Welcome! In this section, these inventory lists are all about your home office. These days, a home office can be anywhere. As long as you have a computer device – whether phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, and an internet connection – you’re in business. And, while you can have a minimalist set-up, you can also go the opposite end of the spectrum and have a room full of books, files, supplies, and more.
This section includes detailed lists of things in your home office to prod your memory as respects items in these areas for your home inventory project. Listed below are the five checklists included in this section:
42 Things in Your Home Office and Library
42 Basic Office Supplies in Your Drawers and Cabinets
42 Binders, Supplies, and Accessories in Your Home Office
42 Paper Supplies in Your Home Office
42 Important Papers in Your Home
Here’s a tip: instead of needing to purchase each home office area checklist individually, click here for the best value – The Complete Book of Lists: Room-by-Room Checklists for Your Household Inventory Project, – $10.00 for all 75 lists!
This all-in-one book of 75 checklists not only includes the “home office,” but also incorporates these other parts of your home:
- Main Areas
- Bedrooms and Bathrooms
- Kitchen
- Laundry, Cleaning, and Storage
- Bonus Areas and Extras
- Holiday
- Garage and Storage
- Garden and Outdoors
Each of these sections includes several home inventory checklists to help you with your project. You’ll have the complete set of home inventory templates at your disposal in one book for easy reference.
Here’s the Backstory…
The idea of creating and sharing these lists of 42 for home inventory purposes came to me while working on my own home inventory project. In 2007, we lost our home in a catastrophic wildfire known as the Witch Fire. Many years later I wrote a series of blog posts on this blog to share our experience with readers. You can read about it beginning here: Any Way the Wind Blows.
During this 10-day crisis in Southern California, more than 1,000,000 people were displaced. At one point there were nine wildfires burning across San Diego County with people not only evacuating from their homes but having to evacuate again from their chosen place of safety. For example, my husband and I evacuated to my parent’s house only to have to evacuate from their house about four hours later.
Once we were allowed to go back to see the burned-out shell of our home about a week later, we met with an insurance claims adjuster on site. He explained to us that we would need to complete a whole-house inventory for our homeowner’s insurance claim on Excel. This exhaustive and overwhelming project took me 9 months to complete working nights and weekends.
When we lost our home in the fire, we thought we lost everything because our home burned to the ground. Two weeks later, we discovered that the firefighters had noticed our filing cabinet and carried it out to safety, moving it to our neighbor’s garage. We were lucky that most of our important papers were filed away in that filing cabinet. We only lost our current bills and records because those weren’t yet filed away. Thank you, firefighters!
This taught me a lesson: we should have a Fly-away Kit as a backup plan! What is a Fly-away Kit? Hop over to this blog post and learn how to create a kit of important papers that you can grab on your way out the door in the event of an emergency.
Getting back to the Lists of 42…
These lists of 42 are checklists of the numerous things in and around a house for home inventory purposes grouped together to total 42 in each space. Choosing 42 items to highlight on each checklist was a conscious decision to “brand” the “4 Two” in the name of my blog! Plus, by limiting each list to 42, it breaks this massive project into more manageable bite-size tasks.
My hope in sharing these lists of 42 with readers is that if you, too, have to undertake such a project, my checklists will help you reach your goal.