How to make a probate inventory of a whole house

An estate inventory is the schedule an executor works from: the contents of the house, described well enough that someone who has never been there could identify each thing, with a value against whatever carries one. The same list does a second job for the family — it is the shared record of what has already been decided, so the sorting-out can be split between people without anyone losing track.

What the courts require of you differs by country, and the solicitor or registry handling the estate will tell you which assets must be listed and which need a formal valuation. This guide covers the practical half: getting an accurate, photographed list of a whole house built quickly, in a form you can export when the paperwork asks for it.

Finish one room before you start the next. Create the room as a location — Living Room, Main Bedroom, Garage, Loft — then photograph a shelf, a drawer, or a cupboard at a time. AI drafts an entry for each item it can see, with its own cropped photo, a name, a description, and a category. You confirm what is right and correct what is not.

Photograph first, sort later. The photo is the part of the record you cannot recreate once the house is emptied, and it is what settles questions months afterwards: which of the two dining sets, which lamp, what condition the sideboard was actually in.

Things that are worth little individually can go in as one entry with a quantity — a box of kitchenware, forty paperbacks — so the schedule stays readable. Save the item-by-item detail for what carries value, or meaning.

The inventory only saves the family time if it holds the decisions too. Tags are free-form, so use the words the family actually used — keep, sell, donate, or a person’s name — and search by a tag to pull up everything promised to one person as a single list.

Statuses carry the state of a thing as it moves: mark what is ready to let go, and what needs repair before it could be sold. On Family, everyone sees the same catalogue as it changes, so a decision made in one kitchen is not relitigated a fortnight later by a sibling three cities away.

Put a value on an item as soon as someone knows it — a replacement cost, an auction estimate, what a dealer offered. Anything genuinely valuable is usually appraised properly for probate; the inventory is where that figure lives afterwards, beside the photo it belongs to, and the finished report totals the list.

When the walkthrough is done, export it. The PDF report is the itemised schedule, grouped with locations, values, and totals, and it can carry each item’s main photo beside its details on reports of up to 100 items — or stay text-only for a longer list. The spreadsheet export is the version to hand to a solicitor or an auction house who would rather work in columns. Both are yours to keep after the estate is settled.