Storage units, to me, are the epitome of American overconsumption as a sickness. We buy too much crap, so we have to rent out additional land with which we can house our crap. We don't have any...
Storage units, to me, are the epitome of American overconsumption as a sickness. We buy too much crap, so we have to rent out additional land with which we can house our crap. We don't have any use for any of this - neither utility nor emotional value - which is why we never really go to visit it.
I'll spare you the five paragraphs of vitriol I wrote and tell you that I'm currently surrounded by the garbage of a roommate's storage crap that we had to take in because he couldn't afford to pay them anymore and my husband couldn't say no and now the roommate is dying and he's not even here but we can't throw his shit away and I'm so tired of living in a garbage patch. đ˘
I think you're right, the root cause is overconsumption, but the immediate cause is really just guilt. People have too much shit because they over consume, but people have no room to store that...
I think you're right, the root cause is overconsumption, but the immediate cause is really just guilt.
People have too much shit because they over consume, but people have no room to store that shit because they're guilty about getting rid of it. There's this pseudo emotional attachment/sunk cost fallacy that people have worn their shit. They emotionally value these objects because of what they paid for them, or memories they have associated with them, and they can't just throw them away because then that value goes away. They can't even sell them, because the 150 bucks you'll get from a used couch is way less than the 1500 bucks they spent on it, or the fond memories they have of sitting on it, so it just sits somewhere and makes people feel good knowing they "have" it.
I've successfully avoided the immediate cause of this, but not the root cause. I over consume just like everyone else. I have a huge table saw in my garage I never use, a bunch of cables to things I don't own anymore, and all the other junk that everyone else has.
The main difference between me and, say, my wife, or my parents or a lot of my friends is that I prescribe almost no value to objects outside of their actual utility.
I would have gotten rid of my art from middle school I still have in my attic if it wouldn't bother my parents or wife so much. My first coffee table from college is in a landfill somewhere, and I routinely just throw old stuff out. I never ever miss it.
Sometimes, I'll go through the effort of selling things on eBay that do have some true value, but going through that whole pain is probably worth about $150 of my time and frustration, so anything worth less than that goes into the trash. Anything else like bringing it to a college or shelter or whatever is just too much friction for me to ever do, and I just straight up won't do it, because I know myself, so it goes in the trash.
Is it wasteful? Yes, definitely. In my mind it's way less wasteful than taking up space I don't need, or sitting in a storage locker I'm paying for only to be thrown out by my descendents when I eventually die though.
It's all going to a landfill anyway, I see no reason to delay the inevitable.
My wife isn't like this. She'll come up with a million potential use cases for any object we have that deep down, she knows isn't going to ever come up, but in that moment, she's convinced they will. As a result, I definitely have more stuff in my house than I'd like.
I think the main difference between us, and probably most people like her versus like me is that when she buys something, she views it as sort of an investment. Something that has value, will retail value, and will generate value over time.
Most objects I buy I just view as a liability. Same as going out to dinner or the movies or whatever, but worse, because I need to pay to store it. It actively costs me money in some small way for every day that it exists in my ownership. Once I spend the money, the money is gone. I'm not getting it back, it doesn't contribute to my net worth, so as soon as that object stops earning it's keep, it goes into the trash. If it were up to me, no one, not even an intimate object would live in our house for free, except pets (we don't have kids yet).
One of the things I deleted in my tirade was that the objects we buy these days just simply don't have value anymore. Furniture, for instance, is no longer handcrafted by experts; they are...
One of the things I deleted in my tirade was that the objects we buy these days just simply don't have value anymore. Furniture, for instance, is no longer handcrafted by experts; they are manufactured by machines and assembled by - well, these days, often by you. They don't carry value because they are quick to fall apart and have joints that aren't just difficult to repair, they're critical points of failure. You buy it as an investment, but it very quickly turns into a liability.
Don't even get me started on all the useless crap on the market. Every time I go to the mall I find a new store dedicated to selling nothing but useless "collectables".
Is it the case that everything is cheap, or rather than the option to buy things for cheap now exists? A basic wooden chair in 1940 would cost 12.98...
