The insulation is between the new floor and the ceiling of the level below. The local utility subsidized 2/3 of the cost after an energy audit. Yes, it does get hot up there, 114 F (46 C) recently. But it’s the space we have available for storage.
I have 2 10x10 storage units. I pay $120/mo for each one.
The first is mostly filled with music gear and furnishings from my teaching studio I closed during covid.
The second, which is not fully utilized, houses some furniture and home decor we expect to use in the future, tires for two cars, and seasonal items.
Our home is less than 1000 square feet and has no dry or safe-from-heat storage. Building a garage is not an option.
As long as I’m still gigging I’ll need a space for gear. We’re in the market for a new home, and storage (or space to build storage) is a priority.
Typically I do not. Haven’t for years. Actually, never have had one.
Until now. We’re remodeling the house and much of our furniture had to go into the garage. All the stuff that was in the garage (which BADLY needed to be squared away, sorted through, and organized) recently went into a storage unit.
I am sorting through and organizing that stuff. I won’t have it much longer.
Well said.
This is the central conceit upon which the industry turns.
Folks own something they aren’t using but might re-use in the future, and are willing to pay something to preserve that re-use option versus simply pitching the goods now. The gotcha is that they’re really paying a silly price for that option. For the money they spend storing, they could have pitched the stuff then bought new and better later if the re-use ever materializes. And if the re-use never occurs, they’d have been better off pitching it in the first place before storing it.
As various folks have said upthread, as way to provide truly temporary guaranteed to be time limited storage, seasonal use goods storage, or storage for a bulky hobby or side gig when you live in otherwise small housing, or whatever they’re invaluable.
But keeping stuff “just in case” is a human mental / emotional foible just like the tendency to opioid addiction is. And a whole industry has sprung up to encourage addiction then fleece the addicts.
Once our kids moved out and got their own homes, we moved to a slightly smaller home. In the move and since we’ve RUTHLESSLY went through our every belonging. We gave the kids everything that was theirs - including driving crap out to Colorado. They can either store or dispose of it.
If we are not actively using it, or do not clearly envision using it in the clearly foreseeable future - it goes! We’ve asked our kids what of our stuff they want, and they each compiled a list. Yeah, we have a bunch of what we consider nice (Stickley) furniture, but they all have their own homes furnished to their tastes.
Don’t get me wrong - we still have plenty of stuff. But we derive ongoing enjoyment from only having the stuff we use and/or appreciate, and being able to readily locate anything without digging through clutter.
My parents are both dead, and my estranged brother is still living in the family home due to failure to launch. He and my parents always had collecting/hoarding tendencies, and now I see on Google street view and on satellite view that the family home has become a hoarding nightmare.
I recently went to that government website where you can see if there is some unclaimed cash owing to you from closed accounts or whatever. I ran my and my husband’s name through, and then any other names that occurred to me. I see that there are two or three storage unit places which owe small amounts of cash to my brother, so I now know that he is overflowing into storage unit facilities.
He’s older than me and will probably go before I do, and when he does, I’m going to inherit all that crap. It’s something that keeps me up at night, and I’ve been looking into “we buy hoarder houses” websites that are local to his area. I assume there’s a business I can utilize along the lines of “we buy hoarder storage units” too.
Except for the part about not leaving the kids stuff on your curb so they could drive from Colorado to retrieve it, I totally salute your wise ways here.
I know several people with basements full of stuff that were / are the kid’s possessions, never their own. Said kids now being age 40, successfully launched, etc. WTF? How about “Hey dear kid 'o mine: it’s all going to the curb on bulk collection day next month; that’s the 15th. You can come and get as much or little of it as you want. If not, it’s all gone. Love and kisses, Mom & Dad”
@teelabrown. When the time comes, the hard part may be locating what storage units late brother still had.
Then again, if it’s almost certainly 99% crap you don’t want, that’s not really your problem. The rent will stop being paid when bro stops, and the storage unit company will eventually “foreclose” on the crap and sell it via their own means to pay (some of) the back rent without you ever being involved.
