It Just Takes a Minute

Our living room, complete with kid. I couldn't QUITE get up the nerve to show you the laundry-strewn bed!

I was inspired by a fairly traumatic post on Young House Love to tackle a project that I’ve been putting off for a while: creating an inventory of our home contents in case of emergency or another break-in.

I don’t know what was different- that I had the camera sitting on the desk recharging, that my son’s guitar teacher was here so I couldn’t veg out on the couch or if I was just extra-motivated at the end of a long week. But in any case, I grabbed my camera and set about taking photos of everything in our home: pieces of furniture, pictures on the wall, contents of cupboards…I even took pictures of our DVD collections and our dishes!

The project didn’t take too long either- about 20 minutes, start to finish, with another 20 minutes to upload the photos to my Dropbox account. Granted, we have an 1,000 square foot apartment, with only five rooms, not counting the kitchen or bathroom. And I have to admit that I didn’t bother straightening anything before hand either- the insurance company will get an eyeful of our clean laundry waiting to be folded. But the important thing is that the pictures are taken and if something does end up happening, we at least have a visual record of what we need to try to replace- along with pictures to prove it.

Sure, it may be better to have a room by room, written inventory of all our possessions, complete with receipts. I haven’t seemed to be able to get around to creating one though, in the past 4 years of telling myself I need to do so. I’ve been a rapid follower of Unclutter’s A Thing A Day forum for about 6 months now and I’ve been strongly inspired by the idea that sometimes it’s just enough to get started.

One foot in front of the other, one thing at a time. Just do the next thing on the list, and it will all get done!

What have you been putting off?