Personal Storage

Are you nervous about leaving your items away from home?

Table Of Contents
  1. Decluttering
  2. Seasonal
  3. Yard & Garage Sale’s
  4. Spring Cleaning

Do you think you’re ready to move your belongings into a storage unit? Are you nervous about leaving your items away from home? If you need clarity about some things our storage tips are available to you to get the clarity you desire.

Decluttering

As you look around your house, you realize that you have accumulated more than will fit into the square footage available in your home. It may be that you cannot abide junk and regularly rid your home of worn out items and things no one wants anymore. Still, you see that too many things are cluttering your home and hiding its style and pizzazz. You decide to rent a self storage unit. It will allow you to rotate your treasures in and out of your house at the whim of your inner design guru.  Now comes the hard part. What should stay and what should be tucked away in your self storage unit?

Keepers

  • Hold onto clothes that are in season and that you wear regularly.
  • Keep at home practical items in regular use like silverware, towels, bedding and soap dishes.
  • Retain often used furniture.
  • Keep photos and wall hangings that add a spark to the décor.
  • Hold onto board games and enough toys to fill your child’s toy box.
  • Keep enough of your college student’s personal objects to make them feel at home when they visit.
  • File current bills and private documents like social security cards and bank account information at home.
  • Show off collectors’ items in a display cabinet.
  • Make room for sporting gear that someone in the house uses every few days (basketballs, yoga mats, bikes and more).
  • Carve a niche for that emergency household tool kit.

Storage-bound

  • Store out-of-season clothing and footwear.
  • Box up extra items that clutter your cupboards like excess towels, the good silver used only on holidays, extra blankets needed only in winter and toothbrush holders that have been replaced by a fresh design.
  • Store the rocker that only grandma sits in when she visits every six months or the footstool that no one uses but everyone trips over.
  • Store photos and wall hangings that make the room look too busy or just don’t fit your current design scheme.
  • Pack away extra toys that you have no room for. Rotate them in and out every few weeks so that your child can enjoy all of them. Involve your child in the decisions.
  • Put away your college student’s bags, balls and other belongings that spill out of his closets into other rooms or that make his room uncomfortable for guests.
  • Stash tax documents and other papers that may be needed but are seldom reviewed.
  • Store collectors’ items that take up too much room and don’t look good on display. If you have several collections or many items, you may want to rotate them.
  • Pack up out-of-season sporting gear.
  • Bundle garden tools together in the off season and stick them in a garbage bin in your self storage unit.
  • Ultimately, use your discretion to decide what stays and what goes. Label your stored goods well. If you are keeping them, you should rotate what you can into daily use every so often.

Seasonal

The presents are unwrapped, the boxes are emptied of their contents, and tissue paper is strewn about the room. Time to clean up from all the holiday merriment; but don’t be too hasty to throw out the tissue paper and empty boxes – recycle them. This article will give you some “ah ha” ideas for storing holiday decorations, and self storage is a convenient place to holiday items when the season is over.

Ornaments

  • Run used gift wrap and tissue paper through a paper shredder and use the fluffy strips as filler.
  • Keep fragile ornaments at the top of a box.
  • Egg cartons are perfect for tiny ornaments.
  • Have a partitioned cardboard wine box? Use it to store tissue-wrapped ornaments. Several ornaments can be stacked on top of each other in each slot.
  • Reuse a shirt box or shoebox to store ornament hangers. Fill it with hooks, rolls of small ribbon, cording, scissors, twist ties and craft wire – everything you’d need to replace the inevitable lost hanger.
  • Store food-based decorations (like the cinnamon and applesauce ornaments your kids bring home from school) in sandwich bags to protect them from humidity, and then place the bags in an empty cookie tin to keep rodents out.

Garland

  • Store bulky garlands in large plastic storage boxes. You can push a lot into a big box, since there’s nothing to break, and the garlands can be fluffed out.
  • Mark the center of a long swag with a colored twist tie before you remove it so you won’t have to measure it again next year.
  • Label segments of garland with a pen and masking tape as you take it down so you’ll always know which piece to hang in the entryway and which is just the right size for the mantel.

Lights

  • Instead of coiling your lights in a bundle that somehow turns into a big tangled ball, wrap them around empty wrapping paper tubes and tape the ends of the string to the tube.
  • Put extra bulbs and fuses in a sandwich bag and place inside the tube.

Yard & Garage Sale’s

So you want to have a garage sale to get rid of some of your old things? The question is where to store and organize your items while you are getting ready. A self storage unit is your answer.

Your basement storage room may be so full that you have no idea what is in there, and no room to sort through it. Your garage may be full of tools, bicycles, kids’ toys, yard tools, and sporting equipment, not to mention your cars. An empty storage unit is the perfect place to sort and price all of your items.

