few weeks after moving so, instead of temporarily moving all my shop things into the garage just to then have to move it out a few weeks later (all to save a couple weeks worth of rental feels), it just made sense to just move the shop directly into the shipping container from the get go. We didn’t know what time of day we would get the keys so we booked the delivery of the bin a few days after taking possession so we staged the shop items in the garage initially.

 

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[1] Pre-Move

Phase one starts the day we got the house which is a few days before we get the big trucks; we wanted to get a few things done before we started brute-force streaming bins in:

1. Take initial photos of the house. The house is almost certainly never going to be this empty again so this is a perfect opportunity to document the house, inside and out with in high-resolution, with stupid-wide lenses.

2. Get the house in a clean state before - you know, before we make a mess of it! We got pretty lucky, the house was handed off in a fairly clean state

3. Have the kitchen, bath and a temporary sleeping setup all migrated

4. Change the locks, verify all of the keys, verify the appliances [still] work

We got into a pretty good flow — in the time it would take me to go back, load and come back, Nicole would finished unpacking the previous stuff. Some things were semi-unpacked (i.e., moved to the intended room, unboxed and placed in piles) since they were dependant on other things (i.e., closets, shelves etc.) but other things were more thoroughly unpacked (i.e., kitchen, bath, laundry).

By the end of the first day we had all the kitchen cupboards and drawers unpacked, the bathroom (and related supplies) migrated and we had a futon setup in one of the rooms. Pretty successful for one day!

[2] Big-Truck Day

Big truck day was exciting - we got lucky and scored a free ‘upgrade’ from a 20ft truck to a behemoth 26ft truck. The big selling point of this rental was the liftgate: with this, we could roll all the heavy stuff onto the liftgate (at ground level) and have it lifted into the box of the truck.

 

 

The lift-gate was what made this move even remotely possible - we ended up taking two trips with this huge truck. The first trip covered the majority of the bulky items that we had already staged in the garage; the second trip was much rougher (since we were also tired from moving all day). Thankfully, we had some help from a buddy of mine and Nicole rallied the neighbors to lend a hand as well.

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The computer wall desks View fullsize
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Flat-packed -- still awkward  

Apparently we were feeling pretty good after our first load so we actually cancelled the reservation for the second big-truck… While this ended up fine, it made for a pretty intense one-day mega-move.

[3] Leftover Moves

But we realized we still had a bunch of stuff left to move: we poked around but there weren’t any trucks available on short notice (nothing that wasn’t super expensive at least). We did however, catch a super lucky break in the form of a Home Depot cargo van rental. The pricing model for the rental is definitely targeted at around-town:

• 90minutes: $24.95 + $5 for every 15-minutes after that

• 4-hours: $74.95

• Daily rate: $99.95

The magic sauce is that all of the vehicles come with unlimited kilometers which makes this actually one of the cheapest rentals (by-day) for intercity moves. We lucked out and got a 9ft van which was perfect for moving some of the slightly longer/awkward things leftover from the shop (all things that I could have moved with the pickup, but man, it was so much easier with the extra length of the van). Again, we split up: Nicole got the [old] house sorted out and checked to make sure we didn’t leave anything behind while I disassembled the remaining shop fixtures.

[4] Cargo container

During big-truck-day, we were mostly concerned with making the most of our limited time with the lift-gate truck so we dumped most things straight into the garage rather than into the shipping container. Now we moved everything into the shipping container until some of the garage upgrades were completed. We ended up packing the container to the brim and even overflowed into the shed and into the house. It’ll be fun to see how I get all this stuff the garage long term.

For us, the pricing difference between the 10ft and 20ft cargo container is so insignificant that it just makes sense to get the 20ft — make sure to book this as soon as you can (think months) - we got lucky with ours but you definitely don’t want to be stressing about it. As for deciding on which cargo-container option to go with:

• The 20ft cargo container that we got requires 70ft of clearance (in the direction of the bin) to deploy; other specific brands may vary a little bit, but make sure you triple check there is enough room on your driveway to the far side of the street for the truck to deploy

• Different types of bins may deploy differently. For example, when POD containers are moved, the bin remains level (so you just need to pack things so they don’t fall over); with the Big Steel Box, the loading process has the bin rolled on a slight incline - so you’ll need to make sure your tie-down game is on point

• Different bins have different construction so if you’re concerned about theft and/or weather resistance, make sure to take that into consideration

• Be sure to ask about the lip of the container you’re working with - the Big Steel Bin we ordered had an 8” lip. Thankfully I had a couple sheets of OSB/Plywood and some 2x4s to make a sturdy makeshift ramp

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By the numbers!

Trips

• 14 trips with the pickup

• 3 trips with the car

• 2 trips with the 26’ lift-gate truck

• 1 trip with 9’ Home Depot van

• 2 months with the Big Steel Box

Packing

• 1 (big!) box to store all of the (non-benchtop) power tools

• 2 (big!) boxes to store kitchen appliances and larger pots/pans

• 2 (cooler-loads) to bring over all the food stuffs from the refrigerator

• 6 full rolls of packing tape

• ~100 plastic storage bins

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Reflection

While it was a bit of a hell-week moving, obviously, we made it!

Overall, there were a lot of wins and good decisions

• Taking a full week off was a good idea (we barely fit into the that week actually)

• Labelling bins and being bin-centric worked out well

• Some of the big boxes we kept came in clutch

• The Home Depot van rental with unlimited kilometers was a lucky find

• And of course, the lift-gate truck made this all possible

• It was a huge win to throw the cabinets to my miter saw station onto a dollies — moving them was just a matter of rolling them on and off the truck

If I could go back and improve things:

• Get more bins! Shockingly, we ran out of bins

• Reserve the big lift-gate truck for three-days to avoid stressing out about trying to cram everything in one day

• I would consider renting the Home Depot van during the pre-move phase (just for one day); the sheer capacity jump compared to Nicole’s small car would have made good use of that time

• It wouldn’t have been a bad idea to rent a (traditional) storage unit in town — move a bunch of bins and stuff that we wouldn’t need right away before the big day

That being said, if we ever more from here, I think we’ve finally reached the point where professional movers make sense.

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Quick Links

• Getting Started

• Goals, Objective and Criteria

• Step 1: Setting the Stage

  • Powering POE Cameras

  • Centralizing Management

• Step 2: What I wanted in a Camera

• Step 3: A look at Reolink

  • POE Cameras

  • Wi-Fi Cameras

  • Battery Operated Cameras

  • An observation about night vision

• Step 4: Integrating with Synology (or another NAS)

  • Making the most of the integration

  • Dedicated NAS?

• Conclusions

Getting Started

For consumers, there are three broad use cases of surveillance or security cameras

1. Security: this can be something like a camera watching the driveway for people coming up to the house, or be more subtle like a nanny camera just to make sure the babysitter is on the up and up

2. Package notification: I think this might be the bigger motivator: we all worry about porch pirates, so having a quick ping to the phone when a delivery comes is great

3. Glorified baby monitors: this could literally be a baby monitor, an ‘is the pot boiling yet’ monitor, a ‘my kids are swimming in the pool is everything okay’ monitor etc.

At MinMax, of course, I’m looking to cover all of the above. And then some.

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Goals, Objectives and Criteria

There are so many brands and models of cameras that we would be analyzing them forever; according to Synology’s camera compatibility list, they support over 7500 models from 140 vendors. We need to very quickly bring that number down to something that we can process through. I think, with five questions, we can sufficiently narrow down the options:

1. How do you want to connect and power the camera: via power-over-ethernet (POE), WiFI (with dedicated power) or purely battery/solar powered?

   • Battery/solar powered gives you the flexibility to setup nearly anywhere (i.e., in a tree!); in addition to having to replace/recharge the batteries every so often, every aspect of the ecosystem will be battery-conscious, so you will generally be limited to motion-triggered capture and on-demand streaming only

   • POE cameras have constant power so you have the ability to do continuous recording reducing the reliance on motion or event detection; being constantly powered, they will typically give you the best video quality options. Having a wired connection allows for a very stable video stream. The downside is that you will need a direct connection between the camera and the video recording system

   • Wi-Fi cameras are somewhere in between: they are continuously powered but any power connection will do - their connection to the video recording system is wireless. The downside is that you’re at the mercy of a wireless connection. Video quality will be somewhere in between the battery and POE options
     

2. What type of recording do you want to do: motion/activity triggered? Scheduled recording? Continuous (24x7) recording?

