How to inventory a house
April 29, 2023 10:47 PM Subscribe
I am stress organising my house and labelling everything. I don’t need barcodes or RFID but I want to catalogue and lookup about 1-2K of items (I have so much yarn and books) with tags and categories. The App Store is full of wildly varying priced apps and I can’t find decent reviews - should I just diy with Notion or Excel? Is there an app people reliably use?
I have found ravelry a great place to catalogue my yarn stash - especially since you can post pictures with the yarn and quantities. I also have my yarn organized in bins by weight, so if I want to make some socks, I just pull out the bin of sock yarn to dig through. You do have to input everything into ravelry by hand so it definitely takes a lot of time.
posted by ruhroh at 11:16 PM on April 29, 2023
posted by ruhroh at 11:16 PM on April 29, 2023
Hey there. It's not automatic, but I've had a good experience with MYSTUFFPRO which is a basic tagging software where you get control over what categories and hierarchies look like.
Once you have a category and stuff set up, you can really rapidly start to add items to your household. Especially if you're counting or categorizing things that are similar. Ie, I have a category for musical instruments, and music adjacent (record player, etc). Manufacturer--date of purchase--replacement cost--serial number--model number--photo--notes. This is much more in depth than my structure for household furniture where many categories are dropped.
I did it for insurance purposes to find out how much coverage was needed and discovered quickly how much we undervalue our dressers, kitchen supplies, record and video collections, etc!
Good luck.
posted by Khazk at 1:40 AM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
Once you have a category and stuff set up, you can really rapidly start to add items to your household. Especially if you're counting or categorizing things that are similar. Ie, I have a category for musical instruments, and music adjacent (record player, etc). Manufacturer--date of purchase--replacement cost--serial number--model number--photo--notes. This is much more in depth than my structure for household furniture where many categories are dropped.
I did it for insurance purposes to find out how much coverage was needed and discovered quickly how much we undervalue our dressers, kitchen supplies, record and video collections, etc!
Good luck.
posted by Khazk at 1:40 AM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm coming in to say, no, you don't want a spreadsheet like Excel. You want a database. It sounds like Khazk's suggestion of MyStuff is exactly that. The reason is that they make it easier to gets lists of things by various characteristics e. g. Yarn by brand or by color or by fiber.
I would caution you to go small at first. It's very easy to decide after a little while that you should have organized things differently. Probably, you can make changes without re-keying the data, but it's tedious to go back and add a new field to 100 items.
Other general purpose database programs that are not already prepared for any particular purpose are LibreOffice Base, Zoho Creator, and Bubble.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:10 AM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
I would caution you to go small at first. It's very easy to decide after a little while that you should have organized things differently. Probably, you can make changes without re-keying the data, but it's tedious to go back and add a new field to 100 items.
Other general purpose database programs that are not already prepared for any particular purpose are LibreOffice Base, Zoho Creator, and Bubble.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:10 AM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
Can I go back a step and question your premise here? Why are you doing that? It sounds very stressful and awful and not necessary. It sounds bad for mental health... And since you called it "stress organizing", can I be a bossy stranger and suggest you reconsider this project? Respectfully, I suspect this may be a project you should NOT optimize with apps and spreadsheets, but instead probably just abandon.
Is it for insurance reasons? Just walk around and take slow videos of the stuff in each room / drawer etc, and talk about things as you do it. That's way more than most people do for their insurance, so just do that (one hour per room, you can get it done by next weekend), and you'll be ahead of all the rest of us.
Is it an overwhelming amount of ... crafting materials and books? Crafts and reading are supposed to be fun. Maybe just get a ruthless pal to come over, keep you company / encourage you to give 50% of the stuff away, and then see if you can make fun out of the rest of it?
Even as a paid employee, inventory week sucks and is miserable. Doing it unpaid for your own home just seems like a bad way to spend energy.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 5:39 AM on April 30, 2023 [6 favorites]
Is it for insurance reasons? Just walk around and take slow videos of the stuff in each room / drawer etc, and talk about things as you do it. That's way more than most people do for their insurance, so just do that (one hour per room, you can get it done by next weekend), and you'll be ahead of all the rest of us.
