Home Tasks Dashboard: Building a Maintenance Tracker for the House That Actually Works

I Built a Home Maintenance Dashboard Because Google Calendar Couldn't Handle Being Late

I have a pond, indoor plants, outdoor plants, a cat, an HVAC filter I reliably forget about, and no real memory of whether I changed my bedsheets two weeks ago or three. Google Calendar was my solution for a while, until I noticed it had one fatal flaw: it has no concept of late. This is the latest in the vibe-coded series, and it's the one built entirely to live on my own wall.

What was actually wrong with calendar reminders?

Recurring calendar events fire on a fixed interval from a fixed start date, and they don't care when you actually did the thing. If I'm supposed to treat my pond every 14 days and I do it 18 days late, the calendar still fires 14 days from the original date, not 14 days from when I actually treated the water. Over time the schedule and reality drift further apart until the reminders turn into noise you dismiss without thinking. What I actually wanted was a timer that resets from the moment I press Done, not from when it was supposed to happen.

What does the dashboard actually do?

Every recurring task gets its own card with its own independent countdown, currently things like litter box cleaning, bedsheets, the HVAC filter, pond treatment and pump cleaning, and fertilizing both indoor and outdoor plants. A card turns yellow when it's coming up soon, red when it's overdue, green when it's fine. Hit Mark Done and the timer resets from that exact moment. Cards sort themselves by urgency, so whatever needs attention floats to the top, and anything more than 30 days out fades slightly so the visual hierarchy always points at what actually matters right now. Each card also has a small bar chart showing how many times you completed that task each month, which turned out to be a lot more satisfying to look at than I expected.

What's it actually running on?

A small USB-powered portable monitor connected to an old MacBook that lives next to it, plugged in, set to never sleep, with the dashboard open fullscreen in a browser and just staying there. The monitor has no touch input and no spare ports, so the real design constraint was figuring out how to mark something done without a mouse. The answer was keyboard shortcuts, pressing 1 through 9 marks the corresponding task done in sorted order, with a small USB keyboard tucked nearby for input.

Why not just use localStorage?

That was my first instinct, and it mostly worked until it didn't. It's per-browser and per-device, so marking something done on my phone wouldn't update the wall display, and it gets wiped if you clear browser data or switch browsers. For something meant to be the actual record of when I last cleaned the pond pump, that's not reliable enough. The fix was storing state in a small cloud key-value store instead, so any device that loads the dashboard's URL sees the same data, the wall display, a phone, whatever.

How many times did the design change?

More than I expected. A dark, tech-forward version with glowing status indicators looked cool but felt like a server monitoring tool, wrong for a home. A version inspired by the aesthetic of the film Her, all warm sienna and lowercase serif type, was genuinely beautiful to build and immediately unusable to actually live with, gorgeous and nearly illegible. A Gmail-inspired version, white cards and clean status pills, was functional and completely joyless in a kitchen. What finally stuck was a warm off-white background, a terracotta accent color, heavily rounded cards, and muted status colors instead of harsh primaries, something that actually feels like it belongs on a wall instead of a monitoring screen. Most of the real finessing wasn't the aesthetic choices themselves, it was the underlying tech and figuring out a UI I could actually commit to living with. This is a shared household tool, so it also had to be something Ryan would want to use, not just something I found clever.

What's still missing?

Task deletion, honestly an oversight, you can add tasks but not remove them yet. I'd also like to move this off the old MacBook and onto something like a Raspberry Pi, since running a full laptop 24 hours a day for a dashboard is wasteful, the only holdup is a display technology quirk that makes Linux support a little finicky. The idea I'm most excited about and haven't built yet is NFC tags, small stickers on the pond, the litter box, the HVAC unit, so tapping your phone against the sticker marks the task done with zero screen interaction at all, the physical act of doing the thing is the completion.

The actual cost of this

Zero dollars a month, and about one afternoon from idea to something actually on the wall.

FAQ

How is this different from a normal recurring calendar reminder? The timer resets from the moment a task is actually marked done, not from a fixed schedule, so a late completion doesn't throw off every future reminder.

Does it require a touchscreen? No. Tasks are marked done using number key shortcuts on a small USB keyboard, since the display itself has no touch input.

Does everyone in the house see the same data? Yes, state is stored in the cloud rather than in a single browser, so any device loading the dashboard's URL sees the current, shared state.