What an inventory will and will not tell you
Estate inventories are wonderfully specific about objects, and almost completely silent about the conditions in which the objects were used.
Inventories are the most quantitative document in a typical estate folder. They count things. They price things. They list things in an order that is sometimes useful and sometimes mysterious. They are also the document people most often want to take at face value.
An inventory will tell you what objects were in a room on the day the inventory was made. It will not tell you who used them, who repaired them, who took them out of the room at night, or whose work they represented. Those questions live in other documents, or in no documents at all.
When I am working with a researcher who is new to inventories, the conversation we have most often is about the distance between the list and the world the list came from. Both matter. They are not the same thing.