Not aimed specifically at you, but you indirectly bring up something said upthread by several others that simply baffles me.
Somebody dies so next of kin rent a storage unit and fill it with the decedent’s stuff. WTF is that? Pure insanity in my mind.
IMO …
Call a construction disposal service to drop a big open-top dumpster at the house, shovel 100% of the house’s contents sight unseen into the dumpster (or hire day labor to do it) and sell the place.
Nobody in the extended family actually wants any of that stuff. Some folks might want to want some of it, but they’re mostly just being emotionally avoidant about the finality of death, and using paying for a storage unit as a (costly) fig leaf. Even if somebody truly does want something, if they can’t be arsed to come get it within a couple weeks of the death, they’ve proven they don’t want it bad enough to bother lifting a finger. Out it goes.
The USA is awash in cast off housewares and ordinary furniture from bygone eras. Any effort spent to sell ordinary stuff won’t pay you minimum wage. Just dumpsterize it all and move on with your lives.
Yes, some tiny fraction of Americans have truly valuable saleable original art, recognized specialist antiques, etc. But not you, not me, and probably not anyone here on the Dope.
And my strikethrough wasn’t just a rhetorical device. Something being “valuable” in the sense that the decedent paid a lot to buy it long ago it is irrelevant. The fact it was of objectively high quality when new and is still in great condition is irrelevant. What it needs to be is saleable now. IOW someone wants it now and wants it enough to pay real money for it. And those someones are thick enough on the ground that you can find one with only reasonable effort.
E.g. perfectly good pianos are being landfilled every day all over our country because elderly folks are dying with pianos in their parlors yet nobody wants to buy any pianos. The instruments are fine; it’s the market that’s bad. IMO in another 10-15 years the piano disposal bubble will end as the last folks die off who were of the era when every aspirational middle-class house had one.
Hell, even pawing through a large stuff-packed house to find the cash Granny had doubtless squirreled away probably won’t pay minimum wage for the effort. And will be physically daunting and emotionally draining. Why do it?
And that’s before we (circling back to dear Teela’s impending tar baby) consider the difference between dealing with routine elderly lifetime accumulation and psychologically unhealthy hoarding.
I have one. Size, I don’t remember, cost, TFM. It is emptier than it used to be since I got all my used jigsaw puzzles out and donated them. It has a lot of Christmas stuff - ornaments, decorations, a candle “tree” - metal, only used outside - and a rotating, music playing Christmas tree stand suitable for Antiques Roadshow.
If we ever finish cleaning out the garage we might be able to move stuff from storage into it. We have managed to get rid of most of the kids stuff, but neither of them live close enough for it to be practical. The one with a big house has very little stuff with us, the one with a small rental house has most of it, though we did dump some of her riding stuff on her when we drove to visit.
When we do a major renovation, like new carpeting, we rent a Pod to put all the stuff in, but only for a month so that doesn’t count.
I don’t have one but I live in one. In that 1/4 of my basement is dedicated to the storage of my brother’s and SIL’s stuff. I also housed some of my friends’ stuff when they were moving, and my business partner’s stuff when he moved out of state.
My boyfriend has always had one and someone upthread called their an “albatross” and I agree. It’s a never-ending thing to pay for that for the most part you don’t ever visit or see. Boyfriend lost one of his storage units one time when he trusted his brother (who he shared the unit with) to actually pay for it. He didn’t and basically all of the mementos of their dad is gone.
He has another unit, which houses his recording console that used to live in the recording studio he had to vacate when the building got sold. The console won’t fit in his house or my house (doors too small). So now he’s in an endless loop of having to pay for the unit so he can keep the console that he can’t use or set up anywhere, which he could sell, but it’s easier just to pay for the unit (which is not easy) than to make the decision to sell the console.
My business partner also has a storage unit. No idea why. He had one in Ohio and got one when he moved to Georgia 18 years ago. I would not be surprised if he just moved the contents from one place to another and has not touched the thing in 18 years. He probably has large music equipment in his too.