   • This choice is only available if you opted for a Wi-Fi or POE camera

   • The benefits are pretty obvious: you can capture everything and not have to worry about whether a motion/event triggering algorithm fires correctly or not

   • The downside is that continuous recording generates a lot of data (and cameras/recorders aren’t exactly concerned with optimized encoding). This adds another layer of complexity when you have to decide take into consideration the video codec used by the cameras. You’ll almost certainly be relying on some kind of centralized video recording system
     

3. Are you looking for indoor or outdoor cameras? Do you have impact/vandalism considerations?

   • Indoor cameras will generally be a bit more svelte and compact as they don’t need to worry about water or snow

   • When looking at outdoor capable cameras, take into consideration the operating temperature if you live in and an environment where it gets particularly hot or cold

   • More so for public/commercial spaces, impact/vandal-resistant cameras are available - you’ll just need to pay to play!
     

4. What kind of ‘smart home’ integration are you looking for? Or conversely, is there an ecosystem you are specifically looking for?

   • Having smart home integration can be pretty cool - you can have camera feeds automatically come up when events are triggered etc.

   • Of course, the downside is that this infrastructure presents a bigger cyber-security surface area to manage (if you care)

   • Note that you don’t necessarily have to go all-in or all-out — you can integrate individual cameras into your smart-home if desired
     

5. Is there anything you want to do with the footage?

   • Do you want to get the footage offsite?

   • Do you want to do analytics on the footage (i.e. count people) or generate time-lapses?

   • Do you want to have a dedicated TV to display all of the camera feeds?

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Step 1: Setting the Stage

We specifically wanted to look at continuous recording: if you plan for continuous and run into problems or limitations (likely disk space), you can always scale something back to make it work. Continuous is just easier to plan for - there will always be 24 hours in a day whereas motion-triggered recording will obvious vary based on how much activity is detected.

Powering POE Cameras

A POE camera receives data and power from via the built-in ethernet port. There are four ways to connect and power a POE camera

1. Use a POE injector: you connect your POE injector to your existing network hardware (this provides the data link) and then you connect your POE camera to the POE injector. POE injector itself has a power cable and supplies the necessary power to the downstream device. Having a POE injector is great for testing!

2. Use a POE switch: here, you just connect your POE camera directly to the switch like any other device. For non-POE devices, everything behaves as usual but POE-devices, will receive power from the switch as needed

3. Use a POE NVR: essentially the same as connecting to a POE switch, but here, you connect the camera to a network video recorder (NVR) that has POE ports

4. Use a DC power adapter: most POE cameras will also come with a DC input connector that allows you to connect to a DC power adapter (usually not included). In this case, you will have at least two cables running from your camera: one ethernet cable for data, running to your network infrastructure and a DC power cable to provide power.

Tip:

Even if you plan on using POE infrastructure, I would recommend getting a POE injector (preferred) or DC adapter (works as well). Having one will allow you to do testing while up on a ladder if you don’t necessarily have ethernet cables already in place. A POE injector is more useful since it will use a standard RJ45 connection so it will work also for additional POE devices down the road.

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Centralizing Management

Going with POE cameras means that we need to figure out how to store all the footage and manage all of the cameras in a centralized manner. To do this we will need a network video record (NVR). Most NVRs that work with POE cameras will also have built in POE (meaning, you won’t need to buy a POE switch or buy a whole bunch of POE injectors).

What about Digital Video Recorders (DVR)?

A DVR is essentially the same thing as a NVR — except instead of connecting Wi-Fi or POE cameras, they allow you to connect older analog cameras that use a coaxial BNC connector. For my purposes (and I imagine, for most consumers/prosumers), I’ll be looking at digital (POE) cameras.

In our case, we have a Synology NAS unit that can act as a NVR (and I plan on adding a POE switch). Almost all NAS units will support having security cameras in one way or another, even if it is just via a FTP or network share for the video stream to pipe to although some brands offer a very rich feature-set. For some of the more popular brands

• ASUStor ‘Surveillance Center’

• Buffalo ’Surveillance Server’

• QNAP ‘Surveillance Station’

• Synology ‘Surveillance Station’

• TerraMaster does not have a package for managing cameras but can act as a store

Your specific experience will vary based on the management software available as well as the hardware specifications of the specific NAS unit you’re looking at. Some NAS brands (QNAP, Synology) even offer more specialized NVR units.

A word on licenses:

One of the ways NAS brands ‘get you’ is with camera-licenses. Most NAS units will allow you to connect a whole bunch of NAS units (it varies by model, some will allow you to connect 40 or more cameras!) but the NAS will only include one or two camera licenses. If you want to connect more, then you’ll have to buy additional connection licenses. Thankfully these add-on licenses you buy are generally transferable.

The more specialized NVR NAS units from Synology and QNAP come with eight licenses out of the box which sounds great — except those licenses are embedded into that unit. This means that if you ever replace or upgrade that unit, you’ll either have to continue paying the premium for the more specialized NVR, or you’ll have to shell out for individual licenses (which thankfully, can be transferred)..

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Step 2: What I wanted in a Camera

If you are going with a branded NVR unit (i.e., the same brand as the cameras), then this step won’t matter; if you’re using a NAS unit I would recommend getting a camera that is officially supported by your NAS unit. Consult your NAS IP camera compatibility list to be sure.

Before we dive into the possibilities, it’s important to figure out what we want from our camera. Every scenario will be different and you may even have different requirements for different cameras.

Note!

For audio recordings, please check your local laws on whether or not this is allowed! (you can orf course, always disable audio recording).

Regardless of whether you have a Synology NAS or not, their Supported IP Camera tool is one of the best that I have found because it allows you to specify what features you care about first (whereas all of the other compatibility tools assume you have a specific camera/brand in mind already).

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Step 3: A look at Reolink

For one reason or another, I started my exploration with Reolink. What I liked the most actually, was navigating the product stack without having to hop through half a dozen layers and (for better or worse), not having a metric ass ton of cameras to sift through, clicking on endless ‘View More’ panels. It was a bonus that the cameras are reasonably affordable and relatively available. I also liked that the cameras were grouped by connectivity only (POE, Wi-Fi, Battery) and they were not grouped by form-factor (bullet, dome, etc.) but depending on what you’re looking for, it may not be an issue for you.

Although I’m primarily looking at POE cameras, I’ve included the Wi-Fi and Battery model breakdown as well with some general comments. Here’s the rough decision matrix for the three different families of Reolink cameras.

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A few common terms:

• IR-Cut: security cameras use IR illuminators to allow them to see at night; during the day when there is sufficient lighting, these IR illuminators can cause color distortion. Cameras with a an IR-cut filter can filter this out to improve the video signal

• Sub-Stream: when you show the camera’s live-view, you are generally viewing the main video stream; but when you are looking at list of cameras with just the little thumbnails? That’s the sub-stream. Generally speaking, the main-stream is the one I am concerned with

POE Cameras

Since I’m specifically looking at cameras that are H265 and 4K, this limits me to the 8-series of cameras which are then broken down into two more decisions based on form-factor and to a lesser degree, pricing:

• Bullet (810A vs 811A). The 811A is the functionally superior camera in terms of field-of-view and the potential flexibility of having zoom (even assuming that the 811A will likely work with Synology even without official support), but the 810A is likely the better camera for me. With the 811A, I would end up paying too much for features I outright don’t want (2-way audio, lights, siren)

• Dome (820A vs 822A). Here, the 822A is the superior camera: better field of view, brighter fixed-aperture lens and with the flexibility for zoom

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Wi-Fi Cameras

Compared to the POE cameras, there’s nothing that supports H265 or 4K. Given that we are trading the convenience of not having to pull network cables through, it makes the most sense to go for a PTZ to maximize on the strengths. Something to note: not supporting 4K might be understandable (due to the unpredictability of Wi-Fi), whether or not a camera supports H265 is a limitation of the processor on the camera.

• PTZ (E1 Outdoor): realistically, this is the only choice. The other PTZ options make big compromises on bitrate, frame rate and have dimmer optics. This camera supports 2.4 and 5GHz WiFi bands as well as wired ethernet and comes with Person/Car detection as well

• Bullet (510WA vs 511WA): like the 810A/811A comparison above, here the 511WA has the superior feature set, but if you’re going to go for the more svelt, battery conscious bullet form-factor, the 510WA is my pick since I’m not paying for features I don’t want

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Battery Operated Cameras

With battery only cameras, we should really be targeting totally infeasible or awkward places to add a camera: trees, unpowered sheds etc. None of these cameras support continuous recording and only one supports H265 or resolution above 1080. For this class, battery life is the big consideration rather than image quality — which is evident by the lack of detailed information on sensor or lens information.

