Twelve identical bins on a steel shelf. Open the right one first.
These opaque plastic bins keep a garage tidy and tell you nothing about what is inside. Give each one a photo, and the tools are back within reach.
Bin by Bin is a home inventory app for iPhone, Android and the web, now in beta.
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Tidy and legible are different things
You bought matching bins so the shelf would look uniform. Now every one of them has to be opened to find out what is in it.
It is always the last place you look
You open every cabinet, bin and tool chest until the item is found an hour later.
A storage unit bills monthly for the forgetting
A unit whose contents you cannot list is a recurring charge in exchange for uncertainty.
Setting it up
A room per space
Garage, basement, attic. Rooms are color-coded, so a mixed list still tells you which part of the building a thing is in at a glance.
A bin per physical bin
Resist the urge to make categories. The model works because a bin in the app is a box you can put your hands on; the location field is where that box physically sits.
Give every bin a cover photo
A cover photo is what makes a bin recognizable before you read anything. Switch the list to photo grid and the shelf is legible at a glance.
Pin the ones you open weekly
Pinned bins sort to the top. Most garages have four bins in constant use and thirty in deep storage, and the app should not pretend those are the same thing.
What you’d lean on
Photo grid
Bins as cover photos, grouped by room with collapsible headings. Names stay under each one, because two bins in the same room can photograph almost identically.
Free-text locations
“Overhead rack”, “floor rack by the door”, “aisle 4, third shelf”. Structure where structure helps, plain English where it does not.
Declutter queue
Flag things to recycle, sell or donate as you come across them, and deal with the pile when you have an afternoon rather than losing the thought.
A storage unit is a building with its own address
An off-site storage unit is organized almost exactly like your garage. The one decision is whether it counts as its own home, and the test is simple: if it has a different address, make it one.
Inside that unit, organize items the same way you would in the garage: divide the unit into aisles or zones, treat each aisle or zone like a room, give every box its own bin record, and label each box with its exact aisle and shelf location.
Questions
- Do I still have to label the physical bins?
- Minimally, yes. Something on the outside has to match the bin name in the app, or you are back to opening boxes. A number written on tape is enough; the app carries the meaning, the label only carries the pointer.
- How many bins can it handle?
- There is no fixed limit. Bins group under collapsible room headings and sort by room, with pinned bins on top, then by name.
- Can two people share one inventory?
- Not today. An inventory belongs to one account. You can sign in to that account on more than one device, and everything syncs between them, but there are no separate logins for separate people.
- What if my bins are already full and I do not want to empty them?
- Photograph them at the next moment they are open for another reason. Doing a special pass over a full garage is a project that gets abandoned around bin six; catching each bin opportunistically finishes eventually and costs nothing.
How it works, in the user guide
Start with one bin.
The whole house is a daunting project. Document one bin, then one shelf, then one room.
Tell us iPhone or Android. You get a TestFlight or Android test invite back, usually within a day. Or write to support@enjoixlabs.com.