Former CIA Officer Tackles Genealogical Puzzles and Dead-Ends

A couple of weeks ago, we introduced, four garage “personalities,” and a lot of our readers found themselves exclaiming, “Yes, that’s me!” when we described the Classic and the Whozits and Whatzits garages. One of our readers even reached out to our founders to ask if it was written about them. Sorry, it was not, it was based purely on research.  

For those of you that find yourself staring at a lot of ‘stuff’ every time you venture into your garage, this ARTIcles story is for you.  

What’s In Your Garage? 

When was the last time you took a hard look at what was in your garage? If you had to create a home inventory of the items stashed and stowed away for safe keeping or “someday,” could you? The fact is that our garages often end up being de facto storage units of last (or first!) resort.  

Over 60% of US adults surveyed by Craftsman feel their garage is the most cluttered space in their home, and more than half of the adults surveyed use their garage for DIY projects. While Pods.com found that most garages in the US contain on average $1,800 worth of tools alone! Not to mention countless other items, some of which may be financially valuable or have what we love to call heart value. 

Our co-founder Heather, who lacks a garage in Washington DC, ventured home this summer to uncover the treasures lurking in her father’s garage. Kayaks, canoes, paddles, personal flotation devices, power tools, old signs, a custom-made West Barnstable Table waiting for its next home, and even a car. A car, shocking, we know! 

When asked, Heather’s father said he’d “certainly know what the big things are, I’d know there were two kayaks and a canoe, and one car...would my insurance company believe I had a West Barnstable Table sitting in the garage, probably not.”  

As for the rest of the ‘stuff’ in her dad’s garage, that’s up for debate. Which is not at all what your insurance company wants to hear if you ever need to file a claim if faced with a house fire, flood, or other natural or manmade disaster. 

If you aren’t sure what exactly is in your garage, take a moment this week to create a quick inventory.  

• Start with the big ‘stuff,’ kayaks and cars included; 

• Work your way down to the smaller, less memorable items;  

• Document anything that has financial or heart value.  

Artifcts is a great way to record the stories and values behind all those whozits and whatzits lurking in your garage. You can also use one of the many inventory apps that we featured in last week’s ARTIcles story if you really get on a roll.  

...And Is It Insured? 

Once you know what’s in your garage, take a moment to confirm with your insurance agent that it is in fact all covered by your homeowner’s insurance policy.  

Homeowner’s insurance typically includes coverage for garages, whether attached or detached, as part of the dwelling policy. Coverage for detached garages is typically limited, however, to a percentage—e.g., 10 percent—of the dwelling’s coverage amount, which according to FEMA, may not be enough for valuable contents.  

Ask your agent about any additional riders recommended for particularly valuable items (antique cars, various collections, golf clubs, etc.) to ensure you don’t inadvertently end up with more ‘stuff’ than you have coverage for in your garage. Artifcts makes it easy to quickly and privately share the details of the items with your insurance agent via email or link. It’s a win-win for sure! 

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© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In this era of more frequent and intense extreme weather events, more nomadic lives that send us across state lines and national boundaries, and often an abundance of ‘stuff,’ we have more risk and more at risk than ever before.  

Just think, back in 1994 after the L.A. earthquake, there were more than 19,000 insurance claims filed. That was 30 years ago when the population of L.A. was approximately 3.5 million. The population of L.A. has since boomed to 12.7 million. Imagine the volume of claims from this year’s catastrophic wildfires alone! 

Home inventories offer you a baseline level of peace of mind and practicality. If you have your home and its contents well documented, you’ll be able to proceed more rapidly through the claims process and likely recover more on your claims than without. 

That means if you do nothing else, take a video of each room in your house, and store the video in a private virtual space (and back it up to a second location, too). Now in a worst-case scenario, you have something to go from to prove what you owned to your insurance company.  

Better yet, subscribe to a home inventory app. Modern home inventory apps can take you much further than a baseline inventory and serve different home and life management needs and priorities. Today we’ll introduce a few home inventory apps to illuminate the variety available and offer some insights from professionals who are using these apps to support you through decluttering, downsizing, and moving. 

Before we dive in, for those who are less familiar with Artifcts, you may wonder, how does Artifcts compare with a home inventory app?  

