First: safety and immediate steps
- Only re-enter the property once it's confirmed safe — fire departments and utility companies will tell you when.
- Call your insurer as soon as possible to open a claim; most policies have time limits for reporting a loss.
- If a crime was involved, file a police report — insurers typically require the report number for a theft claim.
- Take steps to prevent further damage if it's safe to do so (covering a broken window, shutting off water) — most policies require "reasonable steps to mitigate further loss," and photograph the damage before you do this.
What the adjuster will actually ask for
Insurance claims are generally evaluated against a "proof of loss" — a formal, itemized statement of what was lost and its value. What supports that statement matters more than how detailed your memory is:
- Photos or video of the damage, room by room, before anything is cleaned up, moved, or thrown away.
- An itemized list of damaged or lost items with estimated replacement values.
- Receipts, if you have them — for high-value items, these carry real weight, but their absence doesn't disqualify a claim.
- Any pre-loss documentation — old photos, videos, or a prior inventory. Even a casual video walkthrough taken for an unrelated reason (moving in, redecorating) can serve as evidence of what existed.
Don't discard damaged items until your adjuster tells you it's fine to — insurers often want to inspect them directly, and photos alone sometimes aren't considered sufficient for higher-value items.
Reconstructing an inventory from nothing
This is the hard case: something happened, you don't have a prior inventory, and you're now trying to remember what an entire room — or house — contained. A few things make this more manageable:
- Work room by room, not by memory of "everything." Stand in the doorway of each room (or where it used to be) and mentally walk it wall by wall — the physical act of scanning a space surfaces more than trying to freely recall a list.
- Check other sources for evidence of what you owned. Old photos and videos (including ones where an item is just in the background), social media posts, credit card and bank statements for purchase history, warranty registrations, and delivery/order confirmation emails.
- Ask anyone who's been in the house. Family, house guests, contractors, even delivery photos left at the door — other people's memory fills gaps yours won't.
- Don't skip low-value categories. Clothing, kitchenware, and linens rarely feel worth itemizing individually, but they add up to real replacement cost and insurers expect to see them.
- Estimate honestly rather than guessing high or low. Use realistic current replacement costs — adjusters will sanity-check numbers that look inflated, and lowballing just shortchanges you.
After the claim: don't repeat this
The single biggest predictor of how smooth a future claim goes is whether an inventory already existed going in. Once this claim is resolved, the highest-leverage thing you can do is not let it happen again — rebuild the inventory as you replace items, and keep it current going forward rather than starting from scratch again next time.
An app built for this makes the difference between "I'll get to it eventually" and it actually staying current — Itemize lets you photograph items as you replace them, auto-fills details from the photo, and organizes everything by room so the next inventory doesn't have to be rebuilt from memory again.