One Afternoon of Photos Can Carry Your Whole Claim

After a storm, your insurance company will ask you to list everything you lost. From memory. While you are living it. After Hurricane Ian, that list took our family weeks, and every item we could not prove was a small fight we started from behind. The fix costs one afternoon and the phone already in your pocket: walk the house with the camera running, before any storm has a name.

Why memory is the weakest part of a claim

Contents claims are paid item by item. The adjuster's worksheet wants what it was, roughly when you bought it, and what it was worth. Sit down after a loss and try to list the contents of your own kitchen drawers; most people recall a fraction of what was there. The things you forget are simply not in the claim, and nobody comes looking for them on your behalf.

Photos flip that. A dated picture of a room settles what was in it before anyone has to argue. That is the same principle behind everything we do here: the person with the record has the easier conversation.

The one-afternoon method

1. Film every room, wall by wall

   Stand in each doorway and take a slow video or a wide photo of every wall, floor to ceiling. Narrate if you like; the date stamp does the real work.

2. Open everything

   Cabinets, drawers, closets, the attic, the garage shelves. Closed doors hide most of what a household owns, and the hidden things are the forgotten things.

3. Get the plates and serial numbers

   Close-ups of the model and serial plates on appliances, the air conditioner, the water heater, televisions, and the generator. Serial numbers turn "a TV" into your TV at a stated value.

4. Photograph the paper

   Receipts for big purchases, appraisals for jewelry, and the declarations page (the summary page) of every policy you carry. Paper fades and floods; a photo of it does not.

Where the record must live

Not in the house. An inventory stored only on a laptop on the desk floods with the desk. Pick any one of these and it is enough: cloud storage that backs up your phone automatically, an album emailed to yourself, or a copy shared with a relative outside the storm zone. Two of the three takes five extra minutes.

You are not photographing your things. You are photographing the answers to questions an adjuster has not asked yet.

When to update it

• After any big purchase. New appliance, new furniture, new equipment: one photo of it in place, one of the receipt.
• Once a year. Pick a date you already remember, the start of hurricane season on June 1 works, and rewalk the house.
• When a storm is named. A fresh walkthrough the week before landfall gives you a "day before" record no one can question. The storm playbook has the rest of that week's moves.

If you would rather have the record made professionally, shot to adjuster standard and stored off-site, that is exactly what our property record service does. And if the storm has already happened, start with the first 72 hours checklist instead; the inventory you make today still helps with everything the storm did not touch.