📖 6 min read · 🎬 3 min video
How I use Jira to organize home improvements, DIY projects, maintenance, and the household information I know I’ll forget otherwise.
Read the article, watch the quick video walkthrough below, or explore both—whichever works best for you.
I like fixing things, building things, and generally having things in order. Some of those things take five minutes. Others start as a random idea and somehow turn into a project spanning several weeks, a few stores, dozens of work items and, occasionally, more money than originally planned. 😅
Over time, Jira became the place where I keep most of that organized. I use it for home projects, DIY work, repairs and a lightweight inventory of the things around the house. It isn’t particularly complicated, and that’s intentional — I’m much more interested in having a useful history of what I did than in building elaborate workflows for myself.
How my Jira setup works
There are a few Jira spaces where different parts of my personal setup live:
- Home — projects, improvements, maintenance and repairs around the house
- Assets — inventory, locations and asset-related problems
- Personal — things that don’t naturally belong to the house, such as writing these articles or exploring other personal projects
The workflows themselves are fairly simple. As I usually say, the simpler the better. What matters more to me is the way of working and the information stored along the way.
1. From an idea to a finished home project
I’m the type of person who has a million ideas; my problem is finding enough time to implement them all. 😅
Some ideas are much larger than others and need a bit of structure before I start working on them. One example is a pathway I decided to build in the backyard. I’m not particularly good at simply winging it, so what could have been “buy some materials and start digging” first turned into a blueprint and a small project plan.
In simplified form, my process looked like this:
- Create an Epic and the initial work items for planning and preparation.
- Add potential materials and products to Jira Product Discovery while researching stores and alternatives.
- Once the blueprint is ready, turn the plan into concrete next steps and decide what I’m actually buying.
- Track the work, time and related expenses while the project is happening.
At first glance, this might look like a lot of tracking for something I’m doing in my free time. In practice, once the process exists, most of it is simply changing a status, logging some time and occasionally adding a note.
The payoff comes later.
When I look back at the finished project, I don’t just see the pathway. I can see how long the planning took, which materials I considered, what I eventually bought, how much I paid, which Transactions from my Expenses space (article coming soon!) were related to it, and what went right or wrong during the work itself. At the end, the useful parts can also become proper post-project documentation in Confluence.
That history is the part I value most. Jira isn’t useful here because I enjoy moving statuses around — it’s useful because six months later I can still reconstruct how the project actually happened.
I originally tried putting recurring household reminders here too. Things such as watering plants or taking out the trash were scattered between Google Calendar, tasks and reminders. That experiment eventually moved toward Trello instead, but that’s a story for another article. (coming out end of November)
And, of course, a special shout-out to my dad for helping me with the pathway! Jira might have helped me plan and track everything, but it certainly didn't do the actual work. 😄
2. DIY projects — including the ridiculous ones
Not every project around the house is particularly serious.
One of the more fun ones was building a wall frame for my LEGO Speed Champions F1 collection. I had seen similar displays online, bought the cars, and then started debating whether to order a frame or build one myself. Once shipping and the frame itself started looking a bit expensive, the obvious solution was apparently to spend a lot of time in the garage building one. 😄
It ended up being a proper little project:
- 1 JPD idea
- 1 Epic
- 22 child work items
- 8 linked Transactions from the Expenses space
- Around 34 hours logged using native Jira time tracking
- Roughly two months from start to finish
I also turned the finished project into a short video — if you want to see how the whole thing came together:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PDth33jSdCk
Was that level of tracking strictly necessary for a LEGO display? Probably not. But I now know exactly what went into it, how long it took me, and what I’d do differently next time. And, more importantly, I actually finished it.
There are plenty of similar ideas sitting in the backlog, mainly for things inside or around the house. Some will happen. Some will probably stay there for a very long time. I guess Jira can’t help with everything. 😅
3. Jira as my lightweight home inventory
The whole setup actually started with assets.
I had drawers full of receipts and manuals for appliances, electronics and other gadgets that I would probably never need — right until I suddenly needed a warranty, serial number or proof of purchase.
My first thought was naturally to use Assets, but it isn’t available on the Free plan I use for this setup. I tried a Marketplace app for a while and eventually realized that, for my needs, a normal Jira space was sufficient.
With Assets now also available in paid Jira plans, this is something I've been tempted to revisit, especially after Team ’26 Europe.
So, Atlassian, if you're reading this and feel like sponsoring my very serious home asset management initiative with a complimentary Jira Standard subscription, I'd happily migrate everything to Assets. 😅
What I mainly care about is fairly simple information:
- Serial number
- Purchase date
- Store
- Purchase cost
- Warranty information
- Location
- Receipts, manuals or other useful references
It isn’t a full asset-management solution, and I don’t need it to be. The goal is simply that when something happens three years after I bought a device, Future Me has somewhere sensible to look.
4. When something inevitably breaks
This is probably one of the most useful parts of the setup.
Assets break. Things that came with the house break. And, every now and then, something behaves strangely enough that I know I’ve dealt with it before but have absolutely no idea what I did last time.
My memory is approximately that of a goldfish, so I added Bug as a work type and use it for repairs and problems. Whenever possible, the Bug is linked to the related asset.
In Croatia, we have the phrase sam svoj majstor — roughly “be your own repairman.” I quite like that approach, especially for smaller things where YouTube, documentation and now AI can often get me surprisingly far.
There’s nothing particularly sophisticated about this workflow. It simply gives me a history of what broke, what I tried, how I fixed it and whether the repair created any additional expenses.
And the next time the same thing breaks two years later, Future Me has considerably more information than “I vaguely remember fixing this once.”
Would I do it this way again?
Mostly, yes.
Treating larger personal projects as actual projects has helped me finish them. Something that initially looks simple can turn out to be surprisingly complicated once you start researching it — and sometimes the opposite happens. Having a structured place for the plan, decisions and execution has been genuinely useful.
That doesn’t mean the setup is perfect. A lot of it grew organically over several years, so there are places where I’d now consolidate fields, spaces or processes that were created at different times. I’m also careful not to add something to Jira simply because I can. If a different tool fits better, I’d rather use that.
The Free plan brings some practical limits too, particularly storage and automation usage, so attachments and unnecessary complexity are worth keeping an eye on.
The goal was never to turn my home into an enterprise Jira implementation. 😄 It was simply to have one place where projects, repairs and useful household information don’t disappear the moment I stop thinking about them.
Curious to see what other slightly over-engineered things people are using Jira for at home. 😅
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