Evernote & Our Home Renovation

Kevin and I recently completed the renovation of our existing home. We’re now in the beginning planning stages of an addition. We’ll be adding a master bedroom and a small transitional room that will be for storage and work space. There’s also a deck in the works … very exciting.

I can’t help with a lot of the planning, and you won’t see me downtown waiting for permits. I can, however, help us stay super organized throughout the whole process using my favorite app, Evernote. Evernote is a wonderful web and iPhone app that helps you keep track of your notes, thoughts, pictures, and more. There’s really not much you can’t keep track of with Evernote. I’ve even started using it in meetings at work to take down – yes – notes and tag those notes with projects that relate back to a particular notebook. It’s brilliant.

We’ve started simple, but I plan to come back regularly and update on how Evernote is helping us get through this process. Here’s where we’re at:

1. Receipt Storage: Throughout the process, hundreds of receipts come in and out of our life. In order to keep close track of where the money goes and towards what, we will be taking photos of our receipts with our iPhones, then sending them straight to Evernote. I tag them “renovation” and voila, there they are in the Renovation notebook with relevant tags. Maybe I also need to tag it “lunch” or “flooring” … you get the idea. The tags help me group the receipts that have to do with each other, which is simple and wonderful.

2. Product research / shopping lists: I can’t tell you how many times we’ve returned home from a trip to Home Depot to discover we have to turn around and go back. By researching our trips before we leave and adding notes about the products / services we need, we make sure we don’t forget anything. I save web pages, pictures of items taken with the iPhone, and catalog numbers when we see a product or tool we need. It gets tagged “tools” and moved to the renovation notebook. Now we have a live wishlist going for tools and equipment we need or will need soon. As long as one of us has an iPhone at Home Depot we’ll never forget again. We can even price compare.

3. Design Elements: This is mostly for me. Here I’ll be keeping track of pretty rooms, color combinations, pieces of furniture or other creative uses of space that inspire me on the web. We’ll use some of these ideas, and some we won’t. I really do want that chair, though. It couldn’t be simpler: add the web page to Evernote and tag it. Make sure it ends up in the renovation notebook and you’re all set. I’m tagging my chair wishlist, renovation and color. See how we can group all kinds of ideas together through various notes? Later, I’ll tag something else color and when I look at all the tagged items grouped by color, I’ll have a history of my favorite colors. Just brilliant.

I can also save paint colors I like or take photos of houses with my iPhone and then tag them ‘color’ to make sure we have a comprehensive list of options when it’s time to choose the outside paint color.

4. Budget: We work on the budget in a Google doc that can be exported as a PDF. I simply drag that PDF into Evernote and voila, our budget is with us on the iPhone wherever we go. If we update the Google doc, I export and update the PDF in Evernote as well. This way if we’re talking to contractors, looking at lumber, choosing furniture or contemplating cheaper / more expensive parts, we have the budget with us in the iPhone at all times to check.

This is just the beginning. I’m sure we’ll find more ways to useEvernote as we go through our build. How would you use it?