Richard Joseph Spinelli published Building Maintenance History Belongs in Writing on Blogger on September 21, 2026, nine days after his post on hiring for a walkable portfolio and on the same day as his Medium essay on resident first practice. The order matters, because this post reads as an amendment to the earlier hiring argument. That essay held that a newcomer can learn the route between buildings on foot within a week. The new post accepts the point and then names what the walk leaves out: the record of what has already been done inside each building.
A boiler, three guesses and no log
He starts on a cold evening when a boiler in one of the Belmont buildings began firing on and off too quickly. The obvious question was when it had last had service, and everyone in the conversation had a recollection while nobody had a document. From there the post makes a narrow claim for a small company where the founders still take calls. Such firms keep few notes since few have ever been needed, and he wants one exception carved out early, well before the portfolio seems large enough to justify a system.
His diagnosis is that clustering causes the problem the record later cures. Because the same handful of people pass through every cellar, frequent visits remove the felt need to document anything, and a building’s past travels as talk: which riser a plumber exposed while redoing a bath, which basement takes on water first. He also notes that memory skews spring planning, going easy on buildings people are fond of and hard on the ones that spoiled someone’s week. The idea that a small operator’s know how sits in a few heads runs across his writing and is traced on the page on knowledge that lives in people, beside the related claim that repetition builds familiarity, which this post partly turns against itself.
Six fields and a photograph
What he prescribes is modest. Each event gets a date, the building, the system, the failure, the fix and the person who did it, logged that day in one shared place. To that he adds pictures shot while a wall is still open, because in prewar construction nothing costs more to lose than the image of what lay behind the plaster. He then takes a position he expects working owners to reject: at this scale, he argues, the software is the weak link, since a tool nobody updates in a bad week is worse than a plain document per building that anyone can open from a phone underground. His advice is to record less than the tool asks for, and to record it without exception. For owners starting from nothing he narrows further, to three systems, namely heating, plumbing and the roof, going forward only, with no attempt to rebuild the past.
Research on written procedure backs the spirit of this and complicates the detail. Atul Gawande’s New Yorker essay on the intensive care checklist1 described a short written protocol that pushed line infections at one hospital close to zero, on the reasoning that once work outgrows memory, writing steps down lifts even experts. A federal patient safety summary of the 2009 surgical checklist trial2 describes a 19 item list, run at three fixed moments in eight very different hospitals, that significantly cut deaths and complications; it comes from operating rooms and bears on building logs only as an analogy. The Atlantic’s review of the checklist evidence3 is the counterweight: an Ontario study found no gain, and a British audit found key steps followed in only a small fraction of cases, which led Gawande to reply that the list helps only when teams truly use it. That is close to Spinelli’s objection to software in other words. The value lies in the habit of writing, and a system that outruns the habit adds nothing.
What leaves when a person leaves
The central distinction of the post is between two kinds of knowledge. Knowing the route renews itself, he writes, because the buildings stay put. Service history does not, and once the person holding it stops picking up, the only recovery is to pay a trade to find it out again. That is why he frames the record around whether the company can keep its standard on a day the founders are away, and not around growth. The tie to the small bench of trades is explicit: those outside relationships hold a great deal of undocumented history about the buildings, quick while it lasts and held in memories he does not control. The post also sharpens the walkable hiring argument, which it cites by name.
Workforce reporting shows how ordinary this loss is. A PBS NewsHour column on retiring workers4 cited a survey in which most older employees had handed on half or less of what their successors would need, and about a fifth had handed on none, largely because nobody asked. HPAC Engineering, reporting on the facility management field5, put the average age of its practitioners near 51 and described a professional partnership formed to set shared standards, the discipline Spinelli calls the organized version of his one idea. Habitat magazine described a records system6 built because condominium buildings kept losing their files whenever management changed; the answer was to make the files belong to the building. New York already mandates a slice of this, as The Cooperator explained in covering Local Law 1527, which sends licensed plumbers to inspect gas piping on a cycle and obliges owners to certify corrections and hold the reports for years.
The standing summary of this post is the richardjspinelli.com works entry on maintenance history, which serves as the main article, and the broader practice of servicing systems before they fail is covered in its entry on preventive upkeep in rentals.
The work that is never urgent
Spinelli is candid that record keeping is the first task to slip, especially in August when turnover and arrivals consume the calendar, and that the early years of some buildings survive only as memory he does not expect to recover. He calls that a trade accepted by starting late. The seasonal angle ties the post to preparing before the season and to the storm response essay, where readiness depends on knowing a building before weather tests it. His claim for the log is intentionally small: it makes a company legible, he writes, and legibility is what a standard needs once the work is shared among several people, which puts this entry inside the argument that a small portfolio counts as a real company. The open question is the one he cannot yet answer: whether a hand kept document in plain sentences survives the first hire who never knew the buildings before the log existed. The post itself is Building Maintenance History Belongs in Writing on Blogger.
