Before you go too far down the road of creating your own home inventory, I would suggest that you check out the free home inventory program provided by the Insurance Information Institute. The software is called "Know Your Stuff" and here is the opening for the program in a Google search that provides a pretty good description:
"Once you have completed your inventory, it is easy to keep your information up to date. New: Know Your Stuff, Home Inventory 3.0 with Vault 24 secure file..."

You can find this download at http://www.knowyourstuff.org/download.html

Creating your own inventory is intuitive - you name/create a room and then load items with descriptions and images. There are entries for date of purchase, cost of purchase, scanned image of sales receipts, valuation for replacement, and an image of the item. After the inventory is compiled you can print off a copy for your personal records. We burned CDs with the inventory software and the household inventory and have one at our insurance agent's office and copies with our children for safekeeping. Our insurance agent was not aware of this free program until we gave him our copy. He now recommends it to others.

Nice post.