TL;DR: I was fed up with my landlord. So I built an app using Airtable to manage the lifecycle of maintenance requests.
I moved to Brooklyn in 2015 for cheaper rent and cozier neighborhoods. Living in BK has left me with more than a few questions at times, like:
Aren't There Supposed to Be Closets?
Y’all, they are really out here building rooms and boxing in 2sq ft as a closet. I’ve now lived in two apartments where a “bedroom” had no closet at all. It’s as if they think no one has any suitcases or long clothing that need to be stored.
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Often there is no general purpose closet in the living space. Where are we supposed to put our coats, brooms, or vacuum? There is no easy-pasy-lemon-squeezy solution for tucking away large cleaning supplies in an open room.
What Do Landlords Have Against Medicine Cabinets?
I have a wall of mirror in a bathroom with no cabinets. Not an upper cabinet, not a lower sink vanity, nothing. What gives?
Do Y’all Have Soap Dishes?
Because I don’t. And since moving to Brooklyn I never have. It’s like at an annual convention of landlords they determined that tiling a cut out for hair products and soap was an amenity and that they should never be bothered to glue/screw in a dish.
Does My Landlord Know Maintenance is a Thing?
One of my landlords didn’t have a system for keeping track of requests or informing his handymen what needed to be done. We had a half a dozen email threads going for weeks and no signs of progress. Eventually, I got tired and took matters into my own hands.
Calling on Airtable
Airtable is a cloud-based spreadsheet-database creator and manager. I’ve been using it for years to design and manage a magazine, track important contacts, schedule editorial content, organize gifts and donations etc. This time, I created an app that would let us fill out a form and automatically contact our landlord about what needed to be done and when he could send someone over.
How Airtable Helped Me Manage Work Order Requests In My Apartment
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My first step was to make a table to log the things we had previously asked the LL to do. I made columns for the location and type of request and filled in the details from our exhaustive email chain. I printed this out as check-list of sorts for the maintenance team to refer to when they stopped by
Eventually, I got tired of doing the whole email to manual entry to manual follow-up process. Airtable has an API that allows you to integrate with other tools on the web. So, I connected Airtable to Gmail using web hooks and IFTTT. Now every new row in Airtable automatically emailed our landlord and cc’d the roommates.
Our landlord needed some hand-holding to ensure that things got done. So my next step was to create some kind of feedback loop in the system. I used the service fut.io to help resend this email to our landlord whenever he didn’t follow up. I simply cc’d the right fut.io email address and created an auto-reminder.
Have you been looking for a better way to track DIY projects, ideas, or even maintenance requests at home? I 100% recommend you take a look at Airtable (referral link).
Are you an enoma.co member? I'll be sharing a tutorial on how to build a base that sends emails automatically with my Free Members next month. You can sign up below.
Photo by Brandon Nickerson from Pexels