Built a wall-mounted family command center that runs the household — a rolling month of meal plans with auto-generated grocery lists, the day’s schedule, rotating family photos, and a self-serve chore board where my sons (9 and 6) check off their own work and watch their allowance grow. Google Sheets doubles as both database and admin panel, so managing the house is as simple as editing a spreadsheet from a phone. Replaced a paid chore app and the “what’s for dinner” text thread with one kiosk, and turned chore consistency from a nightly negotiation into a self-running system.
Context
Our household runs on coordination: two working parents, two boys (9 and 6), school, camps, sports, and the nightly “what’s for dinner” question. We’d tried the app-per-problem approach — a chore tracker on our phones, a meal plan in someone’s head, a grocery list that lived nowhere. The chore app failed for a structural reason: the tracker lived in a parent’s pocket, so the kids could never own their responsibilities. Checking off a chore meant borrowing Mom’s phone. Consistency collapsed.
Family coordination tools are fragmented by design — each behind its own subscription, each modeling one slice of the household, none built for a shared, always-on surface the whole family can see and touch. The information a family actually runs on is small: what’s for dinner, what’s due today, who did what, what it earned. What’s missing isn’t features — it’s a single place where that information lives, visible to everyone, editable by the people in charge, and tappable by a 6-year-old.
Project Info
Date:
2026
Role:
Sole Builder & Dad
Technologies & Tools:
Claude Code (Fable 5) · Next.js 16 · React 19 · Google Sheets & Calendar APIs · Vercel