In certain applications (i.e., a private shed) it may be a viable option to run a small solar panel to a large power-bank to “plug in” these battery powered cameras. That may help to provide a substantial boost in effective runtime.

• PTZ (Argus PT): although it may cost more power to run the PTZ components, this would allow us to truly maximize the flexibility of a battery camera. Note that any kind of motion triggering will only apply to the field of view the camera happens to be pointed at the given moment.

• Puck (Argus 3 Pro): this is the do-it-all battery camera

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An observation about night vision

Most security cameras offer some kind of black-and-white night-vision mode (some even offer color-night-vision but I don’t have a model to test). The way they work is by using IR illuminators to light up the scene with ‘invisible’ light. There are two broad types of IR illuminators:

• 850nm: much more common, brighter, generally better image, the LEDs will have some glow

• 940nm: about half the illumination range, dimmer but the LEDs are effectively invisible

Just how visible is the red glow from the IR illuminators? Certainly not enough to overtly draw attention to themselves, but if you’re looking for a telltale glow and have an idea of where to look, you’ll spot it.

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There’s no need to worry about whether to go with 850nm or 940nm though — cameras need to be built from the ground up around 940nm illumination and I wasn’t able to find any well-documented, consumer (or prosumer, or commercial for that matter) oriented cameras built around 940nm. If you really don’t want the glow, turn off the IR LEDs and instead, add supplemental lighting (i.e. turn on your porch lights).

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Step 4: Integrating with Synology (or another NAS)

So I ordered a single RLC-820A for testing purposes and I thought if I was happy with the camera, I would just order a whole bunch and hook them up to my NAS (after buying the licenses of course!). Something about this process felt a little too easy so I wanted to check a few other things.

There are three constraints that are interconnected

1. Each NAS will have a limit on the number of cameras you are allowed to connect; most units will come with 2 licenses and additional licenses are available to purchase, up to the total connection limit.

2. Based on the hardware/performance of each NAS, there is a budget (measured in fps) for a given resolution of camera that will be supported. The budget is split according to the video codec as well. Generally, for a given resolution, H265 will give you a bigger budget.

3. Based on the available space available in the NAS (or at least the space available to surveillance station), there will be a limit to the number of days backlog you can store before having to overwrite older footage.

While there is nothing you can do to exceed the total connection limit, there are three ways you can make better use of the frame-rate and disk-space budget:

1. Reduce the capture frame-rate for the camera. This can be a bit of a balancing act: if you go too low, the footage will be begin to be too choppy to be useful

2. Reduce the bitrate used. Again, we also want to do this in moderation otherwise the footage will be too noisy to be useful

3. You can transition your cameras from continuous recording to motion-triggered, scheduled-continuous only or a combination

At the end of the day, you need to determine how much footage backlog you want to capture and retain. For some users (more commercial), this may also tie into how fast they can get footage off-site as well.

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Making the most of the integration

Synology Surveillance Station (SSS) has a few neat features to explore

1. Smart Timelapse: continuous recording ends up mostly being small blips of activity in a sea of ‘nothing happening’. With a time-lapse, you can get a ‘fast-fwd view’ of a period of time allowing you to compress overnight footage into a 2 minute clip that you can review with your morning coffee. The smart aspect comes in the way of allowing you dynamically slow down the footage when motion is detected and speed back up when it’s just a ‘sea of nothing happening’

2. Edge Recording: the nice thing about network recording is everything just magically gets recorded to a share — but what happens if there is a network drop? With edge recording (and a supported camera with an SD card), the missing footage is automatically backfilled from the SD card to the NAS when the connection is restored. Sadly, my camera doesn’t support this feature — it seems like this is only available when you have pricier commercial/government oriented cameras. If this is a feature that is important to you, make sure to check beforehand

3. LiveCam: one of the neat things about using a NAS as an NVR is that you have all your footage centralized into one location. But what if you don’t have coverage of a certain spot, or you want to take more detailed/specific footage after an event has happened? With LiveCam you can turn your phone into a temporary IP camera to go out in the field.

4. Live Broadcast: I’m not sure if I would have a use for this but theoretically you could use a security camera to broadcast to YouTube. This feels like it’s a solution looking for a problem, but nonetheless, is pretty neat

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Dedicated NAS?

I have a perfectly functional DS1817+ so this begs the question of why I might be looking at another NAS. There are three main drivers for this

1. Reduce drive thrashing: I use my main NAS pretty extensively (both read and write) and sadly, I don’t have SSD caching. Surveillance is a constant sequential write operation which means, if I’m using my NAS for other things, there will be back and forth seeking around. Not an issue for one or two cameras, but perhaps more of an issue as I add more cameras

2. Transition to surveillance drives: I use NAS ‘optimized’ drives in my NAS which is a fancy way of saying they are rated for continuous operation (from a vibration and endurance perspective). Surveillance optimized drives are also rated for continuous operation but also (supposedly) are also optimized for continuous sequential write access rather than ‘general purpose’ (once setup and initial testing are done, surveillance is 99% write, with only intermittent read)

3. Segment the workflow: longer term, I’d like to explore automating a quick encode and pushing footage offsite and automated with life-cycle management; by having a separate device, I can keep everything related to this in one space. Of course, I this would allow me to leverage NAS to NAS backups as well

None of these are deal breakers so I’m not in a huge rush so this will be something to explore down the road.

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Conclusions

My biggest takeaway is to make sure you thoroughly explore the compatibility of your camera with your NAS (if you’re going with that route) - I would have found out up front that Edge Recording wasn’t available on my camera and would have avoided the disappointment when I realized it’s effectively out of my price point.

Obviously, my next step is installing a few cameras and going from there. A tool like IPVM is super handy for this: it leverages Google Maps and Streetview to help you plan out your layout - you can even select specific camera models and it will dial in the field of view etc. Once some of the cameras are setup, I need to explore how to automate encodes and life-cycle management on the retained footage, stay tuned for a follow up!

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Quick Links

• Where we started: AllState

• Annoyances to watch out for

  • Joint accounts

  • Are you running a business?

  • Limits

  • Personal Article Floaters or PAFs

  • Monitored Security

  • Getting specific details is like pulling teeth

• Comparing Quotes - Use a Standardized Template

• The makeup of a quote

• Exploring the limitations of contents coverage

• Data!

• What about the rest of the coverage?

• Reducing your premiums

• Recommendations

Where we started: AllState

Just like with home buying, it’s super important to identify the things you care about and really dig into the specifics of the type of coverage you are getting. This is doubly so if, like many people, you’re going to select a provider and not shop around regularly for better options. In our case, tenant insurance was an extremely cut down version of homeowners insurance so I was pretty eager to explore what kind of peace of mind we could get with the ‘full fat’ homeowner insurance. Obviously, with homeowner insurance, there is going to be a broader coverage base (i.e., the home!) but at this time, I was exploring coverage for “stuff”.

With tenant insurance, they ask you a fairly standard barrage of questions to get a picture of the house

• Address, type of house, how many rooms

• Distance from hydrant, smoke detectors, any smokers

• Type of heating

• Whether or not you’re running a business

The number of finished rooms will the primary driver for how much contents protection you get:

• One provider might get allot you $7K per room, so for a 2-bedroom apartment, you get $14K worth of ‘stuff protection’

• Another provider might allot you $8K for your 4-bedroom rental giving you $32K of coverage

All of the other questions contribute to calculating the premium. In some cases (many?) you might want to increase this top-line number - at a cost (of course!). Regardless of what your final top-line number is, there are a ton of limitations, caveats, annoyances and gotchas. You really need to drill down and understand your risk/coverage comfort level when it comes to protecting stuff. In our case, I wanted to look at four broad categories:

• Tools and Yard equipment

• Kitchen stuff

• Camera gear (specifically) and most importantly

• Computers

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Annoyances to watch out for

Joint Accounts

One annoying thing I found was that with my provider, all people living the house were included on the insurance whether I wanted it or not. From a risk perspective, this makes sense i.e., is Roommate Bob is a smoker, sure that would put the whole house at a higher risk and thus, my stuff would be a higher risk and I get that. But when I’m paying for insurance, I only want my stuff to be covered - Roommate Bob can go get his own damn coverage.

When I first went into setup insurance, there was just my car insurance and the joint tenant insurance and I paid for it on the spot; later on, we added the second car insurance account. You would think that, when getting the accounts setup in their computer system, they would do some of the following:

1. Two accounts: one for my car and our joint tenant and a second for her car insurance

2. Three accounts: one for each coverage

Nope. The system took the nonsensical route of ‘associating’ the tenant insurance with her auto insurance and there was no way to change it. Is this a big deal? Nope. But if your system is so crippled that you can’t get the little things right, maybe it can’t get the big things right either.

