How to create a home inventory

Keep track of what you own for insurance, documentation and peace of mind.

I first set up my home inventory spreadsheet as a means to simply document what I had, starting with the big stuff (like furniture and larger appliances), but over time it has evolved into a comprehensive index of my things.

My use cases so far have been:

• Estimating the total value of our home contents, and identifying specific expensive items for insurance purposes
• Tracking serial numbers
• Tagging who owns who between me and my partner (although now we have a child, this feels like a moot point!)
• Noting what’s in our (offsite) storage unit

The true value of a list list this would come into play if we had to replace everything. Obviously that’s something none of us ever want to think about, but perhaps the process would be made 1% less painful by having things documented.

The basic template has the following columns:

• Room (eg. bedroom, kitchen…)
• Type (eg. furniture, appliance, homewares…)
• Item (eg. couch)
• Brand (eg. Adairs)
• Value (eg. $500)
• Description / notes (eg. dark green boucle modular couch, purchased via Facebook Marketplace)

There are two methods for this part:

• In person: walk physically through the space with a notepad or your phone (eg. using the the Voice Memo app, or typing directly into the spreadsheet in Google Sheets)
• From afar: use your memory to imagine walking through each room, or refer to photos

Either way, there are a few tips:

• Start with the big ticket items (like furniture and large appliances), then work your way down to the smaller items (like books or clothing)
• Include approximate values, perhaps highlighting the cell or using an asterisk to denote an estimated value (ie. in case you want to go back and make these more accurate later)
• It’s helpful to group similar items when making a first pass (eg. “Assorted clothing $500” instead of listing each piece of clothing individually)
• As you go through, take photos of the most valuable or sentimental items — if you aren’t physically able to be there, you could use Google to find similar items as placeholder images
• Depending on the size of your house and how much time you have available, you might want to break the task into 1-2 rooms per day (or per week!)
• Remember to update the sheet when you add or remove things 🔄

It’s not essential to have photos, but if you’re an overachiever like me, it’s a nice way to keep a digital record of things for extra piece of mind.

As mentioned, I opted for a Dropbox folder called “What we own” with subfolders:

• What’s in storage
• Furniture
• Homewares
• Appliance warranties
• Invoices and receipts

You might prefer to organise your photos by room, but I found this categorisation made most sense for me.