Why You Should Do a Home Inventory When Moving House

Moving house is chaotic, but it has one hidden advantage: it is the only time every single thing you own passes through your hands. Everything gets sorted, packed, carried, and unpacked. That makes it the perfect, and most natural, moment to create a home inventory, both to protect your belongings during the move and to set up the years that follow.

This applies the ideas in our complete guide to creating a home inventory to the specific moment of a move.

Key takeaways

• Moving is when your belongings are most exposed to damage and loss, and easiest to document.
• A dated record before the move supports any removalist or transit claim.
• Arriving in a new home is the right time to refresh your contents insurance.
• Documenting as you pack turns a one-off chore into part of the move.

The move itself is a risk

Between the old home and the new one, your belongings are handled more, and by more people, than at any other time. Items get dropped, scratched, crushed, and occasionally lost. If something is damaged in transit and you want to claim, against a removalist or a transit policy, you need to show what condition the item was in beforehand and that you owned it.

A dated record made before the move is exactly that evidence. Without it, a transit claim becomes your word against the removalist's. With it, the condition and existence of the item are documented.

Document while you pack

The packing stage is the ideal time to record an inventory, because you are already touching everything. As you go room by room, you can capture what you own with almost no extra effort, while items are out and visible rather than hidden in cupboards.

This also solves the usual problem of forgetting the long tail, because packing forces you to handle the contents of every drawer, wardrobe, and storage box, the very things people normally leave out of an inventory.

Two records, one move

A move naturally produces value on both sides:

• A record of what you are moving, useful for the removalist, for transit cover, and for checking nothing goes missing between packing and unpacking.
• A record of your contents in the new home, which becomes your baseline inventory going forward.

Reset your insurance for the new home

A new home is a natural trigger to review your cover with your insurer. The spaces are different, and you may have bought or sold items in the process, so a current inventory gives you an up to date figure for what you own at today's prices to take into that conversation. Moving is one of the clearest moments to read up on how underinsurance happens, and it pairs naturally with the annual review habit in how often to update your home inventory. WHIG does not recommend a sum insured.

The easy way to document a move

The last thing you want during a move is a tedious extra task. WHIG keeps it light: as you pack or once you have unpacked, you record a short video walkthrough talking about what is there, and it builds a dated, valued record of your belongings. You get evidence for the move and a ready-made inventory for the new home, without sitting down to a spreadsheet in the middle of the boxes. The values are estimates, not professional valuations, but they give you a documented starting point in your new home. See how WHIG works.