For us this isn’t ultimately a big deal but this could totally be disastrous in other scenarios where there is a breakdown of the relationship and one partner simply doesn’t renew/pay for the tenant insurance and the other partner is none the wiser.

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Are you running a business?

So much of insurance hinges on whether or not you’re running a business. It’s ‘obvious’ if you have customers entering for goods and/or services; those are easy scenarios. The modern ‘gig’ and ‘creator’ economy makes things tricky. Consider whether the following scenarios would count as operating a business at home:

• I’m a full-time Youtuber who streams gaming from home. My computer and streaming equipment could be business assets. Of the examples, this might be the most clear cut case.

• I’m a full-time vlogger who uploads using an iPhone. Is the iPhone considered a business asset? What if I vlog from my living room, does that mean I’m operating a business from home? What if I walk out to the sidewalk - that wouldn’t be at home anymore right?

• I have a full-time job that pays the bills, but I found a neat Instagram niche and get a monthly kickback. Is that a business at home? What if it was a $100K/month kickback? What if I walk out to the sidewalk, is my iPhone considered a piece of business equipment?

• What if I take pictures en-mass and upload them to stock-photo websites and don’t think about it? What if nobody buys my photos? What if one of my photos hits jackpot in a years time?

• What if my kid mows the lawns in the neighborhood for $20? Does it change anything if the kid gets $10K/lawn?

This is a QA brain at work when the definition of “operate a business at home” or “equipment for business purposes” hasn’t been updated by the insurance industry at large in a decade. The frustrating answer is often that it depends but we won’t tell you what it depends on.

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Limits

The limits for my AllState tenant insurance range from pretty paltry to being totally out there. I pulled out a few from the ‘Special Limits of Insurance’ section. AllState says that the coverage limits for tenant insurance ‘provide sufficient coverage for the average person’.

• There are some easy ones which makes sense:

  • Jewellery - $7K cumulative, max $2.5K per item. Jewellery is the category that I find everyone focuses on. While I think the numbers here are on the low side, this limitation has been in play for so long now that it’s now 'just the way it is’

  • Cash, money, bouillon - $1K cumulative. Keep this in mind if you keep emergency funds at home.

• There are some categories that are over-covered

  • Computer software - $5K cumulative. This refers to the cost of replacing software (i.e., Adobe Photoshop license) due to computer loss and doesn’t cover data recovery. LOL if my parents delete my Steam account, can I use this as recourse? Seriously though, if you have $5K of computer software, then you should have some form of backup to handle this. It’s not hard, and certainly not expensive to do this.

• There are some categories that I think could have been better distributed i.e., lower the standard coverage amount of but add an endorsement package that increases the coverage for people who need it to a level that is more appropriate

  • Tractors/Snowblowers - $10K cumulative. This either seems too low or too high and if I were in charge, I would have dropped this down to $6K but also made a “landscaping package” to bring it up to $25K.

  • Bicycles - $2K per. I suspect that $2K per bike is excessive for your run of the mill bike but at the same time, once you get into serious road-bikes, $2K is pretty underwhelming, so maybe have a “cyclist endorsement” to bring it up to $10K per bike

• And finally some categories that can get you into coverage trouble if you’re not paying attention

  • Spare auto parts - $1K cumulative. On first blush I thought “that’s okay, I don’t keep spare mufflers or clutch packs in my garage” but then you realize snow tires count as spare auto parts…

  • Photography equipment - $1K cumulative. For ‘real’ cameras, this is comically low. Even if you look at the camera that most people have — their smartphone — it’s quite inadequate coverage.

Amusing thought: a smartphone would likely not be considered ‘photography equipment’ even though it takes pictures (perhaps the argument is that it does ‘other’ things?) Makes me wonder if you had something like a Canon C300 video camera or a DJi Inspire 2 drone or an go up in smoke, it would get classified as a photography equipment.

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Personal Article Floaters (PAFs)

So to work around the comically low coverage for certain items (i.e., camera gear) or for categories you have specific concerns about (i..e, computer equipment), providers give you the option of adding a personal artifacts floater or PAF at additional cost (of course!). The headache doesn’t end here though as there are sometimes more hoops to jump through (depending on your provider):

1. Items over a certain amount needed to have an appraisal (and there’s no guidance on how to go about this). In the case of my recently purchased camera at the time, I simply went back to the store I bought it from and nicely asked for a “buyback quote”

2. Having a PAF would reduce the deductible for that specific item to $0 in case of a loss however, the premium was ~1% of the amount per-year. For a singular high-value item, this might be something to consider but multiple cameras and lenses, this becomes infeasible very quickly

Computers, specifically

Tying all of this together is how they treat computers. From an accounting perspective, computers depreciate something like 25% a year. If we do simple math, this would put it approximately 0-value after four years. For the large majority of computers out there — off the shelf desktops and more so, laptops, this is totally true.

However, once you start getting into the custom built space where specific parts are chosen to hit specific price/performance targets, all bets are off. It’s absolutely laughable that a $10K computer purpose-built as a high-performance machine, would be outclassed by an el-cheapo in four years.

Funny anecdote: modern computers are funny creatures. They ‘get more work done’ (and do so for less power consumption) but there is such an emphasis on ridiculously lower and lower power envelopes that in the field, they don’t get more work done. I had a Q6600 (circa-2008) based machine outperforming my work laptop from 2018 with an “i7”. Apples to apples? No. But winning is winning.

I don’t expect computers, even high-performance custom built ones to last forever. Instead, I was looking for a confirmation that the process would bring in someone who knew something about computer hardware.

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Monitored Security

This one is amusing and feels like it’s just one industry feeding another: security systems. There’s a discount of some sort provided if you have a professionally monitored security system for your home. This by itself is fair and makes sense but the insurance industry as a whole makes it very clear that you do not qualify for any discount if you any self-monitored (i.e., smartphone) security system.

Again, this by itself is a tiny bit annoying and starts to feel like it’s a bit of a ‘you scratch my back’ industry behavior, I can understand that. Most people would not have the same perceived (that’s the critical word there) level of service that a monitored security system might have so it’s justifiable. What if we went on the other end of the security spectrum? I checked!

• Multi-point locks on your doors? No discount

• Breach resistant doors? No discount

• Ballistic/shatter resistant glass? No discount

• Mantrap entrance? No discount

• Panic room? No discount

• Bollards? No discount

• Actual security guards with a canine unit patrolling the grounds 24x7? No discount

• A platoon of actual soldiers stationed in your garage, complete with air support? No discount.

But hey, if you sign up for ADT, you qualify for a discount.

On a similar note, a few years ago when I was doing some preliminary checks on life insurance, I asked about these things as well as wearing ballistic rated clothing, having bodyguards, on-call doctors and up-armoring personal vehicles — no discount (even if you live in Crime-ville— I specifically asked). But hey, if your cholesterol is high, your rate is going up.

I don’t really blame the agents, they just pitch the policy they have to work with, the problem comes down from on top. Risk analysis is a fickle subject that focuses on penalizing the higher risk scenarios (rightly so) but doesn’t do enough to incentivize the other end of the spectrum.

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Getting specific details is like pulling teeth

This is the big one: trying to understand what is covered and how it’s covered can be like pulling teeth.

Obviously your experience will vary wildly from provider to provider or even from agent to agent but when it’s bad, it’s bad. In some cases, there’s very much a “don’t worry, this is complicated but the point is, you’re covered” — until you’re not.

I understand and can appreciate that the process is complicated, but the lack of transparency is brutal. Here are my favorites:

• “Any product that involves generation of income will be reviewed and determined by Claims Advisor at the time of loss. Therefore could be considered as business tool and may not qualify as personal contents”

• “PAF is not available for personal computer”

LOL if you get a text from your boss asking if you want some extra shifts, that phone is now involved in the generation of income. Will it likely rule that way? Probably (hopefully!) not, but the industry reserves the right to judge however it sees fit.

Again, the experience here will vary wildly depending on the agent you’re working with - some are awesome and will go the extra mile to get you a full picture and even if the premium ends up being a bit more, sometimes that extra effort is worth it.

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Comparing Quotes - Use a Standardized Template

Just like how finding a good Realtor you can work with, you have confidence in and is a good fit in general is crucial to the peace of mind during the house buying process, I think finding a good insurance agent or broker is super crucial in the insurance process. In the process of finding insurance, I would be working with two different types of people:

• Agent - represents a single insurance provider

• Broker - doesn’t represent an individual provider, but rather, combs the insurance market as a whole, to (theoretically) find you the best coverage across multiple providers

For all intents and purposes, as a consumer, the terms are effectively interchangeable — at the end of the day, it’s a person I talk to in order to get an insurance quote from. As a non-expert, I thought that working with a broker is the way to go since you have access to ‘the whole market’.