Is it an overwhelming amount of ... crafting materials and books? Crafts and reading are supposed to be fun. Maybe just get a ruthless pal to come over, keep you company / encourage you to give 50% of the stuff away, and then see if you can make fun out of the rest of it?
Even as a paid employee, inventory week sucks and is miserable. Doing it unpaid for your own home just seems like a bad way to spend energy.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 5:39 AM on April 30, 2023 [6 favorites]
Stress Organizing might be defined as something you do to relieve stress, not something done under stressful conditions.
When it comes to books, many people want a list of books they own in order to avoid buying duplicates. Personally I use Goodreads to keep my lists but LibraryThing or StoryGraph are also good choices. I agree you don't want to just slap them into a spreadsheet. However, if you do have anything like a spreadsheet with lists, most of the book apps will allow you to import them easily.
posted by soelo at 10:33 AM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
When it comes to books, many people want a list of books they own in order to avoid buying duplicates. Personally I use Goodreads to keep my lists but LibraryThing or StoryGraph are also good choices. I agree you don't want to just slap them into a spreadsheet. However, if you do have anything like a spreadsheet with lists, most of the book apps will allow you to import them easily.
posted by soelo at 10:33 AM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
I just used Notion to catalogue everything in my closet except underwear and socks. I set up a database, added tags that seemed right then amended as I went. I have a small amount of clothes (comparatively) and I could create extra columns for things like repair/alter, for things I've realised I need (work shoes that aren't docs), and so on.
As someone who does the organising as a stress relief method - my child likes to tell me it's my autism - it felt good to accomplish that on a day where I'm out of my meds and about to move and applying for jobs and so on.
In general I like the database qualities of notion, easy to work with and each entry can have notes attached as well, and pictures etc. I wouldn't use it for books just because there are better purpose built things for that (LibraryThing + barcode scanner) and the information needed at a home level is pretty minimal and unchanging. For craft materials I'd use notion, particularly so you can add amount, type, potential project use, notes about the item, and so on. You can add those as columns with tags and links etc. And in notion, if you want, you can fancy it up a fair bit. The phone app + desktop version in web makes it easy to use as well - you could just take photos, add them as database entries, and do the cataloguing and tagging and linking on a desktop fairly easily. I don't think there's a bulk import option for images as discrete database entries but possibly?
So I vote notion, or whatever knowledge management system you're familiar with - much more useful than excel for that. And a separate purpose built app or website for the books.
posted by geek anachronism at 1:26 AM on May 2, 2023
As someone who does the organising as a stress relief method - my child likes to tell me it's my autism - it felt good to accomplish that on a day where I'm out of my meds and about to move and applying for jobs and so on.
In general I like the database qualities of notion, easy to work with and each entry can have notes attached as well, and pictures etc. I wouldn't use it for books just because there are better purpose built things for that (LibraryThing + barcode scanner) and the information needed at a home level is pretty minimal and unchanging. For craft materials I'd use notion, particularly so you can add amount, type, potential project use, notes about the item, and so on. You can add those as columns with tags and links etc. And in notion, if you want, you can fancy it up a fair bit. The phone app + desktop version in web makes it easy to use as well - you could just take photos, add them as database entries, and do the cataloguing and tagging and linking on a desktop fairly easily. I don't think there's a bulk import option for images as discrete database entries but possibly?
So I vote notion, or whatever knowledge management system you're familiar with - much more useful than excel for that. And a separate purpose built app or website for the books.
posted by geek anachronism at 1:26 AM on May 2, 2023
Response by poster: I ended up using none of your suggestions although I did try several. Instead I used the file inventory system of labelling every room with a letter then each storage space with a number and then assigning items to it - my bedroom is now filed away with little stickers on items to tell me where things belong which is genuinely soothing because I literally have a place for everything and other people in my house also know where to put things when they clean my room. I’m tackling our six big shelves this weekend on the same system.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:29 PM on May 30, 2023
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:29 PM on May 30, 2023
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posted by dum spiro spero at 10:51 PM on April 29, 2023