How to Document Your Home Before You Need to Prove It

What actually happens in a claim

After a loss, your insurer asks for a proof of loss. Somewhere in that paperwork is a schedule of personal property: a list of what you lost, item by item, with a value and a purchase date where you can manage it.

Most families sit down at a kitchen table and try to write that list from memory, usually while staying somewhere else in the first days after the loss. Memory is worse at this than anyone expects. People remember the television and forget the tools in the garage. They remember the couch and forget the six years of small purchases that furnished the room around it.

An adjuster isn't trying to trick you. They're working from what you give them. If you give them a thin list, you get a thin number — and nobody ever finds out what was left off.

The method: one room at a time

Don't try to itemize your house. You'll quit in the first bedroom. Instead, walk through each room with your phone and do the same four things.

• One wide shot of the room. Stand in the doorway and photograph the whole space. This is the picture that establishes context — that these things were in this house, arranged like a house someone lived in.
• Open everything. Closets, cabinets, dressers, the pantry, the linen closet. Most of what you own is behind a door, and a closed door photographs as nothing.
• Serial numbers on anything with a plug. Appliances, televisions, computers, tools, lawn equipment, the furnace, the water heater. The label is usually on the back or underside. One photo per label — you don't need to type them out.
• Say what you're looking at. If you shoot video instead of stills, narrate as you walk. Twenty minutes of narration captures detail that would take three hours to type.

What a useful photo shows

Four things, and any photo that has all four is doing its job: the item, clearly enough to identify make and model; its condition, so nobody argues later about wear; the serial or model number where one exists; and enough context that it's recognizably inside your home.

The most common mistake is a beautiful close-up of a watch on a white background. It proves a watch exists somewhere in the world. It doesn't prove it was in your house.

The things everyone forgets

Some categories go missing from almost every list.

• The garage. Tools accumulate over decades and are worth far more than people guess — power tools, hand tools, the ladder, the compressor, the yard equipment.
• Jewelry and watches. These usually have to be scheduled separately on the policy to be covered at full value. While you're photographing them, find out whether yours are scheduled. Many people learn they aren't at the worst possible moment.
• The basement and the attic. Holiday decorations, luggage, the second set of dishes, the furniture that used to be upstairs.
• Clothing. Nobody photographs a closet of ordinary clothes, and a family's wardrobe is often one of the largest line items in a total loss.
• Anything you built. Finished basements, custom shelving, the deck. These sit in a different part of the policy than your belongings, but the photos matter just as much.
• Receipts you already have. Don't hunt for paper. Search your email for order confirmations from the last few years and save the folder — an hour of work that produces dated proof of purchase for a surprising share of what you own.

Where the record has to live

This is where most home inventories fail. A folder of photos on the phone in your pocket is fine. A folder on the computer inside the house you're documenting is not. Neither is a printed binder in the office closet, which is a very well-organized way to burn your evidence along with everything else.

The record has to survive the event it exists for. That means at least one copy outside the building — a drive at a relative's house, a copy in a safe deposit box, or a backup you can reach from a hotel room. Two copies, two buildings. That's the whole rule.

The boring parts the photos don't carry

Write these down in one place, next to the inventory itself and next to the rest of your household paperwork.

• Your policy number and the claims phone number
• Your agent's name and direct line
• Your deductible, and whether you have replacement cost or actual cash value coverage
• Which items are separately scheduled
• The date you last updated the inventory. An inventory from nine years ago describes a house you no longer live in, and an old one is easy to mistake for a current one.

Common questions