Setting up Trellis
You don't move into a house in one day.
Setup takes a few honest minutes. The system learns your family over the weeks after.
It is 9:40 on a Tuesday night. The kids are down. Somewhere on the counter there is a stack of paper schedules, a practice flyer, a school calendar nobody has opened. The real calendar lives in one parent's head, and that parent is tired.
Trellis is the operating system for your household, not one more app to configure. You are not signing up for an hour of data entry. You are giving the system a first, honest picture of your week, and letting it learn the rest as you go.
So start light. Every step in setup is skippable, and nothing is lost by skipping it. After setup ends, Trellis keeps offering the next small step, one at a time, on its own schedule. You are moving in, not filling out a form, and moving in takes a season.
The goal of setup is not completeness. It is a first honest picture of your week.
How Trellis thinks
Three things to know before you start.
The twelve pillars
Trellis organizes household life into twelve pillars. This is the map of the whole house. You will not touch all of them this week, and you are not meant to.
- Who We AreWho you are. What you stand for. The family you're building on purpose.
- Self & SoulThe interior work that holds everything else up. Rest, healing, formation, faith.
- The PartnershipThe marriage. Where everything else lives or dies.
- Raising Your KidsEvery kid, by name. Not a blob called "the kids."
- Time and RhythmsThe calendar that runs your life, instead of the other way around.
- Managing Your MoneyBudget, goals, giving. Where your dollars actually go.
- Running the HomeMeals, chores, inventory, flow.
- Health and WellbeingBody, mind, medical calendar.
- Your PeopleThe community around you.
- Work and PurposeVocation for each adult.
- LegacyWhat gets passed down.
- When It's HardCrisis, conflict, grief, repair.
Cy
Your family's advisor inside Trellis.
His name is Cyrus. Everyone calls him Cy. He knows your family by name, speaks in two to four sentences, and works only from what you have actually put into the system. He is a chief of staff, not a mascot. He notices patterns, puts one light action per pillar in front of you for the Family Meeting, and writes a short read of the week.
More about CyThe walls
The walls are real.
Trellis has real privacy walls, built into the database, not just the screen.
- Each adult has private space. Self and Soul, personal check-ins, a personal memory the other adult cannot read. Not hidden. Cannot.
- Kids get their own view, scoped to what is theirs. A kid sees their chores and what they have earned, not the family finances or a parent's journal.
- Cy respects the walls. What he says in a family space never draws on either adult's private content.
- Households are sealed off from each other, and that isolation is tested before every release.
Your spouse cannot read your private pages. Neither can we design a feature that lets them.
Step zero
Before you start, take the Family Assessment.
The Family Assessment lives on The House We Built. Sixty questions, about fifteen minutes, one parent answering for the household. It returns your family type, one of eight, and the specific patterns your household runs on.
Take it first, then set up Trellis with your results in hand. The assessment tells you which pillars are carrying the most load right now, which is the same question setup quietly asks you.
When you set up, bring what you learned. How the results carry over into Trellis is being finalized, so for now keep your family type and your heaviest pillars in mind as you answer.
The assessment is optional. Trellis works without it. It just makes the first read smarter and the first month more pointed.
The setup
Seven steps, once.
You set up at app.trellis.family. A seven-step wizard runs one time. Here is the whole thing, in order, with what to expect at each step.
Welcome
Just a doorway. Nothing to prepare.
The house
Name your household. This creates your family's space. Do not overthink the name. The Rivera House is plenty.
The adults
Who runs this house. The roles cover real families: Mom, Dad, Stepmom, Stepdad, Guardian, Partner. One parent can do all of setup alone. The other joins later by invite.
The kids
Names and age ranges. You add the kids here. Full kid accounts, with their own view and a PIN, can come later.
Calendar
Connect Google Calendar if you use it. Skippable. Trellis works without it, and you can connect it any time from Settings.
Your week
The step that matters most, and the one to be honest about. Pick whichever of three doors is the least effort.
Tiles
Tap the rhythms that sound like your week. Practice nights, meal patterns, the Sunday reset. The fastest door.
The brain dump
Type or paste one messy paragraph about how your week actually goes. Nobody is grading it. Trellis reads it and pulls out the people, the rhythms, the recurring stuff.
The photo
Snap the calendar on the fridge, the practice flyer, the school PDF. Upload it. Same result.
Cy may ask one follow-up question. One. Then everything Trellis heard comes back as a list of candidates, and you confirm or dismiss each one. Nothing enters your family's system without your yes, and anything you confirm can be undone.
Meet Cy
Setup closes with Cy's first read: a short, specific reading of the actual week you just described, not a canned hello. This is the moment worth waiting for. It is the proof that the few minutes were worth it.
After the wizard
Trellis keeps a quiet setup surface on your home page that always knows the one next step worth taking. Invite your partner. Add the first kid chore. Connect the calendar you skipped. It never nags, and it never blocks the app.
Every step is skippable
Nothing is lost by skipping. The app keeps offering the step later.
Progress saves as you go
Close the tab in the middle of setup and you resume right where you left off.
It works on a phone
The whole thing is built for the parent setting it up at 9:40 at night.
As a couple
One of you can start tonight.
One person can seed the whole system alone, and that is a fine week one. But two spaces only come alive when both adults are in: The Partnership, which is the check-ins and the repair and the weekly rhythm between the two of you, and each adult's own Self and Soul space.
Week one
One parent sets up, dumps the week in, and lets Cy's first read land. Invite the other adult when there is something real to look at.
Week two
Hold your first Family Meeting in Trellis. Cy puts one light action in front of you per pillar. The meeting is the habit that makes everything else compound.
The first season
Moving in takes a season. Not a night.
Setup gave you a first honest picture of this week. The rest fills in a little at a time. The Family Meeting is when it happens, and the home page always holds the one next thing worth adding. You are never doing it all at once.
What fills in, week by week
Money
The budget, the goals, where the dollars actually go. Finance Friday becomes a real habit instead of a someday.
Chores
The kids' chores and what each one earns. The home stops running on one parent's memory.
Rhythms
Morning routines, the evening close, practice nights, the Sunday reset. The week starts to have a shape you chose.
Family meetings
Thirty minutes that hold the whole week. The habit that makes everything else compound.
Your people
The kids by name, the family around you, the birthdays, the prayer list. Nobody gets carried in your head anymore.
By the third month
You can see the whole thing at once. Everything the family is involved in, what it actually takes, the way it all connects. And Cy holds all of it. The more he holds, the more he can actually support you, because the picture he is working from is finally the real one.
Somewhere in there, a quieter thing happens. The two of you start to trust the system, and each other, with it. You stop guessing and start deciding. You feel the difference between a house that is happening to you and a house you are building on purpose, with more structure and more support behind it.
That is the turn. The first few minutes calm the week. The first season builds the house you actually want.
The house was always going to run on a system.
The only question is whether the system is written down.
Not carried in one tired person's head. Written down, where both of you can see it.
Or take the Family Assessment first.