My HomeBox organisation system: setup and labelling

[danielrosehill]

Note: Before somebody points it out, yes, I'm aware that any QR codes photographed here can be scanned / the URLs decoded. I'm happy to take the risk!

I figured that I'd get the 'show and tell' section of the Discussion tab going :-).

I'm conscious of the fact that there's not one right or wrong way to set this up. So this was just my attempt to organise the system in a way that made sense for my home organisation needs.

I started off my creating locations for all of the rooms in the apartment that my wife and I rent:

I also built out my locations tree with some less conventional "locations" just because it made more sense to me to create these as locations rather than assets/items.

For one, I wanted to keep track of the stuff that I'm storing in my car so I added that as a location. I purchase some hardware for clients so I wanted to separate that from my main inventory. Hence I set up a 'for clients' folder.

And finally, I added a location called 'offsite locations'.

These are places like my mom's home, my in-laws etc. Places where I probably have a few things. In this way, I thought I'd get a pretty thorough footprint of where all my belongings are. I figure that the next time I'm there, I'll inventorise what I'm keeping.

The "issue" that attracted me to HomeBox (TBH I've been looking for something like this for years!) was that .. I have lots of things in various boxes. I'm a self-employed communications professional and videography is a big part of my job. That means keeping quite a variety of "stuff" at home (like light fixtures, tripods, adapters, cables, microphones ... you get the idea).

The problem was that after a while it became virtually impossible to find anything. My first step was to catalog all the boxes wherever they were in the house (by 'box' I mean ... anything holdings items ... mostly pieces of storage furniture bought in IKEA):

Then when I figured out where it made sense to put every box ... I simply nested it under the room (location) in HomeBox!

The gruelling part was inventorising all of the items in my home. My wife and I are hoping to buy a place soon and I'm determined to make our next move as seamless as possible. So although I initially just planned on inventorising my business items, I ended up inventorising ... essentially everything we owned (except for perishables).

Fuelled by ... a lot of coffee .. I created locations for all the pieces of storage furniture in the apartment (bookshelves etc). I mostly skipped the landlord's furniture (because I want this system to be transportable). But I occasionally added it without labels.

Here's a shelf on our main bookshelf (the bookshelf is one location nested under our living room and each shelf is a location nested under the bookshelf):

I realised quickly that being able to print labels individually would be quite essential to scaling up my system. So I picked up a Brother QL-700:

I mostly printed the labels individually because I played around a bit with the format. But I settled on the one shown below. As my HomeBox is installed locally, the QR codes (to state the obvious) won't resolve from beyond the LAN. So I added the asset IDs beneath the QR code.

I started off just copying and pasting the QR codes from HomeBox. But eventually I got around to experimenting with the different codes. I noticed that DataMatrix seemed to have better readability when printed at small sizes:

Because I was going the whole nine yards with this, I decided to pick up a cheap standalone barcode scanner

This actually ended up being quite useful. The scanner has a "inventory mode" in which it logs all the URLs. This way I can quickly scan everything in a box and then assign them in HomeBox. There's probably an Android app that can do this. But I have noticed that the dedicated barcode scanner does a better job at scanning codes than the phone (unsurprisingly).

After a lot of hours .... I'm getting close to the end of the project. Because I've committed quite a lot of data, a good backup approach was important. I documented the one I use elsewhere here on Github.

I'm tracking down serial numbers, user manuals and warranties for major appliances (dishwasher, washing machine, etc) and adding them into the system. I'm adding photographs for the more important things.

One nice benefit of this exercise: it's helped me to identify a few duplicate items (it had gotten to the point at which it was easier for me to re-buy cheap things like cables than try to find them!). I created a label called "giveaway" with stuff that I now intend giving away:

So far there's nothing too exciting there. But when I have some more useful things I will be able to get them together and give them to friends/charity/anyone interested:

Finally some more photos showing the system in "action"!

The tech cabinet in my home office with ... lots and lots of boxes:

Some living room storage with labels:

About a week ago:

Shelving / tech storage:

The label format I ended up sticking with: DataMatrix barcode (left) and asset ID (right):

Waiting on waterproof and weatherproof labels. These are placeholders. Finally got the porch in order thanks to this system!

Food jars. My wife is an amazing cook. Instead of labelling jars with contents our plan is to record the info in HomeBox.

I labelled a couple of old backpacks. I wrote the asset ID in permanent marker:

My system is something like this: if I buy anything it goes into this box. Then it gets put in its storage location. I call this one the first entry box!

Lots of sandwich bags like this:

Testing scanning codes on Android:

Mobile site viewed in Android. Looks fine to me!

Gotta go but ... hope that was interesting to someone!