I can’t recommend this enough: shop around! Anything less than three quotes and you’re selling yourself short. One thing I didn’t expect was how wildly different the coverage was between different providers for the aspects I cared about. As such, it’s super important that you [a] figure out what things you want coverage for (and what kind of coverage you would want) and then [b] find out, very specifically, what your coverage is.

I found it most effective to come up with a standard set of data to provide with every candidate. Use this opportunity to preemptively field any questions and concerns — how a potential agent or provider tackles the questions and concerns has an intangible value. Here’s what the information I provided and how I broke it down for each agent.

 

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Information

• Address

• Age of Home/When was it built

• Square footage

• Closing date

Construction

• Brick, vinyl siding, etc.

• Finished basement? Does the above square-footage include the basement?

• How many full baths? Half baths?

• Sump pump? Battery backup? Back-flow preventer? Leak-detection system?

• Is there a front porch? Size?

• Is there a rear deck? Size?

• Pool? Hot-tub? Are either of these built-in?

• Furnace type (gas/electric) and age

• Age of the air-conditioner

• What type of roof (asphalt/steel/fiberglass etc) and age

• What type of electrical service is there (100A? 200A?)

• Copper vs Aluminum wiring? Breaker vs fuse box?

• Is there in-floor heating?

• What type of water heater is it (gas/electric)? How old is it?

• Auxiliary heaters (i.e., propane heater in the garage)

• What type of plumbing (copper? pex?)

• What size garage? Attached/detached?

Other

• Do you plan on moving in right away? Or will there be pre-renovations?

• Smokers in the house? Any grow-ops?

• Who’s gonna live there (primary vs tenants)

• Will there be a business on premise?

• Will there be a mortgage on the house? Birthdates for mortgagees

• Distance to closest fire hydrant? Some want to know distance from fire-hall

• Fire extinguishers?

• Is anyone working from home? (i.e., due to covid)

If you’d like to consider bundling auto coverage

• VIN and driver’s license for the primary driver for each vehicle you might want to add

• Whether or not you would do any kind of drive-monitoring

• What kind of yearly mileage you typically expect

• Whether or not you have any 3rd party alarm or tracking systems installed on any of the vehicles

Quotes Requested

• House only

• House + cars (if applicable)

• Willing/preference to pay upfront for insurance vs monthly

• Make sure to compare the same liability-coverage across all of the candidates

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The makeup of a quote

So at this point in the insurance process, all of the bits of information are entered into a system which then spits out a a quote. For me the big ticket items are:

• The house

• Related structures (i.e., shed)

• Contents (my ‘stuff’)

• Additional living expenses (coverage that kicks in when you can’t stay at your home due to things like an evacuation order)

Sometimes quotes will use slightly different terminology but the gist will be the same. Of these, the most important number is the ‘house’ number — all of the other coverages are calculated as a percentage of that (with each provider having their own distribution). Specifically with respect to covering ‘stuff’, you can add floaters and endorsements etc. that will provide you with additional specific coverage but all of that comes at yet an additional cost. There are ‘settings’ you can ask for that will directly scale the baseline house amount but for a first pass, I let the agents do what they see fit — it’s their bid so to speak.

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Exploring the limitations of contents coverage

Now that you have a handful of quotes and after you (optionally) rule out the quotes that were ‘needlessly difficult’ to get, you can narrow down the quotes by digging into the contents categories that matter to you. Obviously everyone will be different, for me, my categories were cooking, woodworking, photography and computers.

Note that poking and prodding into the details for the coverage of these categories will shed some light on the fit of the agent, and by proxy the provider. Sometimes, it’s less frustrating to take your business elsewhere purely based on the experience from a single agent. I recommend using large numbers to make a point but stay within the realm of possibility. In my example, I have a hypothetical cumulative of 210K worth of contents I wanted to explore:

1. $10K in cooking equipment (knives, pots, pans, appliances)

2. $50K in camera and photo equipment

3. $50K in power and yard tools

4. $100K in computers

For computers, it’s important to note that this is hardware only, not data. Lots of providers will get stuck up on “we don’t offer data insurance” - lol, data can be ball-parked at $1M/GB anyways so that’s going to ruin your day ;) To keep thing simple, I wanted to keep this scoped to something a real, physical, thing.

If it’s true, make sure to flag that these are not for business.

At the end of the day, you’re looking to understand whether or not ‘your stuff’ (with an example value of 210K) will fit in the quoted contents coverage amount and if there are any limitations. The coverage can vary wildly between particular providers. For example, with computers I had two extremes:

1. Some quotes come back with “we don’t care: if the computer fits inside the contents amount, it’s covered” (assuming proper documentation etc.)

2. On the other extreme, I had another provider come back with “cumulative $5K for computers”. — RIP any households with one or more macbooks right?

The experience of digging for additional details may also lead you to eliminate potential providers — and it should (if the experience was like pulling teeth).

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Data!

Once you’ve narrowed down the candidates - we can plot out all the major coverage blocks. By expressing the amounts relatively, it’s very easy to see where the value shift is (and makes it easier to compare on a blog by removing geographic price scaling from the picture):

If we remember from before, the ‘Residence’ value is what drives the remaining limits and each provider arrived at wildly different values. One way we can look at this is to rescale the coverage to account for the different residence values. In essence, this is comparing the distribution for each provider independent of the premium.

Here we can see that, if all of the providers valued the house at the same amount, ‘Provider E’ would have a landslide advantage for contents protection and if we were to prioritize additional living expenses, ‘Provider B’ would be the front-runner:

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However, the reality is that the providers didn’t value the residence at the same amount and while we could get them to increase the valuation that would come at an additional cost and it wouldn’t be a fair-comparison (since we could just ask the better proposition option to do the same).

Spoiler: Provider E ended up having the absolute worst computer-specific limits: $5K cumulative.

Instead of ‘coverage distribution’, we need to find a better metric. Providers set the premium so if we scale for that, we can get a picture for “how much coverage do we get per premium-dollar”. Here, we can see a runaway win for Provider C and to a lesser degree, Provider D.

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While there is a lot more to deciding on a provider (sometimes, you’re getting what you’re paying for!) this can certainly give us an indication of which providers to initially start our search with. By having a large sample of quotes to work with, you can get a consider a larger pool of options.

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What about the rest of the coverage?

Coming from tenant/renters insurance, I’m most familiar with the aggravation of getting coverage for ‘stuff’ but there’s certainly much more to consider: water (above and below), ice etc. Every region will and household will be unique so it’s super critical to go through the policy with almost a combative lens and making sure you understand and are comfortable with the various potential gotchas. Ask tons of questions! In my specific case, I got lucky as most of the coverage policies were roughly all in line with each other (or the short-list had the better options).

Trim Level

One thing to consider is the general ‘nice-ness’ of your home, measured in vague terms like “average”, “above average” etc. Depending on how the home’s interior is described, this will directly impact the baseline ‘residence’ number which in turn, will boost coverage to contents, freestanding structures etc.

The ‘trim level’ of your home goes hand in hand with a ‘Guaranteed Replacement Cost’ attribute on your policy: if you don’t accurately describe your home’s trim level, then you run the risk of having the building replacement not being to the same level. Will it be a house? Yes. Will it have quartz counter tops? Likely not. You’ll have to decide on your own risk tolerance.

Inventory Management

Going hand in hand with contents protection, it’s super important to have some form of inventory management for your belongings. Having a way to document and prove your belongings is critical in a loss-situation. I explore this in my previous post, Keeping Inventory.

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Reducing your premiums

This is ultimately what it’s about: we’ve looked at getting the best coverage for your situation but at the end of the day, there will always be the premium.

1. Ask tons of questions — you’re about to spend a ton of money on the promise that some organization will have your back when you need them. When things go south is not the time to be finding out your coverage preconditions and limitations for the first time.

2. Search around, get a whole boat-load of quotes: get some recommendations, do some manual research of specific providers, look up some insurance brokers and to round this all off, visit a robo-quote system like Ratehub. You don’t need to follow through with the computer generated quotes but that can certainly introduce you to a bunch of providers that you might not have naturally discovered

3. Ask your agent/broker directly for different ways you can save on your premium. Ask people who have the same provider how they’ve saved on their premiums too. This can be a really telling moment with the broker/agent you’re working with — with AllState, I asked open ended questions about reducing the premium and beyond “pair home and auto together”, my agent couldn’t think of anything until I gently ‘reminded’ him about all the different ways (some of which he had brochures all around his desk)

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Recommendations

I’ve mentioned a few times that a good agent/broker experience brings a certain value into the equation (and conversely, a bad experience can skew the value proposition substantially i.e., if you’re a jerk, you’re not going to get my business). I’ve said that one of the most important things you can do is ask tons of questions - it your only real opportunity to find out details on your coverage on your terms - before you pay into it.