What we built at Artifcts is wholly different from a home inventory app. We are not worried about every spoon, bed sheet, oven, or lamp. Nor are we worried about home maintenance. At Artifcts, we built a warm and engaging experience for the curated items of your life so that you can keep the memories, even if the ‘stuff’ is lost to time, relocation, or mother nature. You can Artifct the value, provenance, and documentation, too, behind your most valuable possessions to support your insurance claims or estate planning processes. And at Artifcts, we’ve made it easy to share and enjoy with friends and family as well as advisors (e.g., insurance, estate planning, financial advisors). 

Examples of Home Inventory Apps

We checked out dozens of home inventory apps designed for private homes to understand the variety of core offerings as well as bells and whistles each offers. For simplicity, we chose four to feature here not as a promotion, but to illustrate why a home inventory app that is best for you may not be the app that is best for me. 

Listed in alphabetical order. 

FairSplit. This home inventory system allows users to manually and/or with AI-support create a personal home inventory. But the ultimate distinguishing feature, in our opinion, is the upgrade available to then use the system’s proprietary options to divide the assets in a home among beneficiaries: Divide Things, Not Families®.  Web-based only.

HomeZada. This home management system integrates inventory, maintenance schedules, financial oversight, and management of remodel budgets into a single platform. It simplifies property management, empowering homeowners to maximize their home’s value and functionality. AI-enabled to provide critical supporting details. App- and web-based.

NAIC Home Inventory App. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) offers this free inventory app for you to create your inventory manually as well as through scanning barcodes for improved accuracy. The NAIC also features disaster preparedness and claims filing advice. App-based only.

Pinventory. This home inventory app offers a unique and extensive collection of reports customized to particular types of objects. Use the system DIY style or hire a Pinventory specialist to create your detailed home inventory. You can also leverage its integration with MaxSold to sell select items. Web-based with a limited-functionality companion app.

How Should You Choose the Right App for You?

Before you select the inventory app for you, here's some advice from our experience: 

• • • Try it out free on the device, or combination of devices, you intend to use it from (e.g., mobile, tablet, desktop computer). If you think you are going to use it mostly on your phone, test it out on the phone, not on your laptop. Not all apps work like the Artifcts app, where we have nearly identical feature sets on the mobile app and website and automatically synchronize your changes on mobile with the desktop version. 
    • Read the reviews and pay attention to changes over time in customer support, cost, and features you care about most. 
    • Pay attention to media storage (i.e., your photos and videos). What is the storage limit? And will that work for you and the items you plan to inventory? What is the cost for additional storage? 
    • Understand the security and privacy of information you upload to the app and how you will be able to share private information with others of your choosing.
    • Learn how you can retrieve (i.e., download) your inventory data if you want to provide a summary report to an advisor or loved one, or if you decide the app is not for you and you want to take your information with you. 
    • Then decide for yourself, “Does this app, at its core, do what I need?” Ignore the bells and whistles. Are your basic needs met?

What the Pros Have to Say About Home Inventory Apps & Working with Clients

We interviewed several experts in move management, moving, and home cleanouts to get their takes on all things personal home inventories. We were curious how often creating a home inventory is a part of the services they provide to their clients and why they choose the apps they do to get the job done.  

MOVE MANAGERS 

Remarkably, at most, the move managers we spoke with create inventories as a service for 20 to 25% of their clients.  

“If our client is preparing to deal with beneficiaries in court for probate or is going through a divorce, that’s when we need an inventory app so we can be more thorough,” said Marty Stevens-Heebner, Founder & CEO of Clear Home Solutions and author of "How to Move Your Parents (and still be on speaking terms). “The reality is, most other clients are satisfied with simple photos and videos that they then save to their personal cloud account.” 

A problem that arises is that for many of us homeowners and renters, even if we do a home inventory, we’re human, and we forget to update it. It is used for some transitory need and never revisited. But the golden rule from an estate planning perspective is to set a reminder to review and update your inventory and the estate plan it’s tied to at least every two years.  

From an insurance perspective, the more often you update your home inventory, the better. Make a habit of updating your inventory with life changes (e.g., marriage, death, inheritance, new baby, move) as well as with any major purchases. Each of those appliances, large home furnishings, collectibles, and the like add up quickly when it comes to replacing them if lost to fire, flood, or otherwise. 

MOVING COMPANIES

Moving and the use of inventory apps are a whole different story. We spoke with Ryan Hegarty, Director of Residential Sales for Olympia Moving, a member company of Wheaton World Wide Moving. Hegarty described inventories as integral to his company's move operations. Every item that comes into company-managed storage, is placed on a truck for inter-state delivery, or is heading overseas is managed through an inventory system. 