Is it the case that everything is cheap, or rather than the option to buy things for cheap now exists?
In 2026 dollars, that would be $309. Thatâs not some fancy Herman miller adjustable ergonomic chair, thatâs for a normal wooden chair.
I guarantee you you can find a high quality wooden chair today that will last you and your children if your budget is $300 for a single, basic wooden chair.
You buy it as an investment
I think most people buy furniture as something to be used. Certainly I doubt many people shop ikea for âinvestmentsâ.
People shop IKEA for investments all the time. IKEA makes products of both high and low quality and even low quality products can be considered an investment. If you need a chair and you buy a...
People shop IKEA for investments all the time. IKEA makes products of both high and low quality and even low quality products can be considered an investment. If you need a chair and you buy a chair that is an investment.
Your source leaves much to be desired since it doesnât cite any sources. I looked up the 1940 sears spring/summer catalog and found them selling a comb back Windsor chair âHardwood finished Walnut, Maple, or Mahoganyâ being sold for $2.49. Thatâs $59.58 in todayâs money. You literally canât buy the raw materials for that money!
Edit: in case Iâm asked later; itâs on page 505; I found it on christmas.musetechnical.com where they have it listed as page 564.
You would probably enjoy this article from a few years ago : Everything Must Be Paid for Twice (also, Tildes discussion here) The concept is one that I've tried to keep in mind both when buying...
I think the main difference between us, and probably most people like her versus like me is that when she buys something, she views it as sort of an investment. Something that has value, will retail value, and will generate value over time.
Most objects I buy I just view as a liability. Same as going out to dinner or the movies or whatever, but worse, because I need to pay to store it.
The concept is one that I've tried to keep in mind both when buying things and when trying to get myself to throw out things. It's way easier to never buy the thing, but once it's in my house it's really hard to get rid of. Like your wife I can come up with endless justifications for why I should keep something, most of which boil down to one of two things : 1) It cost money and throwing it away is like setting money on fire and 2) it has memories/emotions attached to it . In both cases thinking about the second price I would have to pay to get a benefit from it (for either the first time or a repeat time), and being truthful about if I actually want to pay it helps me in getting things to actually leave.
To me, it helps that I think of the money as already thrown away as soon as I bought it. There a very few objects we buy on a regular basis that retain enough value to be worth reselling. For me,...
To me, it helps that I think of the money as already thrown away as soon as I bought it.
There a very few objects we buy on a regular basis that retain enough value to be worth reselling. For me, that threshold is about $150. If I'm not likely to get at least around $150 to sell it, it's not worth the effort of me cleaning it up, taking photos of it, posting it online, dealing with the absolute insane people on Facebook marketplace, haggling a price, and so on.
It's garbage with a ticking clock from the moment I purchase it, so I don't feel bad throwing it out. I've already mentally made my peace with that money being gone.
As far as the sentimental thing, I've just never been a sentimental person about objects. Sometimes photos remind you of something, and that's nice, but also, our minds were made to forget things. I don't necessarily want an indelible record of my life. I remember the pieces my brain feels is important to remember, and I remember them in a way that feels right to me, even if it's not really what happened.
Ive forgotten the names of many friends, romantic partners, coworkers and so on, and I'm totally fine with that. The very impactful ones I do still remember, and the memory is what's special to me, not the artifact. So yeah, I just tend to throw a lot of things out. (Unfortunately, I tend to also buy a lot of things. I'm looking at a thermal sensor right now that I bought about a year ago for a project I'm not really interested in anymore. It's bound for the trash can this weekend).
I have a workshop. I'm not even going to describe the level of unrelated crap in it. Apart from tools and timber it's been on a downward trend for the last half decade or so, thankfully. I...
I have a workshop. I'm not even going to describe the level of unrelated crap in it.
Apart from tools and timber it's been on a downward trend for the last half decade or so, thankfully. I recommend getting rid of stuff.
Is a religion Australians increasingly share unfortunately
Curious as to what you folks keep in a storage unit, if anything. And how long itâs been there, and what conditions would have you take it out. Iâm moving internationally in a couple months, for a...
