The short version: walk the whole house with your phone on video, narrating room by room — cupboards, drawers, shed included. Photograph the items that move a claim — electronics, jewellery, tools, with serial numbers — and think in categories with rough counts for clothing and kitchenware. Keep receipts, valuations and the video somewhere the disaster can't reach. Then total it against your contents sum-insured; most people discover they're under-insured.
Here's a question worth sitting with for a second: if your house burned down tonight, could you list everything that was in it?
Not the big stuff — the TV, the fridge. Everything. The contents of the kitchen drawers, the linen cupboard, the shed, the wardrobe you haven't fully looked through in years. Because that's exactly what a contents insurance claim asks you to do — produce the list, with some proof — and it asks while you're standing in the wreckage of the worst week of your life, running on memory and adrenaline. Almost nobody can. So they remember maybe half, claim for that, and quietly absorb the rest as the cost of a bad year.
A home inventory is the thing that fixes this in advance. It's not paperwork; it's the difference between a claim that pays what you actually lost and one that pays what you can happen to remember under stress.
Why the claim depends on it
With a contents claim, the burden of proof is essentially on you. The insurer isn't being cruel — they simply can't pay out for things you can't show you owned. No list, no proof, and two things go wrong: you under-claim (you forget a third of it), and often you've under-insured in the first place (you never added it all up, so your sum-insured is a guess that turned out low).
The mistake almost everyone makes is assuming memory plus the insurer's goodwill will cover it. They won't. The inventory is something your present self does for your future self, to be opened on the one day you'll be least able to do it.
How to make one that actually works
The good news: it's an afternoon, not a project, if you do it the lazy-but-effective way.
Walk it, room by room, on video first
Open your phone's camera and walk through the whole house narrating as you go — "lounge: this TV, the soundbar, that's the good rug, here's the bookshelf." Open cupboards, drawers, the wardrobe, the garage, the shed. Talk through what things are and roughly when you got them. A ten-minute video captures more, faster, than an hour of typing — and it timestamps itself as proof you owned it.
Then go back and add stills of the things that matter (below) so each has a clear photo.
Capture the few things that actually move a claim
Don't itemise every fork. Focus on:
- Big-ticket items: electronics, appliances, jewellery, watches, tools, cameras, e-bikes, instruments, art. For these, note make/model and serial numbers where they exist.
- The categories that quietly add up: clothing, linen, kitchenware, books. You won't list each shirt, but you'll badly underestimate "all our clothes" if you don't think in categories with a rough count and value.
- The easily-forgotten: contents of the shed and garage, anything in storage, things you've lent out.
Keep the proof, not just the list
A list is a claim; proof is a paid claim. For the items that matter, hold onto:
- Receipts / tax invoices (proof of purchase and price)
- Photos (the video plus stills)
- Serial numbers for anything that has one
- Valuations for jewellery, art, and collectibles — insurers usually want a current valuation for high-value single items, and may cap unspecified items, so check your policy's per-item limit.
Store it where the fire can't reach it
This is the step people miss: an inventory kept in the house burns with the house. It has to live somewhere the disaster can't touch — off the premises or in the cloud, alongside your other key documents, so it's reachable from a phone while you're standing in a motel car park.
Two minutes that tell you if you're under-insured
Once it's roughly totalled, compare it to your contents sum-insured. Most people find their number is years out of date and well short of replacement cost (and check whether your policy is "new-for-old" or pays depreciated value — it changes the figure you need). Better to learn that now than at claim time.
Take the paper version with you.
One A4 page to fill in by hand — where things are and who to call, never the secrets themselves. We’re building the software version; leave your email and we’ll send you the map now, and one note when it’s ready.
No newsletter, no drip — the map now, one email when it ships. Unsubscribe any time.
The part that lets it rot
Like every household record, an inventory is only as good as how current it is. The new laptop, the engagement ring, the e-bike bought last spring — none of it's in a list you made two years ago, and that's exactly the expensive stuff. The discipline that works isn't an annual re-do nobody does; it's capturing each significant purchase as it happens, when the receipt is in your hand anyway.
You can do that with a folder and a habit. The habit is the hard part.
What we're building for this
This is one of the quiet things Hovenly Papers does for you. You photograph a receipt or warranty once, at purchase, and it files it — so your big purchases become your inventory as you go, instead of being reconstructed from memory after a loss. It holds the proof — receipt, serial, photo — against each item, and it's stored safely off your device, so the record survives the very event you'd need it for.
Papers is in build now. If "could you actually list it all?" landed a bit too close, you can reserve a founding place — no charge until it's in your hands, leave any time. Founding members lock the founding price and help shape what gets built.
This is a practical household guide, not insurance advice. Cover, limits, proof requirements, and whether you're paid new-for-old or depreciated value depend entirely on your policy — read your PDS or ask your insurer. The aim here is simply that, if the worst happens, the list and the proof already exist instead of having to be remembered.