My interactions with Tim have been nothing short of exemplary - and I did not go easy on him. He addressed my concerns both literally (digging further for answers as needed) but also leveled with me as a person, addressing the underlying concern.

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The easier systems are good to track big ticket items but you’re limited to items that are out in plain sight and that can be easily and specifically identified visually. You also run the risk that moving too fast, or bad lighting renders your inventory walk-through less than helpful. On the other extreme, it’s a heck of a lot of work to do manual inventory management for what might be little day to day gain.

To each their own, but here’s what works for me!

Quick Links

• Motivators

• What system to use?!

• What I went with

• My Template

• Closing Thoughts

Motivators

For most people, I imagine the desire to inventory their stuff comes up (briefly) when they look at home or renters insurance. For some couples, it may start out as a way to track “who owns what” during the initial stages of the relationship. Funny enough my original motivation for this was reading about all the insane deals you can find at estate sales. In my mind, I just pictured a grieving widow holding a yard sale and letting go of their former partner’s stuff at fire-sale prices because they didn’t have the domain knowledge to price things properly. I didn’t want to leave my spouse to walk into that unprepared.

And I’m certainly OCD enough to do this. Truthfully the hardest part is clearing out the backlog; once you’ve cleared out the majority of the backlog, it’s fairly easy to stay on top of the inventory provided you have a system that works for you. The system I’ve settled on over the years works well for insurance, estate planning and for warranty purposes.

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What system to use?!

Any system is better than nothing — even if it’s just a journal you log serial numbers in. It’s something. There are tons of smartphone apps out there for inventory management and you can leverage things like Evernote or OneNote to build out your own home-brew system. To address this question we need to indirectly tackle the following:

• What ‘rich’ data we need to capture?

  • For most people, I imagine at least some photos of the product would be nice

  • Do you need multiple photos? Would it be nice to have the photos staggered in blocks (i.e., 2015-photos, 2020-photos etc. to show ownership/condition over time)

  • Do you want to embed manuals, warranty policy information?

  • The initial purchase receipt would make sense to include; what about subsequent maintenance receipts?

• How secure/reliable do you want it? How accessible?

  • Running it using a local repository can be more secure/reliable than relying on an online service that may or may not go away, be substantially changed or you might get locked out of. Of course this means now you need to worry about your own backups

  • Do you want to be primarily app-driven? These types of solutions tend to be easier to use and more accessible but certainly not as customizable

  • If you store it locally, you’ll need to manage backups for it. If you store it in the cloud, you’d still be wise to have backups but more so, you’ll need to track space usage. Depending on how rich your inventory is, this can get out of hand!

• How many people need to interact with the system generally?

  • If one person is in charge of managing the inventory system, you can do whatever you need so long as the other can access it later

• What custom fields do you need to track?

  • Do you want to track bar codes? MAC addresses?

  • Do you want to link password manager lookups? (i.e., to take you to the secured product registration page)

  • Do you want to make certain text elements linkable?

  • Do you want to attach contact info? (i.e., go -here- for service or talk to -someone- for more information)

In my case, I wanted extremely rich, embedded content that was templatable and I could leverage standardized formatting.

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What I went with

Ultimately, I went with OneNote (desktop version). There’s a web version that is free to use but it has two major downsides: limited to 5GB in size before you have to pay and it’s featureset is currently, very limited (specifically with page templates).

Caution: long-term support for OneNote (desktop)

Microsoft has stated that they plan on supporting OneNote (desktop) until 2023 (mainstream support ) and 2025 (extended support). After that, all bets are potentially off. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use (or continue to use) OneNote, you’ll just need to plan for this eventuality. In my case, since I have the OneNote files locally, it’s easy enough to snapshot a virtual machine that can interact with the inventory either [a] forever or [b] until I find a better solution.

If I had to do it all over again, using something else (since OneNote desktop is on its way out)? I think I might use Google Drive; I’m sure there are templates out there for inventory management but even without, a collection of folders within Drive to organize it thematically (i.e., Kitchen, Workshop, Tech etc.). To organize photos, I would use Google Photo albums and just link it for each item.

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My Template

In OneNote, you can build out your inventory form the way you like it to include whatever data you think is relevant. Once you’ve finished designing the page just the way you like it, you can save it as a template. There are a few things to note about templates:

• For pages that you have created a template, there is no way to ‘push’ an update to the template — you will need to redo any changes to the template manually

• If you want to backup/share your templates, the templates become individual pages in a OneNote file. The file is My Templates.one and it is located in %appdata%\Microsoft\Templates

• You can set a template as the default page for a section! You will have to do this for each section though (although you could have a slightly different template for different sections)

• As your inventory gets bigger and bigger, you may want to leverage section-groups — sadly, there is no way to assign a template to a section group

One nice thing you can do with OneNote is that you can right click on nearly anything - from a piece of text to an attachment to a page and create a link to that. This is handy if some of your items are bundles or kits i.e., a drill kit might include a drill, two individual batteries and a charger all of which might have their own inventory page but spread across different sections (i.e., power tools and batteries & chargers). This will allow you to link items that are related to each other, together.

This is an example of a product entry I might have: the nice thing about OneNote is that the pages can be very rich — I have URLs, images, PDFs and archives (containing product images) embedded on this page.

This template is pretty easy to build out — it’s just a bunch of freeform cells but if you want a jump start, you can use this exported page. Just open this .one file in OneNote and save the page as a template.

[Download]

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Closing Thoughts

• Getting started is the hardest part of the inventory process: at first you don’t necessarily know what data fields you might want to collect down the road and the potential aggravation of having to update a template in the future might be discouraging. If you’re worried about that, do a few products to start with from a few different categories and let your brain sleep on it.

• So one downside about using OneNote (desktop) is that you do need to think about backups — there’s no point in having all of your stuff neatly inventoried to just get it wiped out by data loss. OneNote has built-in backups, but don’t necessarily rely on those beyond only the very basics (as files can get corrupted!). One option is to lean in favor of the web-based OneNote (which comes with its own limits) but I would still advise caution.

• As your inventory gets larger and you migrate from sections to section-groups and then multiple section groups, at some point, it makes sense to split even section groups out into their own individual OneNote-notebooks. Splitting notebooks up keeps the individual sizes down and reduces your risk from files getting corrupted.

• If you regularly prune your OneNote notebooks down and take precautions to backup, you should be okay for quite some time. I’ve been following this process since 2014 or so — I started with a single OneNote notebook and as of time of writing, I have 20GB of inventory logs spread across seven notebooks.

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Quick Links

• First Steps

• How we found a place

  • Come up with a process to filter out listings

  • Defining your criteria

  • Viewings

• Metrics

• Google My Maps, putting comps into perspective

• Retrospective

• Recommendations

First steps

I think there is an urge to start with a realtor and to jump into the ‘fun’ bits of looking at houses, but the ideal flow (IMO) is to start with all the boring (or scary) bits up front. For many of us, this is likely going to be one of the biggest purchases we make so above all, I would recommend interviewing all the people you’re going to be working with up front.

It’s important to understand how everyone gets paid and the best interest they represent - don’t be afraid to ask this! This is a factual question with a factual answer. If your candidate isn’t forthcoming, then it’s probably a good idea to move on to the next candidate.

In our specific case, there were four types of individuals to interact with:

1. Mortgage Broker: figure out what you can afford

2. Lawyer: once you finally get your offer accepted, you don’t get burned by a bad experience due to a bad-fit with a law firm; this is a good time to address any cross-border and divorce/widow gotchas

3. Accountant: figure out if there are any broad tax considerations to watch out for, particularly paying attention to cross-border considerations (i.e., in Canada, we can pull money from RRSP to contribute towards down payment - how does that impact foreign taxes?)

4. Realtor: Interview a few different candidates — this is the person you’re going to interact with the most during the ‘fun’ bits; make sure you find someone that’s on the ball and you work well with

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How we found a place

1. Come up with a process to filter out listings

In an ideal world, you’d get a chance to see every home you think you like under identical conditions but that just isn’t practical or realistic: there’s just not enough time to zip around to every house you might think you like. Depending on how specific you are with your requirements, that could be a really big number! One more thing to consider is just how crazy the housing market is where you are (it’s nuts in Canada) - there is a limited number of hours in a day and many homes are just on the market for a couple of days so you’ll need to prioritize.

