Home Inventory Checklist: What to Catalogue, Room by Room

Updated July 16, 2026

The reason most home inventories never get made is the word "everything." It is an impossible instruction — you cannot start it, so you do not. The fix is to stop thinking about your house and start thinking about one room. Here is what is genuinely worth recording in each one, so you can pick a room, work through it, and be finished with that room forever.

Rooms first, things second

A room is a finishable unit. It has walls, you can see all of it at once, and when you have gone round it you are done. That makes it the only sensible unit of work. Do the kitchen this weekend and the kitchen is handled — you never have to face it again, only add to it. Ten small finishable jobs will get done; one enormous one will not.

The kitchen

• Large appliances — fridge, oven, dishwasher, washing machine
• Small electrics — kettle, toaster, microwave, coffee machine, mixer
• Anything you would call "good" — knives, pans, a stand mixer
• The boring expensive: the extractor, the boiler if it lives here

The living room

• Television, sound system, streaming boxes, consoles
• Sofas and armchairs — usually the single most expensive thing in the house
• Rugs, lamps, and anything that was not cheap
• Art, instruments, and anything with sentimental value

Bedrooms

• The mattress — people forget it and it is expensive
• Wardrobes, bed frames, and dressers
• Jewellery and watches, individually if they are worth it
• Laptops, tablets, and anything else that lives on a bedside table

Garage, shed, and outdoors

This is where the real money hides and where inventories are thinnest. Power tools add up faster than almost anything else in a house, and so does garden equipment — a mower, a strimmer, a pressure washer. Bikes belong here too, and so do the things that are technically outside: furniture, a barbecue, anything in a locked shed that a burglar would find interesting.

The rooms nobody thinks about

The loft, the cupboard under the stairs, the home office, the utility room. These hold two categories of thing: boxed items you have not opened in years, and the practical expensive stuff — a desk chair that cost more than you admit, monitors, a printer, the spare everything. If a room does not feel like a room, it is exactly the one your inventory will be missing.

What to record for each item

• A photograph — this does more work than any field
• What it is, and where it lives
• Roughly what it cost, and roughly when
• The serial number, for anything electronic or expensive
• The receipt, if you still have it

How to know when you are done

You are not aiming to record every fork. A useful test: if it vanished, would you notice, and would you want it replaced? That question quietly excludes most of what is in a house and includes almost everything that matters. When a room contains nothing left that passes that test, that room is finished.

Doing it with Stowly

Stowly is built around rooms for exactly this reason — you work through one at a time, and quick-add lets you enter several items in a row without stopping. Starter templates fill in the usual details for common things, and photos come with every item on the free plan. It runs in any browser, so you can stand in the garage with your phone and catalogue it where it is. Unlimited items and rooms are free, with no credit card.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to record everything I own? No — and trying is why most inventories fail. Record what you would want replaced if it disappeared. That is a much shorter list and it is the one that matters.

Which room should I start with? The one with the most value in it — usually the living room or the garage. If your inventory never gets finished, you will at least have covered the expensive part.

How long does a room take? Fifteen to thirty minutes for most, longer for a garage. The photographs are the slow part, and they are also the part that does the most work later.