Home Inventory

As part of my Month of Organization, I decided to tackle a Home Inventory. This item is near and dear to my heart because I am an insurance adjuster. I have stood in the middle of people's flooded basements or fire ravaged houses and seen every item they own destroyed, its very sad. If I ever am in that situation, however, I want to make sure I am prepared with a documented list of the items I own. So here is what I did:

1. Created a spreadsheet for each room in the home

With Dan's help, we went through each room and listed out all of the items. At first, we focused on big items like appliances and electronics. After that, I tried to list as many of the small items as I could list.

2. Photographed each room

I did a couple photos to show the overall layout of the room. I then took pictures again of the big items and photos of each drawer/cupboard.

3. Focused on valuable or high end items

Once we were done in each room, I did a separate spreadsheet for items like jewelery, higher end electronics, designer purses, etc. Its not like I have a ton of this stuff but I spent extra time photographing and listing these items since they do have a higher value

4. Organized receipts and owner manuals

We don't save every single receipt but we do save them for our more expensive purchases so we went through and organized all receipts and owner's manuals. We also made sure that receipts for jewelry and other important documents were in our safety deposit box

5. Store our Inventory

We loaded the photos and spreadsheet onto the computer but also backed it up onto our External Hard Drive. My plan is to also burn it on a CD and save it in the safety deposit box.


I am glad I decided to focus on this project. God forbid we ever have something happen at our home, I feel like we would be prepared to document and submit a claim for our personal property. My plan is to revisit the Inventory once a year to add items or re-photograph additional purchases.


Here is a good article that I found about doing a Home Inventory:

http://www.mygreathome.com/safety/home_inventory.htm