Before we started our house search, we were mostly expecting to get priced out of our region.

We get along great with our neighbors and the community and location is great but we don’t have a specific attachment to this region; we we’re looking for home that we liked, could afford and were a good fit. In the beginning, we had a bit of difficulty getting focused since we really didn’t care where we’d end up, so long as it was within 100km or so of my work (a 100km radius is huge).

Filtering a house listings is no different than filtering computer parts.

Every house listing is a collection of objective facts, subjective attributes and some degree of intangibles — just like computer parts.

• Objective facts: # bedrooms, # bathrooms, garage size, availability of services ➞ what processor, what RAM, what amperage on 12V rail, how many M.2 slots? power phases?

• Subjective attributes: layout of front foyer, layout of kitchen, flow of laundry, what type of fencing is available ➞ what color is the shroud? what’s the brand? RGB vs matte

• Intangibles: is the house on a curve? busy street? lots of children? ➞ is there an extra power rail for stability? dual BIOS? BIOS reset button? how much DRAM cache?

Once I had this realization, it was super-easy to brute-force all of the listings in a 100km radius. We settled on the following flow:

1. Initial search. In Realtor.ca, you can save your searches and it even saves the ‘zoom level’ so you can scan and re-scan a consistent area again and again. I found viewing the results in the list rather than on a map made it super easy to brute force the results. In this initial search, you can broadly filter things like ‘price window’, what type of building you’re hoping for (detached, townhouse, apartment etc.) and possibly things like number of bedrooms and bathrooms. In my specific case, I set the budget to be a bit broader and specified the building type I was looking for (single-detached) and left everything else wide-open - the more results that come back the better.

2. Rough-filter. The first search you perform may return hundreds, maybe even thousands of results depending on how loose your filters are and how broad of an area you’re searching. Once you’ve processed all of the existing listings, you can reduce the background noise by only showing listings that are newer than a specific date. Even then, you can get dozens or hundreds of results. The rough filter allows you to very quickly reject a property without even opening the listing.

   • You want (or don’t want) a specific city

   • You want a specific feature that you can tell instantly from the initial photo: maybe you don’t want 1-car garages, or you want a covered porch or you specifically want an all-brick construction

3. Medium- & fine-filter. If a property makes it to this point, I’ll open the listing and start to fill out a row on a tracking spreadsheet. As I fill out the fields for this listing, either the property gets eliminated or it doesn’t. The medium filter handles attributes about the property (i.e., well-water? septic? gigabit?) and if the property makes it through that, then I perform a deeper dive on the available photos, scrutinizing the rooms that matter to me. It’s super important to know exactly what your must- and mustn’t-haves are.

4. Partner buy-in. If a property makes it this far, then I had my wife look at the property and add her comments (and/or reject) the property. If you are buying a property with someone, it’s crucial that all parties are onboard. Everyone needs veto power, even if it’s just “I can’t articulate why I don’t like it, I just don’t like it”. Everyone needs to be onboard!

5. Viewing. Hopefully you can get a viewing and then decide if you want to go down the road of making an offer!

Tip 1: Keep a running list of houses that made it past the rough-filter but were rejected and a very quick reason why you rejected it. We didn’t do this initially and we’d see the same property come up a couple times and wonder why the hell we didn’t add it to the list and waste time blasting through the listing only to realize that on picture 35, it showed a feature we didn’t like or something.

Tip 2: If you’re buying a house with a spouse, make sure you have the discussion of what your absolute max number is. For us, this was a number that, unless the house was an absolute miracle, we wouldn’t go a single penny over. It also has to be a number that, up to that number, there won’t be any resentment or complaints about.

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2. Defining your criteria

For many (most?) people, home buying is a pretty emotional process and while a ‘good fit’ is important, I think it’s important to be able to articulate why you like (or dislike) a specific property. It can be a bit of an eye opening journey as you articulate your specific must-have, would-be-nice and mustn’t-have features: I certainly found that I was a lot more particular about certain things than I initially thought I was. You don’t need to come up with this list all up front — I didn’t realize certain things until a few viewings into the search.

At this point, I guess it’s no longer a surprise to me anymore; just like with every other market segment, I am not a typical type of customer. Based on how homes are presented, the things most people seem to care about are practically worthless to me. This is doubly so in homes that are ‘professionally staged’ — I knew I was bothered by something about staged homes but I couldn’t put my finger on it. A friend of mine hit the nail on the head when he described staging as ‘how would you post this house on Instagram?’. Sigh. Won’t be able to unsee that.

I’m not the target audience for anything. Ever.

Rough-filter

The point of the rough-filter is to be able to eliminate a listing without even opening the listing details. One example is a specific city you don’t want to look in. Beyond this, how effective a rough-filter is depends on whether or not there are any tell-tale signs you can see from the main photo or not. In my case, there were a few cities I didn’t want to consider but the bulk of my rejections were based on the garage.

• Garage. I need a garage of some sort for my workshop. I would make an exception if a property had a detached shed/barn/structure that I could work out of but barring that, 1-car garages were out. I would consider a 1.5-car garage if it hit a certain square-footage and/or had a specific compelling feature. For the most part, I was looking at 2-car garages

Always an exception: if the structure was a long/deep 1-car garage (typically something you’d only see as a freestanding, detached garage or barn/shed), I would consider it. But it’s needs to be a perfect fit.

Pre-filter: Medium

Properties that made it past the visual inspection needed to pass an attribute check to make sure that there weren’t any gotchas. Mostly, this involves loading the listing page, checking if the address qualifies for certain things and verifying information typically found directly in the listing. For us, any of these were an instant rejection:

• Price sanity check: we have a specific budget window in mind and in some cases, our Realtor steps in to let us know that a given property is going to blow well past it

• Internet service: Must have a specific service from a specific provider

• Septic Sewage or Well-Water. I’ve never directly experienced either, but my wife has, and specifically has experienced the negatives that go with it, so that was instant-rejection

• Wood fireplace. We didn’t want the insurance hassle of a wood-burning fireplace and seriously, the 1700s called, they want their heating solution back

• Garage space. If the floor-plan was available, I’d figure out the square-footage of the garage

• Commute range. Ironically, the software industry hasn’t really adopted remote work, so I will need to take into consideration the commute time

• No pool. I don’t ‘water’ and pools are a huge maintenance hassle for something you can use for a fraction of the year; Nicole didn’t want a pool at all

Always an exception: there was a single property that had a [small] pool that made it past this filter (we even put an offer on it!). This was purely on the strength of the rest of the house

Fine-filter, deep-dive

Once the absolute criticals were met, then we can scrutinize the photos much more intensely. Sadly, the two rooms I care about are never really featured: the garage and basement (finished or otherwise).

One thing about listing photos though: so many photos are shot with crazy, almost-fisheye lenses and with fucky camera angles in an overly desperate attempt to make a specific space look bigger. Those are usually enough to spot but some photos are taken by photographers that seem to know what they are doing and are shot to intentionally minimize other aspects.

• Shed. I’m okay if it doesn’t come with a shed (or comes with a small one) so long as there is space to build a suitable shed for us

• Street location. A bit intangible and difficult to describe but I didn’t want to be backing into the driveway on a big street (since everyone drives bumper to bumper anyways); I also wanted to avoid curves in the road for a similar reason

• Driveway. Primarily wanted a 2-car-wide driveway. It’s not a huge deal with park single-file, but if we can get side-by-side, then why not. Generally speaking, the 1.5-2 car garage ensures this is the case, although we did see a single property with a detached 2-car garage and a long single-file driveway

• Laundry room. The laundry room is a big afterthought - make sure to pay attention to the flow of the machines and which direction the doors open

• Fireplaces in general. So many properties had fireplaces, it was a little ridiculous; sure it’s nice to look at and sit by the fireplace, what, twice a year? No thanks. My bigger gripe though is that many fireplaces are placed front-and-center in a living/family room. Funny enough this is where people want to put TVs - so now you have a TV perched up 5-feet off the ground and everyone can watch a movie with broken necks. Bonus: there was a house that came through that had three (3!!!) fireplaces

Always an exception: in some cases, having a TV above the fireplace can work such as when there is a sight-line from a kitchen to the TV (if you like to have something to watch in the background while cooking)

The Kitchen

I like to cook and apparently, I’m quite particular about what I want in my kitchen. Thankfully, the kitchen is generally the single most glamorized room in a house — who knew everyone liked to cook so much? And then I remembered that kitchens are presented with a ‘what would Instagram do’ mindset. There are so many UX disasters

