After a storm, an adjuster will ask what you owned. The honest answer, “what I can remember,” rarely matches the items a kitchen actually contained. A home inventory converts memory into a list the carrier can work from.
An inventory supports the claim. It does not guarantee a payout or change what the policy covers. It makes the process faster and reduces the disputes about what was in the room.
Start with the phone you already carry
The fastest inventory is a video walk-through of the home. Open every closet, every drawer, every cabinet. Narrate as you go: “master closet, left side, three winter coats.” A slow video covers more ground than a still-photo session and captures details you would never photograph individually.
Photographs matter for the items that would be hardest to replace: electronics with serial numbers, jewelry, tools, collectibles, and anything with a receipt. For those, capture the serial number and the receipt together in one frame where possible.
Room by room, in priority order
Do not inventory the whole house at once. Start where the value is densest. For most homes that is the kitchen and the primary bedroom. Then the garage and workshops, where tools and equipment are expensive and easy to forget.
For each room:
- Wide shots or video of the entire space
- Close-ups of the expensive or hard-to-replace items
- Serial numbers on electronics and appliances
- Receipts and appraisals for valuable items
- Model numbers for anything you would replace with the same unit
Fifteen minutes per room is realistic. A whole home can be documented in an afternoon, including the time it takes to open drawers.
Keep the inventory where the storm cannot reach it
An inventory stored in the home it describes is useless the night a tornado takes the roof. Store the record off-site or in cloud storage, not on a device that lives in the same building as the items.
Options that work:
- Cloud storage attached to your photo library
- A flash drive at a relative’s home or a safe deposit box
- Emailing the files to yourself
Tie the inventory to your policy review
An inventory has a second use beyond claims. It shows you what you own in dollar terms, which is the input a coverage review needs. Personal property limits on a standard policy are often set as a percentage of the dwelling limit, and families with dense electronics, tools, or collectibles may find that percentage no longer fits what the rooms actually hold [5].
Bring the inventory to your renewal review. The same list that supports a claim supports the conversation about whether your personal property limit is still the right number.
Ashford note: An inventory supports a claim but does not determine coverage. What is covered, and at what limit, is governed by your policy terms. Ashford can review your personal property limits against what you actually own.