The insurer pays for what you can list
That sentence is the whole reason this page exists.
After a fire or a theft, the claim process is not an argument about what you owned. It is a request for a list, and then a negotiation over the items on that list. Everything you cannot recall is simply not part of the conversation.
What people recall is consistent: the television, the laptop, the sofa. What they forget is also consistent, and it is worth more than what they remember —
- Every small appliance in the kitchen, individually
- The contents of the linen closet
- A garage of power tools, which adds up faster than anything else in a house
- Clothing, which is worth several thousand dollars in most households
- Everything in the loft, the basement and the boxes at the back of the closet
Video first, then the sheet
The most efficient method is not writing.
Walk the house with a phone camera, narrating, and open everything — every cupboard, drawer, wardrobe and closet, plus the garage and any storage. Ten minutes of video captures more than an hour of writing, it timestamps itself, and it is far more persuasive to an adjuster than a typed list.
Then use the printed sheet for what video cannot do: serial numbers, model numbers, purchase dates and values against specific items.
Both together take an afternoon. Neither alone is enough.
Sub-limits are where people get caught
This is the part most people do not know, and it is the most valuable thing on this page.
A contents policy usually has one overall limit — and then separate, much lower caps on specific categories:
| Category | Commonly capped at | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Jewellery (theft) | Often $1,000–$2,500 total | Not per item. Total. |
| Collections, coins, stamps | Own limit | Frequently far below value |
| Cameras, instruments | Own limit | Photographers and musicians are routinely under-covered |
| Firearms | Own limit | Usually low |
| Tools used for business | Own limit or excluded | A working tradesperson’s garage is not general contents |
| Cash | A few hundred dollars | Effectively nominal |
You can be fully insured overall and still recover a fraction of what a category was worth. Anything above a sub-limit needs scheduling separately, usually with an appraisal — which costs money, and is worth it exactly once you know the gap exists.
The totals table at the end of the sheet is for that comparison. Add up each category, then read your declarations page and write the limit beside it.
Replacement cost or actual cash value
Worth checking, because it is often the largest gap in a household’s cover and it is one line on the declarations page.
Replacement cost pays what a new equivalent costs today. Actual cash value pays what your ten-year-old sofa and eight-year-old laptop were worth on the day before the fire — which, for the depreciating things that make up most of a household, is a small fraction of replacing them.
If your policy is actual cash value, the inventory becomes more important rather than less, because the age and purchase price of each item is what the calculation runs on.
Do not list every sock
The reason inventories get abandoned on day three is that people try to itemise clothing.
Count by category: twelve pairs of shoes, four coats, roughly forty shirts. That is a claimable figure and an adjuster will work with it. Itemising a wardrobe is not, and it is where the whole project dies.
Reserve the detailed lines for things with a make, a model and a serial number.
Keep it somewhere else
An inventory stored in the house it documents has helped nobody.
Cloud storage, a copy emailed to yourself, a copy with a relative, or all three. Photographs of the sheets are fine — this is a case where a phone photo of a filled-in page is genuinely as good as the page.
Then update it once a year. The maintenance list has a January line for exactly that, because the natural time is when the policy renews.
Do the garage even if you do nothing else. It is the room with the largest gap between what people estimate and what is actually in it, and tools are the category most often quietly limited by a policy.