Also - @commasense nice work! 
From what I’ve seen, the storage business puts what’s in the units up for auction, sight unseen, when the rent approaches three months behind. I went to one auction that was called off because rent payments had been made in time.
There are any number of videos on YouTube of people going through units they’ve won at auction.
Thanks. I’m pretty pleased with the level of organization I’ve managed, and hope to expand that to the garage and cellar.
I don’t. I had one for several months when we were renovating the basement and also cleaning out my mom’s apartment. It held some of the stuff i moved from the basement, and some of my mom’s stuff we thought we might use when the renovation was done.
We also filled a dumpster with stuff from the basement. Yeah, some was construction debris. But it was mostly stuff we’d been storing and decided we didn’t need any longer. We cleared out the storage when the basement was ready to move back in.
When we had the place, i met another renter who used it for seasonal stuff. Mostly, they had a unit full of Christmas decorations. I have enough space to keep seasonal stuff in the house, but that seems like an excellent way to live more comfortably in less space.
That being said, i have to disagree with this this:
I mean, if it works for you, great. But i still have a lot of stuff I’ll never use. I have an old, worn Oriental rug that was on my grandparents’ living room floor when my mom was a toddler, and then was on her living room floor. I literally replaced it with a nicer, newer rug, but didn’t want to throw it away for sentimental reasons. And every time i see it, rolled up in the corner of the attic, it reminds me of my mom in a nice way. I suppose my kids will eventually throw it out. Or maybe I’ll have to if we move to a smaller place. But for now, I’m happy i still own it. Same for a bunch of other stuff in the attic.
And when we were cleaning our my mom’s stuff, my sister was really upset at the idea of throwing some of the pieces away. I encouraged her to get a storage unit, even knowing she might never use the stuff, because it lessened the pain of loss. She can afford it.
My brother is actually a hoarder, to a level where it negatively impacts his life. His living room is piled with crap, with just a narrow path to get around it. They haven’t had family over for holidays for years, because they no longer have a place to entertain. My SIL won’t let my brother have friends over at all because she’s embarrassed by the hoard.
But i think a little bit of hoarding is common, and just another irrational human desire, like wanting to wear pretty clothes or eat tasty foods. People attach memories to stuff, and enjoy knowing they have access to things they may never use. So long as it doesn’t break your budget or prevent you from other joys, i don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.
We once lived in a tiny (~800 square feet) house that had very little storage. We rented a small, maybe 5’ x 10’, storage unit to house some of our bigger furniture like a roll-top secretary’s desk that belonged to my grandfather and a large dining room table as well as seasonal stuff like Christmas decor. As soon as we moved to a larger house we got rid of the storage unit.
My in-laws are hoarders and have two large, maybe 15’ or 20’ x 20’, storage units. This is on top of their standard 3 bed / 2 bath house with an outdoor shop, which is of course filled to bursting with junk. They’ve had the storage units for years, probably decades at this point, and have likely paid tens of thousands of dollars in rental fees for them. The stuff in them is useless to anyone, including my in-laws I suspect. But the hoarding instinct is powerful and when they pass on their daughters, all three of which are also hoarders to some degree as well, will have to deal with all that detritus. My wife’s hoarding tendencies are the weakest of the bunch but I’m sure there will be a lot of junk that will be unearthed that she will want to keep. I dread that.
My wife’s sister and her husband were planning on moving from a small trailer in a trailer park to a nice house – a triple-wide, actually – on some land. The property wasn’t ready yet but they went ahead and sold the trailer and moved in with some family, fully expecting the property and house to be finished and ready for move-in in a season or so. In preparation for living in the new house they bought most of a house’s worth of new furniture, put it several storage units, then waited for the new house to be finished.
Which ended up taking like 3 years. By the time they moved into the new place all the once brand new and never used furniture was basically destroyed because they had rented the cheapest storage units they could find, which were not climate controlled. In western, constantly moist Oregon that meant mold and mildew on everything. Some things could be saved, much of it couldn’t. Between the ruined furniture and the storage fees they lost thousands and thousands of dollars.
