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, and almost every problem people have with the app comes from bending one of the levels into something it is not.
| Level | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Room | A place in the building | Garage, Loft, Storage unit |
| 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 |
The rule that makes it work#
A bin is a physical container, not a category.
This is the whole discipline, and it is worth being stubborn about. "Camping Gear" works as a bin when it is one specific box on one specific shelf. It stops working the moment it means all camping equipment, wherever it happens to be; because then the bin can no longer answer the only question a bin exists to answer, which is "where do I walk to".
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, which is doing more work than it looks like: in any mixed list (search results, the items view, the declutter queue), the color strip is what tells you which part of the building a result is in, without you having to read anything.
A storage unit across town is a room. So is a car boot, if you keep things there. The model does not care about walls; it cares about "somewhere you go".
Bins#
Every bin has a name, a room, and a location: free text for where in the room it actually is. The location field is the one people skip and then wish they had not, because "Garage" narrows a search to about forty boxes and "Garage · Overhead rack" narrows it to one.
Bins also carry photos, and the cover photo is what makes a shelf of identical containers legible on screen.
Bins you open constantly can be pinned, which sorts them to the top. It is a smaller feature than it looks and it matters more than it looks: the containers you reach for weekly and the ones you have not touched since spring are different kinds of thing, and an alphabetical list treats them identically.
Items#
An item has a name, a description, tags, a barcode, a quantity, and photos of its own. 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 honest answer is: less than you think, and it depends entirely on whether you will ever search for the thing on its own.
- "Box of Christmas baubles" is one item, because you will never look for a single bauble.
- "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 history. The structure is not a commitment, which is the real argument for starting with a rough one and fixing it when it annoys you, rather than designing the right one up front.