Why we built this.

The will took an afternoon. The house took eleven months.

When my father died, the legal part was handled. He had a will, an attorney, and a folder in the filing cabinet labelled exactly what you'd hope it would be labelled. The house and the accounts went where he wanted them to go, and none of us had to guess.

Then we opened the garage.

Nine hundred square feet of a man's life, and not one line of instruction about any of it. The tools he'd bought the year I was born. A coffee can of screws he would not let anyone throw away. A box marked PHOTOS — MISC in his handwriting. My sister remembered him promising her the workbench. I remembered him promising it to me. We were both certain, and we were both being honest, and for a while that was the worst part of the whole year.

We got through it. Most families do. But we lost something in those months that we didn't need to lose, and we threw away things we'd give a great deal to have back — because nobody knew what they were, or who they'd been meant for, or why he'd kept them at all.

What we needed didn't exist. Not a will — he had one of those. Something simpler and much smaller: a record of the ordinary things, with a name beside each one, and a few sentences in his voice about where they came from. Something he could have built himself on a quiet evening, one drawer at a time, without a lawyer and without a legal pad and without anyone making him feel like he was running out of time.

So we built it. As U Wish records every belonging in your home, lets you decide who receives each one, keeps the story attached in your own voice, and then prints a document your attorney can attach to your will — so a decision you made calmly, in your own kitchen, is the decision that actually holds.

My father would have done this. Nobody ever asked him to.

— Founder, As U Wish