“But inventories are also part of our sales and planning process. We schedule virtual calls with potential clients and guide them through creating an app-based video inventory using Yembo,” explained Hegarty.

Using AI, the inventory app allows the Olympia Moving team to provide customers with immediate estimates, too.

“It also provides us with critical information to estimate box counts, dimensions of entry ways, and where we’ll need a ramp. It means a better, more efficient workflow on move day and reduction in surprises for us and the homes we move.” 

HOME CLEANOUTS

Matt Paxton, Founder & CEO of Clutter Cleaner, offered a different view on inventory apps and the home cleanout process. 

“We have to do a full inventory of a home during an estate clean out. We often have multiple family members that live in different states that simply aren’t aware of all of the items in a home. Some of the states that our Clutter Cleaner teams work in, it’s state law to provide a full inventory of assets sold and dispersed during the probate process,” explained Paxton.  

He’s also found that it’s easier to divide the items when a family is aware of what items are in the home.  

“If the family already has a home inventory, it could save them money during the cleanout process. If they don’t, we typically use Fairsplit to help a family get a full inventory before estate settlement. No matter where you are in the process, a home inventory really helps you understand what you have and what you are willing to disperse, sell, and or donate.” 

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We hope this ARTIcles story will inspire you to take a first and then a second step to inventorying your home for greater peace of mind. And if you discover an app or process that works best for you, share with us! We’d love to learn from you: Editor@Artifcts.com.

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© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

We added the garage to our “Around the House, with Artifcts” series for 2025 based on the simple realization that maybe more than any other space in the home, the garage is a true multitasker. 

• • • Garages protect your vehicles. Not only from hailstorms and theft, but from the toll that extreme temperatures take on the materials, too.  

    • Garages store tools of life. This might be lawnmowers and snowblowers. It might also be every hammer, nail, screw, cleaning chemical and paint, and garden tool you can imagine. 

    • Garages offer habit space. For some this is a petite to full-blown home gym, for others a woodworking area, welding corner, or at-home bike shop. 

    • Garages, oh so often, provide spillover storage. Just as new lanes on a highway nearly guarantee more cars will flow through than ever before, the more space you have, the more you fill it. Sometimes this even puts at risk family treasures and heirlooms for lack of anywhere 'else' to store them.

We’ve also enjoyed exploring how this multitasker of a space takes on the personality of its owners and requires creative and safety-minded solutions to keep them functioning in a way that supports us, not frustrates us. Read on!

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Four Garage Personalities 

On full display in any garage is an owner’s priorities, habits, and hobbies, giving the space a personality of its own. We’ve discovered four garage personalities: 

1. 1. 1. The Immaculate. It’s a well-designed, spotless dream. Painted drywall, epoxy or stained concrete floors. Pricey custom shelving. High-def televisions and supporting sound systems. Maybe even artwork and lighted signs. 
      2. The Classic. A garage that houses vehicles and has space for all the essential tools that make a home run. It’s not essential that it even have drywall. It certainly does not rely on custom cabinets when a few shelves or some freestanding cabinets will do the trick. 
      3. The Whozits and Whatzits. Often poorly organized and contained, storing everything from the tools you commonly associate with a garage to all the spillover content of a home. Examples we’ve seen include cooking gear and glassware that fail to fit inside kitchen cabinets, bins of seasonal clothing, and spare luggage. You just might still fit your car in here, but more likely not. 
      4. Converted. Literally or figuratively, you’ve sacrificed the garage for storage, a spare lounge space, or another function. Either way, no car takes refuge there at any time. 

We interviewed Scarlett who lives commuting-distance outside New York City, in a quiet, tree-filled neighborhood. Surely in this neck of the woods, there would be an abundance of home maintenance tools and equipment, such as snowblowers and lawn mowers, as well as toys, like sleds, required for this family of five. We wanted to know, “How do you make it all work in a single-car garage?” 

“Easy! Convert! Our garage is a tiny one car thing at the end of a 90 ft driveway. When we moved in, we quickly figured it would never make sense to park there, so we decommissioned it (shortened the driveway, made a cut out for our cars and extended the lawn), and the garage became storage from the get-go. The garage stored a hodgepodge of camping equipment, bikes, snowblower, sleds etc. Unfortunately, because of the state of the garage, you would not want to store anything you cared about in there. 

The garage was such a decrepit after thought in our lives, purely functional, that the town even planted trees in the park abutting our home to block it from view! Truly an embarrassment.”