I have a two-car garage that’s mostly filled with boxes of random junk. I hate it but building up the mental stamina to go out and start organizing all that shit is something I’m finding very difficult to do. That’s definitely on my summer to-do list.
My mom did. Not hugely valuable, but we made a few grand selling her paintings, a few grand just for one hideous print by a famous artist, a few grand for her silver (We sold two sets. One was ugly, uncomfortable to use, very heavy, and very complete. It sold for >10k.) and several hundred for some decent pieces of furniture that were in a style people still buy. Collectively, the kids kept most of the nicer pieces of furniture in more old-fashioned styles.
We also sold some of her old clothes, and my father’s bow-tie collection to a guy who sells used clothing. We gave the more popular books to the library (and brought the old text books to the dump). I put all the rest of her clothes in “donation” boxes, and i bet that her large assortment of lightly-used winter coats found homes, as we did that in November. The rest of her clothes? Probably not.
We did, also, hire a guy to remove everything else from the property. I assume he trashed the vast majority of what he took, but he maintained the polite fiction that he would sell some of it, which made us feel a little better.
First of all, I’m reading this and my brain is listening to this:
I don’t personally rent a storage unit, but (up until a week or so ago), an organization I’m involved with did.
I’m the treasurer for a BSA Venture Crew. Before COVID, someone involved with our crew was also involved with a Cub Scout pack, and they had the idea of the two of us renting one 5X10 storage unit and splitting the cost. It was under $100/month, so it made sense.
Then the company started raising the rent. Again and again. Within 3 years, the cost had more than doubled. We were able to renegotiate back down to $150, but that’s still a lot of money for what we had. And the Cub Scout pack folded, so we were responsible for the entire amount. All of a sudden, it made a lot more sense to buy another trailer to store stuff in rather than keep paying monthly.
My mom and her brother basically did this to their parents house. Their parents had their own stuff, plus the stuff from my mother’s grandparents and even great-grandparents. They took a few items, but a lot of it should have been trashed decades earlier.
When we first moved across the ocean, one of the benefits from the company was space in a storage unit. After 5 years we decided to stay and the company offered to move it all here. As everything was labeled, we had some of it delivered to my in-laws house and some was transferred to our home in Switzerland.
We were there when the stuff was delivered to the in-laws house - I think it was about 5’x5’x5’. We cleaned out the space within 1-2 days, as we found homes for all the electronics which had been put in storage.
Electronics. Wow, there’s another trap.
Pro equipment becomes obsolete more slowly than consumer electronics, but a 20-year old piece of pro gear has probably depreciated to 10% of what it was the day it went into the storage unit. Partly from obsolescence, and also from the fact that the ever-plummeting price of electronics means that a new 2024 example of some gizmo costs barely 1/3rd of what an equivalent new one cost 10 years ago in 2014. So the price of new gear acts as a ceiling on the price of older equivalent gear.
Sure eventually you get to things like ancient Leslie organs or tube amps or whatnot that are so old and so rare that aficionados seek them out. But mainstream quality professional whatevers? Not so much.
^ This.
It’s still cheaper for me to retain the storage unit than to get a larger apartment at this point.
But I’m actually using it - stuff rotates in and out, I’m there typically several times a month. It wasn’t a matter of stick stuff in there and forget it.
It’s might be a matter of not being ready to deal with that part of the death and grieving process.
Not anymore - I sold off a couple collections my late spouse collected. But that was a case of him being a serious collector and truly knowing the value of what he had. And even then he had some things that didn’t turn out to be in demand.
But I didn’t keep that stuff for years and year - I started selling it off within a couple months of his death and I was pretty methodical about it.
Most people stuff a storage unit full of stuff don’t have valuables and don’t get serious about liquidating it. Then again, my terminally ill spouse exhorting me to sell it and get something for my self helped me get moving on that. Not a speck of guilt about unloading all that stuff.
I’m definitely an exception to the general rule. Pretty sure a lot of the units where I’m renting are just filled up and forgotten.