Reading time ~ 5 minutes
Please don’t laugh, or think less of me when I tell you that I’ve been trying to complete a home inventory since 1988.
Yes, you read that right, 1988.
1988 was the year I was married and the first time in my life that I really owned anything of value. Only 22 years old, my husband and I began to amass the stuff that served as proof of our adulthood: tables and chairs, a couch and a desk, side tables and bookshelves. Then there were the grown-up clothes and shoes and accessories that we needed for our grown-up jobs, that we added to our already large collections of clothing that we had worn in college.
In addition to the clothing and furniture there was all of the rest of the stuff you get when you marry & set up housekeeping: pots and pans, dishes and everyday silverware, place settings of china and your “good” silver-plate silverware, books, pictures, TVs, a stereo, a Macintosh SE computer, a VHS recorder, giant speakers, CDs and cassette tapes (remember this was 1988).
Our insurance agent, like all good insurance agents, suggested we complete a home inventory in the event we ever found ourselves needing to make a claim. We didn’t own much of value, but I can recall taking pictures of our most expensive and treasured possessions with my Kodak Tele-Instamatic 608 camera, writing down serial numbers for our electronics and calling it a day.
We downsized from a 1,200 square foot apartment to a condo half that size when we moved to Colorado a few years later. Again, I took some “home inventory” pics of the interior of our home, but I didn’t take steps to document or photograph the contents of our closets, cupboards or storage areas, where we kept most of what we owned. As my husband reminded me today when I mentioned this, photos were expensive to develop and we didn’t have much disposable income at the time because he was in graduate school. To our credit, we did keep bills of sale as proofs of purchase for our most prized possessions: our electronics, our mattress and our cherry entertainment center.
A similar incomplete “inventorying” process repeated itself as we upsized to an 1,800 square foot house, and then a 2,200 square foot house, and then a 3,700 square foot house.
It’s not to say that I didn’t make improvements with respect to inventorying our stuff. While living in the 1,800 square foot house I wrote out in long-hand a full inventory of my prized Longaberger basket collection, which I viewed as a step in the right direction. But again, I neglected to open any closet, cabinet or drawer to photograph its contents, even though I had a nicer camera and given the thousands of baby photographs I took at the time, I could obviously afford film developing.
When we moved into our 2,200 square foot house I took photos of our valuables as I unpacked them. I found those photos a few years back and it was interesting to see the crystal, china and silver that I held dear enough to photograph at the time. We bought a small Sony camcorder during the period we lived in that house and I can remember promising myself to video the entire house, including the interior of every closet, every drawer and every cabinet.
Did I?
No, I did not.
Home inventory forms downloaded from the internet, home inventory programs, and stories from Real Simple magazine that explained exactly how to complete a home inventory got me no closer to completing my home inventory than the purchase of the camcorder had. They only made me feel like more of a failure for not finishing the project.
By the time we moved into our largest home I had all but given up. If I couldn’t inventory the contents of our prior houses it was certainly not going to happen given the increase in square footage and stuff filling up that square footage. A blog posting I wrote on a “snow day” in January of 2011 provides insight into my home inventory experience to that date:
This daunting job has haunted me for twenty-five years or more. I’ve made half-hearted attempts in the past, but never managed more than a stack of photos of our most prized possessions. Today I will start creating a home inventory movie of the rooms and possessions in our home. Following the same advice I give to my clients, I will create a plan, break the plan into small manageable steps and schedule the steps so they actually get done.
I didn’t finish that day, however I did create a document outlining the steps I would take and I videoed the contents of a few rooms, including the contents of some of drawers, closets and cabinets, which I viewed as significant progress.
I’m not sure exactly what got in the way of my completing my home inventory project in 2011, but I’m guessing it was a combination of overwhelm with the scope of the project and the busyness of life that returns when you are no longer snowed in.
“Complete Home Inventory” was added to my project list, where it hung out for about seven years, causing shame whenever I passed it over in favor of completing pretty much any other project.
But here it is, 2019, and I’m proud to say “Complete home inventory” has been crossed off my project list!
What did it take to finally finish it?
In a word, minimalism.
Having a house roughly half the size of my previous house, with fewer and smaller rooms and upwards of 70% less stuff made the process I outlined in 2011 much easier and less overwhelming. As a result I was able to inventory the contents of each room ( including cabinets, drawers and closets! ) in what I considered record-time.
It is hard to express in words how good it feels to have completed this project. A project, that having so much less made so much easier!
Is completing a home inventory on your project list? Can you imagine how owning less might impact your ability to complete the process of documenting what you own? Have you completed a home inventory and would like to share some of your tips for getting it done? I’d love to hear your thoughts. I also welcome any questions you may have.