John and I moved into this house about 12 years ago. Ask me how much we paid to have the saltillo installed on the floors, or who put the new counters in the kitchen. Ask me the name of the house painter, or the exact color of the front door. When did we have that new air conditioner put in? Is the water heater still under warranty?

I don’t have a clue. I’m sure we have scraps of paper containing the information somewhere but it would take me days to find it.

But ask me what you wrote in an e-mail five years ago – I can probably lay my hands on in less than five minutes. I’m one of those people who is extremely well organized when it comes to computer files and a mess when it comes to paper.

The Complete Home Journal is the perfect program for people like me.

In a nutshell, Complete Home Journal is a specialized database that helps you organize everything about your home. There are seven parts:

1. Home purchase, including details about the mortgage, realtor and insurance
2. Exterior of your home
3. Interior of your home
4. Mechanicals of your home, such as the furnace and water heater
5. To-do lists
6. Contact database
7. Inventory

The program can accommodate as many homes as you own or manage.

The screen capture in figure 1 is for our guest bathroom, which, thank goodness, falls into the “indoor” category. There are sub-categories for floor, walls, wood, fixtures, ceiling, windows and miscellaneous. We’re looking at fixtures, and I entered the tub, sink, toilet, faucets, lights, etc. The screen you are viewing contains everything you could possibly want to know about our new bath and tub surround. At the bottom, there is room to insert my own digital photos. One photo is of the tub, but I also scanned in the receipt and stashed it there. If there was a user’s manual, I could scan that and include it, too.

You’ll also see tabs above the purchase information where you can enter data about its installation (who installed it, when, and for how much) and the dimensions of the fixture.

The screens for the exterior and the mechanicals follow the same format.

The contact database is a simple one, giving you a place to store all of your contact information. The to-do list is also a simple one: as many lists as you want, with the ability to check things off as they are accomplished.

The inventory gives you a place to record all of the stuff you have stashed in those rooms. There is room for purchase price, warranties, insurance, appraisals and, of course, photographs. They can be viewed by room (everything in the living room) or by category (all electronics.)

All of the screens have ample room for free-form notes, so you’re not limited by the pre-determined categories. There are numerous report formats for you to print, and an easy backup utility. They recommend keeping a backup copy at another location so that if disaster strikes, you have a complete inventory of your possessions.

Now I can hear you database gurus saying, “I could program that myself!” And, of course, you could. But for $39.95, the Complete Home Journal does it for you. You can download a trial version from The Home Journal, which is fully functional but will not save any data. You can buy a full version from the same site, or order it by calling 1-800-999-2734 (request product #2745.) Their marketing guy told me that they were just informed that CompUSA will start carrying the boxed version, so look for it there soon.

It’s a Windows program, requiring version 98 or higher and a minimum of 32 MB RAM. The Mac is not directly supported but the company says that many customers run the software using Virtual PC for the Mac from Microsoft, which allows the Mac to run PC software.

There are a few features I would have liked to have seen included. The contact database is generic, with no cross-categorizations. You can’t search for a list of plumbers, for example: you’d have to remember the plumber’s name, although you could set up a plumber “group,” and sort them that way. The contact list is not linked to the entries for the installers. Duane installed our new tub; I can’t just click on his name in the bathroom journal and get all of his info in the contact list: I have to look it up separately.

The photos don’t have a space for an annotation; this would be a nice feature if I were doing before and after photos, for example.

It would also have been useful in the mechanicals section to have some sort of a maintenance reminder built in: a popup screen telling me when to change the furnace filter, for example.

All and all, though, it’s a great program. I wish I had it when we first bought the house.

They thought of that, too. The company sells the program in bulk to real estate agents who give it to new homeowners. If you buy only 10 copies, they sell them to you for $14.95 each ($9.95 for 100 copies) and affix a custom label to the CD with your office information and logo on it, if you want. This is a great idea and a great deal.

This one is a keeper. Now, pardon me while I catch up on 12 years of home maintenance record keeping…