Rooms, bins and items
The three-level model everything else is built on, and how to pick levels that hold up.
Everything in Bin by Bin sits in a three-level hierarchy.
| Level | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Room | A place in the building | Garage, Attic, Basement |
| Bin | A container you can put your hands on | Camping Gear, Tool Chest, Spice Rack |
| Item | A thing inside that container | Two-burner stove, 10mm socket |
That is the whole model for one building. If you keep things in two, there is one level above Room: see More than one home.
The rule that makes it work#
A bin is a physical container, not a category.
This is the whole discipline, and it is worth sticking to. "Camping Gear" works as a bin when it is one specific box on one specific shelf.
If you find yourself wanting a category that spans containers, you want tags, not a bin.
Rooms#
A room is where a container lives. Each one carries a color, so in any mixed list (search results, the items view, the declutter queue) you can see which part of the building a result is in without reading anything.
A car trunk is a room, if you keep things there. A second building at a different address, a cabin or a storage unit across town, should be considered a new home.
Bins#
Every bin has a name, a room, and a location: free text for where in the room it actually is. It is worth filling in, because "Garage" narrows a search to about twenty boxes and "Garage · Overhead rack" narrows it to one.
Bins also carry photos, and the cover photo is what tells a shelf of identical containers apart.
Bins you open constantly can be pinned, which floats them to the top of their room.
Items#
An item has a name, a description, tags, a barcode, a quantity, and its own photos. It can also carry a loan, a date reminder, and a declutter flag: those are covered in Loans and reminders and Stock and decluttering.
There is no field for monetary value or serial number. If you want either in the record, put it in the description or a tag; both are free text and both come out in the CSV export, but nothing totals or tracks them as numbers.
How granular should an item be?#
The answer is: less than you think. It depends on whether you will ever search for the thing on its own.
- "Box of Christmas ornaments" is one item, because you will never look for a single ornament.
- "Impact driver" is its own item, because you will absolutely look for it, and because it is the kind of thing that gets lent out.
A useful test: if you would not be annoyed to find it missing, it does not need its own row.
Changing your mind later#
Items move between bins, bins move between rooms, and everything can be renamed without losing photos or the items inside. Start with a rough structure and fix it when it annoys you.