Yard Sale Tips

The best way to keep things in order is to categorize things as you drop them off at the storage unit. Sort your items by categories you might see in a department store or secondhand store – kitchen, clothing, toys, appliances, linens, sporting goods, etc. It will save you lots of time as your sale approaches. Instead of having to scramble to sort things as the sale date nears, all you will need to do is go in and tag things. (You can even price things as you drop them off.) As you go through things in your storage room or people give you their hand-me-down clothes, you take them right to the storage unit.

If you are having a sale with friends or family, you can split the cost of the storage unit. That greatly increases the benefits of using a self-storage unit to store your items because it reduces the expense.

As the date of your yard sale approaches, set up the racks and tables in your garage before you bring your things over from the storage unit. Have some idea of where you would like things to go. All you will need to do is load up your van or truck with your items and unload them onto the tables and racks in your garage. Everything will already be sorted and priced.

Having the storage unit also will let you concentrate on preparing for the sale without distractions. Leave the kids, computers, and phones at home and spend time sorting and tagging without the common interruptions.

If you have an annual sale, you can bring items to your storage unit year-round. If you keep it well-organized, setting up for your sale should be simple.

Spring Cleaning

That time of year has arrived when the days get longer, and it becomes easier to do something about the carpet stains, dust and stale air that have built up during the last few weeks and, perhaps, months. Finally, you can throw open all of the windows and let in the fresh air without freezing. Now, get ready to revitalize your home with a good spring cleaning.

Whether you conduct a full-house cleaning once a year or once a month, you may want to consider renting a self storage unit to get things out of the way during the process. In addition, cleaning and organizing easily can turn into redecorating. Self storage facilities are great places to store items for the long-term that do not fit into your updated home design scheme but that you are not ready to toss, sell or donate.

Spring cleaning tips:

  • To keep track of what you have already accomplished, clean from the top down, dusting and washing ceiling fans, light fixtures and corners first. Then wipe and wash walls, windows, counters, furniture and floors.A similar philosophy works with windows. Try cleaning the inside from left to right and the outside from the top down. This will make it easier to tell which side has streaks, if either.
  • Replace smoke detector batteries, test the smoke detectors and give them a good wipe down.
  • Clear counters and shelves and wash them thoroughly. Wash knick-knacks and dust books. If you have accumulated stacks of papers or bills, now is a good time to file the important documents in your self storage unit. Recycle junk mail, outdated magazines and used envelopes. Shred old bills and other papers that contain personal information.
  • Pull out appliances and wash the sides and floor. Clean normally hidden spills and wipe the walls.
  • If you plan to paint or thoroughly shampoo the carpets, consider moving your furniture into a self storage unit. Many companies will rent units for as little as a day. Mobile storage companies will even bring a storage unit to your house and remove it when you are done with it.
  • When cleaning mattresses and other furniture, consider laying down a tarp and leaving the bedding and upholstery outside on the driveway for a few hours. Some strong sunlight and ultraviolet radiation can help eradicate microscopic creatures that are trying to take up residence there. A thorough steam cleaning may leave your furniture feeling and smelling fresh, also.
  • Sort through seasonal clothes. Wash or dry clean them, and sew on buttons or stitch up minor tears. A wardrobe box with a hanging rod will help keep clothes looking good and can easily be placed into your storage unit. Remember to look critically at your garments. Get rid of overly worn garments and things you never wear.
  • As you clean the nooks and crannies, you may find leaky faucets, broken door handles or cracked tiles. Take time to make these repairs now to prevent them from becoming more serious or costly problems later. Get seldom used tools out of the way when you are done with the repairs by placing them in your self storage unit.
  • Remember the small stuff. Sweep the corners where you vacuum does not reach, wash down air vents, clean the dirt from the tracks in your windows and patio doors, and wipe crown molding and window frames.
  • Don’t forget the outside of the house. Use a power sprayer to remove grime, empty wasps’ nests and spider webs from exterior walls and windows. Spray down the garage floor while you are at it to rid the space of fluid leaks and road salt or sand that can easily be tracked inside and stain your carpet.
  • Remove lawn furniture from your basement, garage or self storage unit. Clean it. A good spraying with the hose will usually do the trick. Replace the furniture with snow blowers, snow shovels and winter toys like sleds and snowboards. These bulky items can get in the way when stored at home. As these seasonal items don’t need to be removed often, you may find that when you tuck them away in a self storage unit you have taken a very practical step toward keeping your home free of clutter.
  • Trim bushes, aerate the lawn, lay down fresh mulch, and maybe even plant a few flowers. Garden tools can be bundled together and placed in trash barrels in your self storage unit when they are not needed.

Spring cleaning may be a lot of work, but the payoff is a brighter, safer home that can give you a new perspective and prepare you to meet life’s other challenges.