slightly more than a nitpick: wouldn’t “… it would be a merrier world with ‘fewer’ landfills.” be a bit closer in meaning to Tolkein’s intent?
We put stuff in a self-storage when we had our house on the market. Realtors want to show houses that look like the ones in magazines. We had a lot of stuff (books and such) that expressed our personality but didn’t look much like a magazine layout. Also, apparently it really helps the marketability of a house to keep it from looking cluttered.
The perfect place to store an Ex that you offed, and packed into a barrel. Unless you forget to pay the bill.
George Carlin’s take comes to mind. Stuff. Buy more stuff. Get a bigger place for stuff. Sell stuff. Buy more stuff. Rent a storage space if you haven’t got room for your stuff.
I bought a (new) brass bed and mattress from a guy that uses 3 storage bays as an outlet store. As said, less overhead.
We rent one for (I think) fifty bucks a month. Since our present small house is a rental, we don’t have the option to build any storage of our own. We had combined 2 households, but I’m not sure that is a good enough reason, since the contents are just shifted around and looked at once in awhile.
Our newest pact is to go through all this ‘stuff’ before we move to our own place, and throw away or sell about half of it. sigh We’ll see.
I’ve often wondered the same thing. But, all of the storage places around here lock up at around 6pm. You couldn’t get in or out. That curfew is way to early for me.
In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash*, the protagonist lives in one. 
Now that I think about it, if one were considering living in a self-storage garage, the legality of it would likely not be of great concern.
Need someplace to hide the bodies
I think you mean the Protagonist.