It started with a garage that had, at various points, three tape measures and zero working flashlights. Not because we didn't own the things — because nobody could remember which shelf, which bin, which corner they'd landed in the last time.
The first fix was a spreadsheet. It worked for exactly as long as it took to get tedious, which was about eleven days. Typing "cordless drill, garage, shelf 2" by hand, every time, for every object in a house, is not a system — it's a chore pretending to be one.
So we built the thing we actually wanted: point a camera at a barcode, choose a spot once, and never type the same product name twice. What made it stick wasn't the scanning — it was giving every single thing an actual, specific address inside the house.