How to Do a Home Inventory Before Moving House

Moving house is the only occasion when you physically touch every item you own. You pull it out of a cupboard, wrap it, put it in a box, and carry it out of the door. That handling is exactly what a home inventory requires, which makes a move the single most efficient moment to build one. Instead of treating the inventory as extra work on top of packing, you fold it into the packing you were already doing and come out the other side with a complete, valued, photographed record of your belongings.

Beyond the long-term benefit of an inventory, cataloguing before a move solves several immediate, money-related problems: proving the condition of items before they go in a lorry, getting a rental deposit back, declaring high-value goods to your movers, knowing which box holds what, and confirming that everything that left the old place arrived at the new one. This guide walks through all of it in order.

Why catalogue before you pack, not after

Once items are in boxes and boxes are in a lorry, they are effectively invisible until you unpack them, sometimes weeks later. If something is damaged or missing, you will struggle to prove what condition it was in beforehand or even that it existed. Documenting as you pack means every claim you might ever need to make, against a mover, a landlord, or an insurer, is backed by dated evidence you captured at the right moment.

Step 1: Set up rooms and boxes before you start

Structure first. In Home Inventory, create a room for each room in your current home, then treat each packing box as a container within that room. Because containers can be nested, a box of kitchen electricals lives inside the kitchen, and its contents live inside the box. Number your physical boxes and give each one a matching container in the app, so box 14 in the app is box 14 on the floor. This single habit is what makes post-move reconciliation painless.

1. Create a container for every box and number it physically and in the app.
2. Assign each box to the room it is being packed from.
3. As you pack an item, add it to that box's container and photograph it.
4. Scan barcodes on electronics and packaged goods to log them quickly.
5. Note anything fragile or high-value so you can flag it to the movers.

Step 2: Take condition photos before anything moves

Condition photos are your protection against two separate parties: the movers who might damage something in transit, and, if you rent, the landlord deciding whether to return your deposit. Photograph valuable and fragile items from multiple angles, capturing existing scratches or wear so nobody can later claim pre-existing damage is new. For furniture, get close-ups of corners, legs, and surfaces.

If you are a tenant, also photograph the property itself at the point of moving out: walls, floors, fittings, and appliances, in the same rooms your inventory already covers. Attaching these condition photos to the relevant entries in Home Inventory keeps the evidence dated and organised, which is far more persuasive than a loose camera roll if a deposit dispute arises.

What deposit disputes usually turn on

Most deposit disagreements come down to whether damage was there before you left. A dated, item-by-item photo set removes the ambiguity. Focus especially on the areas landlords scrutinise: carpets, walls, kitchen surfaces, bathroom sealant, and any furniture that came with the property.

Step 3: Identify and declare high-value items

Movers and transit insurance often treat high-value goods differently, sometimes requiring you to declare them separately, and sometimes excluding certain categories unless specifically listed. Jewellery, watches, art, electronics, and musical instruments are the usual suspects. Before the move, pull a list of everything above a meaningful value threshold and confirm with your mover and your insurer how each is covered in transit.

• Jewellery, watches, and precious metals
• Laptops, cameras, and other portable electronics
• Artwork, antiques, and collectables
• Musical instruments
• Important documents, which are often best transported personally rather than in the lorry

For genuinely irreplaceable or high-value small items, consider carrying them yourself. For everything staying with the movers, having depreciation-aware value estimates already recorded means you can state a defensible figure if you ever need to claim, rather than guessing under pressure.

Step 4: Track boxes in and out of the lorry

The moment of greatest risk for loss is the load and unload. Boxes get left behind, mixed with another job, or simply miscounted. Because every box is a numbered container in your inventory, you can produce a simple list of all boxes and tick them off as they go onto the lorry, then again as they come off at the destination. A CSV export gives you a clean, printable manifest to hand to the movers or keep on your phone.

Step 5: Reconcile everything after the move

Reconciliation is where the preparation pays off. As you unpack each box, open its container in the app and confirm the contents match. Anything missing shows up immediately, while the trail is still fresh and the mover is still contactable, rather than weeks later when it is your word against theirs. Any transit damage can be photographed against the condition photos you took before the move, giving you a clear before-and-after for a claim.

1. Unpack one box at a time and check it against its container in the app.
2. Mark any missing item and raise it with the mover promptly.
3. Photograph any new damage and compare it to your pre-move condition photos.
4. Once confirmed, reassign the item from the box to its new room.
5. Delete the empty box containers as you finish, leaving a clean inventory of the new home.

Step 6: Update your inventory for the new home

Once you have unpacked, your box-based structure naturally becomes a room-based inventory of your new home. Reassign items from their transit boxes into the rooms they now live in, and you are left with an up-to-date inventory without any extra effort. This is also the ideal moment to review your contents insurance: a new property may have a different sum insured, different security, and different risk, so confirm your cover fits the new address with your insurer.

Round it off by exporting a fresh insurance-ready PDF and CSV and storing copies somewhere outside the home. You have now converted the chaos of a move into one of the most valuable documents a household can own, with almost no work beyond the packing you had to do anyway.

Home Inventory AI

Catalogue as you pack with a private, offline inventory app that tracks every box, photo, and value on your device.

Get it onGoogle Play

For the bigger picture on protecting your belongings, see our complete home inventory guide for insurance and our guide to documenting your home for insurance. You can also work through the home inventory checklist tool so no room is missed, and view the app at Home Inventory.