The thought of going through all of my storage boxes to catalog hundreds or thousands of items so that I might search for them one day via a web UI seems a lot less productive than simply knowing that old USB supplies are in the “USB junk” box and Christmas decorations are in the “Christmas decorations” box
I think it becomes more useful as you accumulate stuff - I get frustrated when my wife buys crap on Amazon that we already have. So while I don’t have the time or energy to sort everything in our house, I am beginning to catalogue things as we buy or find them in the hope it becomes more useful over time to find things we rarely use and/or avoid re-buying excess items
There’s also the insurance angle.
Heaven forbid you have a fire or flood from a water line break. Insurance companies aren’t your friend and will shaft you if they can - I’ve seen it happen with friends.
So now I have an inventory (and pictures). I have about 4x the stuff in my place than the average person in a house this size, so the defaults from insurance would make me lose lots of money. Once they see an exported spreadsheet with counts and dates (plus the pictures), they’ll cut a check and not argue.
Plus the inventory helps me keep track of what I have so I don’t buy it again.
God forbid the poor insurance dude getting the whole list of damaged items ;)
Maybe I’m too poor or too young (or both), but I know exactly where everything in my home is. And if I don’t it’s because I’ve misplaced it, and the program isn’t going to help with that :(
And if I don’t it’s because I’ve misplaced it, and the program isn’t going to help with that :(
In that case it will help you with where it was supposed to be
Thanks for sharing this, I am currently looking into these and so far found Dumb Assets and also partially Warracker which seems to be super active in adding features, but so far is focused mainly on warranties.
Any suggestions for alternatives while we’re at it?
I’m currently using Google Keep (don’t judge) with special title format and gotta move out of there.
I’ve been attempting to test shelf.nu . they have a docker container but not working for me after a bit of tinkering. What made me want to try shelfNU is they sell QR codes you can put on boxes and assign that as an entity and say these items are there so it’s easy to find what’s in what storage container.
That’s nice. I suppose you could do the same by printing a bunch of UUIDs on QR codes and add the UUIDs to the respective location in the system.
What I’m doing is even easier. I use an X-Y coordinate system. I assign a letter to a storage unit, e.g. a Kallax is assigned “A”. Then each bin horizontally is X and each bin vertically is Y in A:X:Y. Then fairly easily I can determine that the third bin on the second shelf is A:3:2. That’s short enough to type in a search field. It’s also easy enough to locate a shelf coming from A:X:Y. If the shelf has only one dimension, like a bunch of drawers, I use just one number. This system is fairly easy to learn and eliminates the need for physically tagging every bin or drawer. Doesn’t work for unstructured storage, like boxes on the floor or other shameful things that we all have. 😄
