Inspiration A family member once had to file a home insurance claim with no record of what they owned. Watching them scramble to remember every item — from memory — stuck with me. I thought: there has to be a better way. That's where HomeVault started. Just take a photo, and let AI do the rest.
How I built it I built it with Flask on the backend and vanilla JavaScript on the front. The flow is simple — you snap a photo, OpenAI Vision identifies what's in it, and live eBay sold listings put a real price tag on each item. Everything saves to a personal account in SQLite, and you can export a clean PDF report whenever you need it.
Challenges Duplicate detection was the trickiest part — scanning the same room twice shouldn't flood your inventory. I ended up combining image hashing with name and price overlap checks, which worked surprisingly well. I also had to cut video scanning mid-build. It hurt, but dropping it early kept the core experience solid instead of broken.
What I learned Honestly, the biggest lesson wasn't technical — it was about scoping. Knowing what not to build is just as important as knowing what to build. I also learned that empty states and error messages are never "nice to have" — they're the difference between something that feels finished and something that feels broken.
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