Short answer. Presumptively yes. Possession of the house carries with it possession of the movables inside, so you do not have to prove your hold on each chair and appliance separately. But it is only a presumption, and anyone who shows a particular item should be excluded defeats it.
What the law says
The possession of real property presumes that of the movables therein, so long as it is not shown or proved that they should be excluded.
Civil Code, Article 542 — Possession of Immovable Includes Movables. Read the full provision →
What the presumption spares you from proving
The practical work of Article 542 is evidentiary. Without it, a person claiming possession of a furnished house would have to establish, item by item, that he also held the beds, the refrigerator, the tools in the garage. The article collapses that into one act of proof: show possession of the immovable, and possession of the movables inside it follows. It matters most in the disputes where the contents are the real fight — an ejectment case where the contents were left behind, an estate where the house passed to one heir and nobody wrote down what was in it, a levy where the sheriff must decide what he is looking at.
Possession is not ownership
The presumption tells you who holds the movables. It does not tell you who owns them. A tenant possesses the landlord's built-in stove; a caretaker possesses everything in a house he owns no part of. When the question is title rather than control, the presumption gets you only as far as the starting line — possession is one of the facts an ownership claim is built on, not a substitute for it. Readers who expect this article to settle who the sofa belongs to are asking it to do work it was never drafted for.
How the presumption is defeated
The article is expressly conditional: it holds so long as it is not shown or proved that they should be excluded. Exclusion is proved by ordinary evidence about the particular thing. A receipt or delivery record in a third party's name, a written inventory annexed to a lease, a chattel mortgage, a rental agreement over the appliance, testimony that the item was merely stored there — each is directed at one object and, if believed, lifts that object out of the presumption while leaving the rest of the contents inside it. Nothing about the exclusion has to be dramatic; it just has to be about the specific item.
What to do before the contents are moved
Because everything turns on what was inside and whose it was, the record is best made while the house is still as you found it. A dated inventory with photographs, taken in the presence of someone who can later confirm it, is the single most useful document in this class of dispute, and it is worth making even when relations are still cordial. Where items belong to someone other than the occupant, the paper that says so — the invoice, the lease schedule, the storage arrangement — should be kept with that person and not left in the house it describes.