Home Inventory

Written before you need it

The difficulty with an insurance claim is not the form. It is that nobody can list the contents of their own house from memory, and the moment you need to is the worst moment to try.

Serial numbers are the column that matters

Item, room and value are what people expect. The serial or model column is the one that settles a claim, and it is the one that cannot be reconstructed after the fact.

How to fill it in

One room at a time, with the header label set to that room. Four pages in a download covers most houses. Photograph the finished sheets and keep a copy somewhere that is not the house.

What goes in each column

• Item — specific enough to identify: make and model, not "TV".
• Room — where it normally lives, which is how a loss adjuster will walk the house.
• Serial / model — photograph the plate if it is long. This is the column that settles a claim.
• Bought — month and year is enough; it sets depreciation.
• Value — what it would cost to replace today, not what you paid.

Printing it

Choose A4 or US Letter before you download and the table is laid out to fit that sheet — column widths are shares of the page, not fixed millimetres, so nothing is cut off at the right-hand edge. Alternate row shading can be turned off if you are photocopying in black and white, where a pale tint sometimes reproduces as a muddy grey. If you need more than one page, set the page count before downloading rather than printing the same PDF twice; the pages are then numbered, which matters the moment two of them get separated.