How to document your home for an insurance claim

A home inventory is a list of what you own, with enough detail attached that somebody who has never been in your house can tell what each thing was. That is the whole idea. The difficulty is not the concept, it is that the list has to exist before anything happens to the house, and there is never an obvious evening to start.

This is a method for doing it in pieces, and for making the pieces count.

Start with the expensive things, not the front door

The instinct is to be systematic: begin at the entrance, work clockwise, record everything. That approach reliably dies in the second room.

Sort by what would be painful to replace instead. In most homes twenty or thirty things carry most of the value — the television, the laptop, the camera, the jewellery, the bicycle, the power tools, the instrument nobody plays any more. Do those properly first. If you never get to the crockery, you will still have the part that matters.

The long tail is worth recording too, but it is worth recording quickly: a line each, a rough figure, no serial numbers. A list that says “kitchen: about forty pieces of everyday crockery and glassware” is worth more than a blank where the kitchen should be.

What one line needs on it

For each thing worth its own entry:

• What it is, in the words you would use to a stranger. “OLED television”, not “the big telly”.
• Make and model. The badge on the front is the make; the model is usually printed somewhere less convenient. Both matter, because “a television” and “an LG OLED55C4” are different amounts of information.
• Serial number, if the thing has one.
• When you got it, at least to the year.
• What you paid, or your best guess clearly marked as a guess.
• Condition, honestly.

That is six short fields, and four of them you can fill in from memory while standing in front of the object.

Photograph the thing, not the room

A wide shot of a living room proves that a living room existed. It does not prove what was in it, because nothing in the frame is legible.

Take the photograph close enough that the badge reads. For anything with a screen, get the model number too. For jewellery, photograph each piece separately against something plain — a sheet of paper works — rather than the whole box at once. Two or three angles is plenty; the goal is identification, not a catalogue shoot.

Room-wide shots are still worth taking, but as context, after the individual photographs, not instead of them.

Where the serial number is hiding

This is the part people give up on, so it is worth being specific. The number is almost always on a printed plate or a sticker, and the manufacturer put it where it would not spoil the design:

• Televisions and monitors — back panel, usually near the input sockets.
• Laptops — underneath. On some, in the operating system’s About screen instead.
• Phones and tablets — in Settings, under About; sometimes on the SIM tray.
• Refrigerators and freezers — inside the door, on the frame, or behind the salad drawer.
• Washing machines and dishwashers — around the door opening, or on the back panel.
• Ovens and cookers — behind or under the door, on the frame.
• Power tools — on the motor housing, moulded or on a silver sticker.
• Bicycles — stamped into the frame under the bottom bracket, where the pedal cranks pass through. Turn the bike over.
• Cameras and lenses — base plate for bodies, barrel or mount for lenses.
• Musical instruments — inside the sound hole on acoustic guitars, on the headstock or neck plate on electrics.

If a thing has no serial number — furniture, most kitchenware, art — then a photograph and a receipt are doing all the identifying work, so those matter more, not less.

Receipts, and what to do without them

Keep the receipt with the record of the thing it bought, not in a folder of receipts. A drawer full of thermal paper sorted by date is not evidence of anything in particular; a photograph of a receipt attached to the entry for the washing machine is.

Thermal receipts fade, sometimes within a year or two. Photograph them while they are still legible. The photograph does not have to be beautiful, it has to be readable.

When there is no receipt, and often there will not be, other paper does similar work: a card or bank statement line, an order confirmation email, a delivery note, a warranty registration, the manual with the model number written in it. Failing all of those, write down where and roughly when you bought it and mark the figure as an estimate. An honest estimate labelled as one is a normal part of a list. A guess presented as a fact is a different thing entirely, and not one you want in a document with your name on it.

Keep it somewhere that is not the house

A record of the contents of a building, stored in that building, has an obvious flaw.

Whatever you use — paper, a spreadsheet, an app — make sure a copy lives somewhere else: a cloud account, an email to yourself, a copy at a relative’s, a printed sheet in a desk at work. Two copies in two places is the whole requirement.

If you are using paper, photograph the filled-in sheets when you finish. That takes a minute and turns a single fragile copy into two.

Keeping it current without it becoming a chore

Once a year is enough for most homes, and the easiest trigger to remember is whatever annual paperwork you already deal with — the renewal notice you receive anyway. Walk the same rooms, add what is new, delete what has gone, and correct the figures that have obviously moved.

The other moment worth a pass is after any large purchase. A five-minute entry made the week the thing arrived, while the box and the receipt are still in the hall, is far better than the one you will try to reconstruct in three years.

What this article deliberately does not cover

How much cover to buy, which policy to choose, what any particular insurer will accept as proof, and what a claim will pay: none of that is here. Those are between you and the company you are insured with, and the answers vary by policy, by country and by the specific thing that happened.

What is here is the part that is the same everywhere: a description, a photograph, a number off a plate and a piece of paper saying what you paid. That record is useful whatever your policy says, and it is useless if it does not exist.

Where to start this evening

Print the room-by-room checklist and do one room. It prompts you for what tends to sit in each one, which turns out to be most of the work — anybody can write “living room” on a sheet of paper; remembering the curtains, the rug and the games console while standing in it is the hard part.

If you would rather the photographs, receipts and serial numbers were held together for you and came out as one document at the end, that is what Roomkeep is.