🏠 Our Mission

Project Atlas is a purpose-built platform for managing home renovation projects, designed by homeowners who understand the challenges of coordinating complex improvement projects.

Look, after 3 years of homeownership and dealing with everything from "minor" bathroom updates that turned into full gut jobs to tracking down why the previous owner thought routing plumbing through electrical chases was acceptable, I'm convinced the home project management space is fundamentally broken.

⚡ Why We Built Project Atlas

I've tried Trello (too generic), actual Jira (overkill), spreadsheets (please no), and those cutesy home apps built by people who've clearly never spent a weekend installing subfloor. So I created Project Atlas - a platform that treats home improvement like the complex, interconnected system it actually is.

The core value proposition is simple: stop losing track of project context when you're juggling multiple renovation streams, capture tribal knowledge before you forget that weird trick that made the bathroom door hang properly, and make data-driven decisions instead of guessing whether the premium paint was worth it.

🎯 Our Approach

I'm borrowing workflow concepts from enterprise software development but mapping them to the reality of being your own PM, developer, QA tester, and budget holder. Think epic/story/task hierarchies applied to houses, with workflow states that actually matter:

• Someday/Maybe: Backlog of dreams (and that Pinterest board you'll never admit to having)
• Research & Planning: The crucial research phase (where you discover everything costs 3x more than expected)
• Permitted & Ready: Permits and materials sorted (surprisingly satisfying when you finally get here)
• Active Work: Currently destroying something (and questioning all life choices)
• Waiting on External: Blocked by inspectors or deliveries (the most frustrating state)
• Done Done: Including cleanup, because it's not really done until tools are put away

👨‍💻 Meet the Creator

Andrew Foster is the founder and lead developer of Project Atlas. With 10 years of experience as a Solutions Architect in the SaaS industry, I bring deep technical expertise in automation systems, workflow optimization, and user experience design.

The primary users are basically me and people like me - tech professionals who've spent years managing complex software projects but are now staring at their own houses going "why is this so much harder than shipping code?"

We're talking about homeowners in their 30s and 40s who understand the value of good tooling because we've lived through the pain of bad project management at work. But we're discovering that consumer home improvement apps are built like they're still 2010, and enterprise tools assume you have a dedicated project manager instead of trying to remember if you ordered the 2.5" or 3" screws while standing in your basement at 9 PM.

🚀 Development Status

Project Atlas is currently in active development with a focus on creating a domain-specific project management tool that actually understands home renovation workflows. From a technical architecture standpoint, I'm thinking of this as essentially a domain-specific Jira with key workflow modifications that make sense for home projects.

The system will include what I'm calling "dependency hell detection" where the platform actually understands that you can't tile the bathroom floor until the plumbing rough-in passes inspection, and it'll surface those blockers before you order materials. Because we've all been there.