Perhaps you can relate. Or perhaps you relate better to one of the other three garage personalities. In either case, read on for coverage of both garage dangers and pro tips for wrangling it into control to meet your needs.

Common Garage Dangers 

Before we go on with tips to help you declutter your garage if it’s not serving your needs, we want to highlight a few of the inherent risks that come with how we tend to use our garage spaces.  

Garages are highly problematic from both safety and preservation lenses. And if you are new to a geographic area and moving from one climate zone to another in particular, you may get caught off guard. 

Batteries. We beg you: only charge batteries when you are there to monitor for potential fires. Keep an extinguisher in the garage. Unplug the charger and disengage any battery from its device—e.g. leaf blower, lawn mower, power drill, etc.—when not in use. And be sure to test the fire alarm in the garage every season. 

Papers, plastics, and fabrics. Non-climate-controlled garages will take a heavy toll on fabrics, papers, and plastics. Such as? Such as the very carboard boxes you’re storing stuff in (bugs love cardboard, too), the plastics in your bike helmets, the glues in your wreaths and holiday ornaments, and delicate family heirlooms and documents.  

Chemicals. How temperature stable are those paints, solvents, insect sprays and more? How long can you store them in your garage and still safely use them? Keeping safety and effectiveness in mind, it may be time to dispose of some, just to be safe. A simple online search will yield recycling guidelines for everything you can imagine and locations or pick up options for disposal. (Psst… this applies to batteries and lightbulbs too!) 

Top Tips to Help You Declutter Your Garage 

That big garage door and attached driveway offer you a huge advantage in decluttering and organizing this particular space, and leads us to tip #1: 

Empty it. Moving everything out of the garage lets you start with a clean slate. It very likely also puts you on the clock since you won’t want to leave your things out overnight. Obviously, know the weather outlook first.  

Check expiration dates. Like spices in your kitchen, check the expiration dates on all chemicals, batteries, and even sports gear—like sports pads, helmets, and spare car seats—and set them aside to recycle, making a list of items you also need to replace. Use painters' tape to attach that list to a wall for all helpers to contribute to. 

Consider your lifestyle and stage. And be honest with yourself, not aspirational. If you have kids, and they have literally outgrown equipment or toys out there, great, set those aside. If you moved on from a hobby or sport or have single-use tools for that one time you dug a fence post, set all of that aside, too.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed or sad to see some things go? Artifcts is here to help. This is the perfect time to snap pics and record the memories of items that help tell your life’s stories. That's what tv host and decluttering expert Matt Paxton did with his son to make room for a home gym in the garage. Read the full story.

Focus first on frequently used items. Grab a pen and paper. You’re going to make a list that everyone in your home (and professionals, if you have hired them) can reference. Visually scan all the ‘stuff’ you store in your garage. What do you use on a daily and/or weekly basis? Keep the timeframe that narrow to now prioritize how those items are displayed, stored, and accessed. 

Great examples of likely high-use items include packing tape, scissors, and utility knife (all commonly used for opening the abundance of packages we receive these days) as well as reusable shopping bags that we hang when emptied and grab as we walk out the door. 

Another great example: bikes. It’s absolutely terrible advice to recommend installing overhead storage racks to hang bikes if you use them frequently, especially if the people using them won’t be able to easily or safely get them down. Instead, use bike hooks that let you fold the bikes flat against the wall for accessibility and a minimal footprint. 

Equally terrible advice: installing peg boards for every tool under the sun when you use four of them on a regular basis. That makes for not only a poor use of space for your regular needs but intense visual clutter, too, which may be hard on some members of your household depending on their organizing styles. If you're familiar with the four organizing styles created by Clutterbug, these peg boards are great for "bees" but painful for "crickets."

Consider “over and under” storage options. Maybe you’ll hang your ladder just feet off the ground, because that then opens up the ground space for storing a high use or maybe very heavy item you want within reach.

Perhaps you need certain other items within reach, but they take up a lot of space. Go vertical with the storage rather than consuming shelves and floor space. Stretch your imagination on how you store what you choose to keep. 

Clear is king. Remember our story about the deinfluencing trend from earlier this year and the man who went on a clear bin buying spree for his garage? He was able to smartly sort, contain, and keep accessible all the components and equipment he needed for his hobby and home life using clear bins and a few wire baskets. You may also want to add labels but be sure to choose labels that you can easily remove if you want to change out what you’re storing. 

Feeling inspired yet? Good luck, and happy Artifcting!

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© 2025 Artifcts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.