About Home Stories
Home Stories is a renovation tracker for iPhone, built and maintained by one person: Robert Jensen, a Danish software developer who renovated a kitchen, a bathroom and an attic before writing a line of it. The app exists because every tool he tried — spreadsheets, Notion, generic project managers — stopped being useful somewhere around week two.
Who writes the guides
Every article on this site is written by Robert Jensen. They are not commissioned, syndicated, or generated on someone else's behalf. The numbers in them come from three sources, and the articles say which: published industry research (cited inline), quoted work from Danish and UK contractors, and direct experience of running the projects above.
Where a figure is a range rather than a number, that is deliberate — renovation costs and durations vary enormously by region, scope and the state of the building. An article that gives you one confident number for "how long a bathroom takes" is guessing.
Why the app exists
A renovation generates three streams of information at once: what you are spending, what still has to happen and in what order, and what the place looked like before you closed the wall. Most people track the first in a spreadsheet, the second in their head, and the third in a camera roll they cannot search. Home Stories keeps all three attached to the same project, which is the only reason any of it stays useful six months later when the insurer asks.
How it is funded
The app is free, and it stays free for the whole job — unlimited projects, tasks, phases, photos and expense logging. There is one optional in-app purchase that unlocks the deeper budget analysis, CSV and PDF export, and task notifications. That single purchase is the entire business model.
There is no subscription, no advertising, no analytics SDK inside the app, and no data sold to anyone. Projects live on your device and sync only to your own iCloud account if you turn that on. The privacy policy spells out the details.
What this site will not do
The guides are here because they are worth reading on their own. They mention the app where it is genuinely the tool for the job and not otherwise — several of them recommend a spreadsheet, a printed checklist, or a competitor if that fits better. If an article ever reads like an advert, it has failed at the thing it was written for.
Get in touch
Corrections, disagreements and bug reports are all welcome, and corrections to published articles are made with a visible updated date. Email [email protected].
The details
- App: Home Stories: Renovation App, iPhone, iOS 17.0 or later
- Developer: Robert Jensen, trading as 12f, Denmark
- Published guides: 30 articles, all written in-house
- Contact: [email protected]
- Elsewhere: robert-jensen.dk, GitHub, App Store
