Documenting Your Home Before a Hurricane
Updated September 5, 2026
Before a storm, photograph every room and its contents, record what your most valuable items cost and when you bought them, and store all of it somewhere that survives the house — cloud storage, or a copy sent to someone who lives elsewhere. After a hurricane, insurers ask you to list what you lost, and the list is far harder to write from memory in a hotel room than from a phone the week before.
Atlantic hurricane season runs from June to November, and the busiest stretch is right now. Most storm preparation is about the building — shutters, generators, the things that keep water out. Almost none of it is about the contents, which is what your policy actually covers separately and what an adjuster will ask you to itemise. Here is the part of preparation nobody talks about, and it takes an afternoon.
Why contents are the part people get wrong
After a storm, the structural damage is visible. Someone can stand in your living room and see the roof is gone. What they cannot see is what was under it — the television, the tools in the garage, the clothes, the four years of accumulated things that made it a home. Your policy covers those separately, usually as a percentage of the dwelling coverage, and the burden of proving what they were falls entirely on you.
The afternoon version
If you do nothing else, do this. Walk through every room with your phone recording, opening cupboards and drawers as you go and saying out loud what things are. Then photograph anything worth more than a few hundred dollars on its own, close enough to read the brand and model. That is the minimum viable record, and it takes under an hour in an average house.
The reason video works is that it captures the things you would never think to list — the contents of the linen closet, the boxes in the garage, the small appliances on the counter. A written list captures what you remember. A video captures what was there.
What to photograph properly
- Anything over a few hundred dollars individually — appliances, electronics, tools, instruments
- Model and serial plates, which are usually on the back or underneath and are what an adjuster asks for
- Jewellery, watches, and anything with a valuation certificate, alongside the certificate
- The contents of closets and storage — clothing and linens add up far higher than people expect
- The garage and shed, which are usually the least documented and among the most valuable
- Anything you would struggle to describe from memory a week later
Where the record has to live
This is the part that fails most often. A photo album on a phone that goes underwater is not a record. Neither is a folder of receipts in a filing cabinet in the flooded room, or a hard drive in the office. Whatever you make has to survive the house, which means cloud storage, an app that syncs off the device, or at minimum a copy emailed to someone who lives somewhere else.
Do the same with the documents. Your policy, your policy number, your agent's contact details, and any valuations should be somewhere you can reach them from a phone in a hotel room three states away. People routinely evacuate without them and then cannot start a claim.
Values and dates matter more than you think
A photograph proves you owned something. It does not prove what it was worth. If you can add what you paid and roughly when, do — because most policies settle contents on actual cash value, meaning the depreciated figure rather than what a replacement costs today, and the age of an item is what drives that calculation. Without a date, the adjuster picks one.
If a storm is already close
- Do the video walkthrough now — it takes twenty minutes and it is the highest-value thing left
- Photograph the outside of the house from several angles, which establishes its condition beforehand
- Move what you can somewhere higher and drier, and photograph where you moved it to
- Take your policy documents and any valuations with you, or make sure you can reach them online
- Do not stay to document anything. None of it is worth the risk, and everything here can be reconstructed except you
Afterwards
Photograph the damage before you move or discard anything, including the debris — insurers routinely question claims where damaged property was cleared before it was documented. Keep receipts for temporary repairs and for anywhere you have to stay, since most policies cover both. And file quickly, because after a major storm every adjuster in the state is working the same queue, and the people who filed on day one are further up it.
Doing it with Stowly
Stowly is a free home inventory that keeps all of this in one place — photos, values, purchase dates, receipts and policy documents — and it lives in the cloud rather than on the phone in your pocket. If you ever do have a claim, you can send your adjuster a single read-only link with everything in it, or export an insurance-ready PDF. Cataloguing your whole home is free with unlimited items; attaching receipts and documents, and sharing or exporting your inventory, come with Plus. The only thing it asks is the afternoon, and the best time to spend it is before the forecast gets interesting.