• Sink should be by the window or have dedicated lighting — I can’t wash my stuff if I can’t see it

• Bonus points if the sink (or a second sink!) is on an island; in many cases, this island will feature a breakfast bar (awesome!) — but if that’s the case, the breakfast bar needs to be raised to accommodate a back splash on the island

• If there is an island with a sink, the dishwasher should probably be on the island as well

• In most cases dishwasher should not be next to a wall or corner

• The range should not be against a wall - [1] can’t use large pans against the wall and [2] oh god the splatter on that poor wall. If there’s a backsplash on the wall directly adjacent, then, this may be acceptable. A similar idea applies to having the range directly next to a doorway - asking for an accident to happen

• Points lost for having a microwave over the range. Not only will the hood performance be worse/limited, this generally means that if I rip the microwave out and put my own hood in (which I will) - then there hasn’t been any thought (from the builder) as to where to put the microwave

• Points for a plumbed fridge: not so much that the fridge comes with a waterline — I can easily buy my own fridge, but more so that the plumbing is in place for it

• Points for good lighting. Our current kitchen setup is horrendous for lighting

• Points for a dining table space where the table does not block a patio door

• Points for having smart cabinet solutions

• Points for having sufficient outlets for all my counter-top appliances, double points if they are on different circuits

• Points for having a natural gas hookup outside (for a BBQ). For the main kitchen, I prefer induction over gas (since there’s a long term plan to deploy solar panels) but both are acceptable to start

• Is the fridge right up against a wall (meaning, you can’t open it)?

• Bonus points if the microwave spot, if there is one, fits our microwave

I haven’t quite figured out how to articulate it but there is a specific flow and spacing of range + sink + dishwasher that works for me and a small variance that I find acceptable. There’s a lot of variance because the overall shape of a kitchen and whether or not there is an island (with, or without plumbing) changes things a lot. For example:

• stove ➞ dishwasher ➞ ➞ sink is not acceptable

• stove ➞ ➞ sink ➞ dishwasher is acceptable

If the last bit is a bit odd, assume for a moment, that the dishwasher is in the open position at all times — and if you’re going to be tripping over it during a cooking cycle, then it’s no good. Points are lost also if fancy acrobatics are needed to work between the stove and the sink (usually a problem if the sink is far away or directly behind the stove, on an island).

Obviously, you know you — these are just some requirements applicable to my style in a kitchen.

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3. Viewings

Due to COVID-19, house viewings are limited to 30-minutes: we initially thought this would be challenging but we found that on average, we only needed 10-15 minutes to clear a house. Some of this is having a partner to divide-and-conquer with and some is knowing exactly you want or don’t want (most of the analysis has been done during the deep-dive through the photos). It’s really the fun bit: to get to go through a home and QA it. Generally by the time we get as far as a house viewing, we have a rough idea of what areas of the house we want to check, for me it’s all about checking UX:

• Kitchen: open all of the fridge, dishwasher, cabinet doors — are there tight points, restrictions or being too close to walls (i.e. with a dishwasher in a corner, you’ll likely be bumping elbows into the side cabinets), are there cabinets that you can’t reach (common with U-shaped kitchens), run the hood fans to check for rattling

• General: Where is the breaker box? Is it easy to get to?

• Computer Room: where are the outlets? is there enough span for our desks

• Garage: so apparently [a] people still smoke and [b] people smoke in the garage. Unfortunately, we rejected a few properties based on that. Make sure to check the height and if possible, the location of the water taps (ideally at the driveway end) and outlets (ideally all around)

• Laundry: is there room for the washer/dryer doors to open? How well lit is it? Is there space to put stuff?

• Basement: where is the breaker box, how much power do we have, how much room is there, where are the outlets

Sure, a lot of problems can be worked around and/or can be fixed or mitigated, but for spending this kind of money, I tend to be a bit more choosey. Here are some amusing things we saw:

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Metrics

This is the fun bit (at least for me). I don’t know enough about real-estate or whether or not my filtering process represents ‘normal’ or not, but it’s certainly neat to look at some of the pretty charts that can come out of all this raw data!

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Google My Maps, putting comps into perspective

One important concept around bidding on a house is getting a feel for the pricing of similar houses in the area. I’m not going to begin to suggest that I have any expertise in coming up with a number to offer on a house but I can appreciate data and picturing it. Enter Google My Maps. My Maps allows you to create a map with custom markers that are grouped in layers that can be toggled on and off. In the past, I’ve used it to plan cross-border trips: plot out all the stores I want to visit and once I have an idea of where everything is relative to each other, I can figure out the order to visit them.

You can add custom labels for each data point — price, notable features, a link to the listing etc. and you can also make use of the standard Google Maps features like putting together directions or measuring a specific distance.

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You can group your comps by layers and toggle them on and off as a group — this way if you’re looking at multiple properties in a single area, you can toggle entire groups of comps on and off at a time. For me, as a non-expert, it’s interesting to step back and look at the all of the comps in the area and try and figure out ‘what might explain this price’. Depending on the location, you can spot some additional intangible attributes such as being on the ‘correct’ side of train tracks so that you’re never affected by a train on the way to/from work or a neighborhood that has lots of different ways in and out of it from multiple main streets,

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Retrospective

Things I hated

To sum it up simply, it’s the ‘Instagram factor’. More often than not, there is very little useful information shown in listings:

• Hit and miss on floor plans. Floor plans are a start but there’s the entire factor of height too!

• It’s super rare to get callouts in listings about insulation

• Outlets. Outlets. Outlets. Everything in marketing apparently is terrified of outlets. Companies Photoshop cords off of products, stagers hide outlets behind vases. It’s ridiculous.

• The need to angle everything in corners: angled microwaves, angled stand-mixers, angled knife-blocks. It all very jarring - I see the ‘nice’ kitchen and think “ok this person appreciates cooking” and then I see the angled microwave and think “ok this person is an idiot”

Things to keep in mind

House buying is an emotional process and it’s super easy to get lost in the details and let’s be honest: the professional stagers know they are doing. Staging a house is done because it generally works!

• Don’t buy a house for appliances! I know of more than a few cases of purchasing decisions being swayed because one house had ‘stainless steel appliances’ and another didn’t. In my case, I already had very specific appliances in mind and there was next to no chance of any house we viewed to feature any of it. Just like computers, there is a certain amount of synergy the comes with appliances which means if you have $5-10K in a range, the whole kitchen is $25K+ and these kinds of houses don’t show up in our budget

• For renovations, keep expectations realistic. It’s very tempting to think of saving money up front and doing a renovation but keep the following in mind

  • Cost of materials (specifically lumber) is stratospheric right now

  • Labor may cost more (and take significantly longer) due to pandemic limitations

  • Everyone and their grandmother is doing renovations so you may be booking a long way out

  • Renovations after the fact are out-of-pocket costs (you can build this into the mortgage but we don’t like that idea)

  • Even if you do it yourself, it’s still time you need to set aside (with work and family considerations)

• There is a limit to what you can do with renos. Without delving into drastic, structural renovations (something I didn’t want to consider), you can’t really add new space where wasn’t working room to begin with

Things that made it easier

1. A flashlight. Unless you’re looking at huge properties with lots of land, a shorter-throw, floodier light will make your walk-through so much easier. Dim basement? Can’t see under the stairs? Want to look under the deck? Scheduled a late evening viewing? Doesn’t matter anymore.

2. Measuring tape. We have a fairly large microwave (2.1cu-ft) so checking that it can fit into a space is important; also handy for checking the width of stairwells, width of refrigerator stalls, how far out fireplace mantles protrude, how much space you have in certain places to fit a TV

3. If you’re going in the winter, a thermal camera. Unfortunately, the weather was a bit warm during our visits so the thermal difference isn’t very clear

4. Once you’re more sure about a property, either a better camera or even something like a 360-camera. This way you snap everything

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Recommendations

This is our first house purchase and we’re not out of the woods yet, but our journey so far as been super smooth - I can’t say enough good things about the entire process. The single best part of this process has been working with our Realtor, Keshia. This is our first home so everything is still a bit strange, new, exciting and scary.

Working with Keshia has been a wonderful experience. As with any specialized field, you work with a professional because you want expertise-driven guidance, recommendations and results. Keshia delivered on all fronts: during viewings, we could run-along and be tourists while she looked for (and found!) real problems with the house and when the time came to put in offers, we had a ton of confidence in the legwork she did to arrive at the numbers she did. Everything about our experience felt tailored specifically for us and our unique wants and needs. And what impressed me the most? She was able to do all this while keeping up with the intensity we were running at without breaking - most humans just don’t work well at that pace.

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