Curious as to what you folks keep in a storage unit, if anything. And how long itâs been there, and what conditions would have you take it out.
Iâm moving internationally in a couple months, for a few years, keeping my current house and renting it out. Pretty much a perfect reason to get a storage unit. But i know how much of a trap a unit is, and weâve got rid of most of our stuff, though we fairly minimalist already.
When my wife and I moved to Germany, we packed all of our things into dozens of boxes and stored them with our parents. We labeled the boxes with descriptions (books, kitchenware, board games) as...
When my wife and I moved to Germany, we packed all of our things into dozens of boxes and stored them with our parents. We labeled the boxes with descriptions (books, kitchenware, board games) as well as relative importance (ship now!, ship later, ship eventually). Then we flew over with four suitcases, a couple carry-ons, and one cat.
The parents never did ship over any of the boxes. We never felt the need to ask. Once we were there, we found that we didn't need most of the stuff we had packed away; instead we just acquired the things we needed as we needed them. Then, when we would visit our families back in the states, we picked up the few things that we missed.
So I would say a storage unit is probably mostly pointless. You likely have a few things worth stashing away somewhere, but that somewhere probably shouldn't be a storage unit. For the most part you're better off radically downsizing and giving away things to friends, where at least you know your items will have a good home.
(That said, moving back to the States was a real nightmare.)
Pretty sure I'm not a useful data point, but my twin neuroses of being cheap as heck and unable to part with anything means that I live an unintentionally pseudo-minimalist lifestyle. I still have...
Pretty sure I'm not a useful data point, but my twin neuroses of being cheap as heck and unable to part with anything means that I live an unintentionally pseudo-minimalist lifestyle. I still have a bunch of stuff -- most of which I don't use, and would happily forget about -- but because the rate of accumulation is so low, it could barely fill a broom closet.
My wife is far more frugal than I am, but I am far more indecisive than she is. I never shop online, because there is too much choice, and also I want to open the packaging on the way back from...
My wife is far more frugal than I am, but I am far more indecisive than she is. I never shop online, because there is too much choice, and also I want to open the packaging on the way back from the store so I'm not going to sit around waiting for something to ship to me. All that results in "i never buy anything" unless it's just pastries while out and about.
And early on with kids we signed up with the toy library in our city (and tool library, and book library, ....) and everything comes in through those organizations. And they accept donations, so that's where a lot of stuff goes, too.
Mmhm, that makes sense. And signing up to more local "things" libraries is a great idea; I keep putting it off for my local institutions, but they seem extremely useful!
Mmhm, that makes sense. And signing up to more local "things" libraries is a great idea; I keep putting it off for my local institutions, but they seem extremely useful!
I was in a very similar situation. Humidity damage in storage can be bad, so I went with an conditioned unit. Sold most of the big furniture. Gave away things that I knew my friends could put to...
I was in a very similar situation. Humidity damage in storage can be bad, so I went with an conditioned unit. Sold most of the big furniture. Gave away things that I knew my friends could put to good use, particularly if they might degrade anyway sitting around indefinitely. After a year or two away and paying the monthly charges, I finally accepted that it would make more sense with even my absolute minimum timeframe (>5yr) to just move the small valuables/sentimental stuff either to my parents' place or bring them with me, dump the rest, release the unit, and buy new stuff whenever I move back
We share a storage unit with my in-laws. We have the left side, they have the right with a gap in the middle so we can reach everything. Honestly it's mostly stuff from two things: Our twins...
We share a storage unit with my in-laws. We have the left side, they have the right with a gap in the middle so we can reach everything. Honestly it's mostly stuff from two things:
Our twins outgrew baby/toddler stuff, but we weren't 100% sure if we'd have more or not. Then once we were certain we wouldn't want any more (I don't want to mean the crazy person who has twins, makes it to age 4 and decides "hell yeah, let's do this all over again"), we kept some of it with the intent of donating to friends/family in need or keeping stuff for the kids to have later (for nostalgia or passing on to their own kids some day, etc.)
When my kids were toddlers, they loved to pull things off the wall. Art, pictures, etc. Any wall decor they could reach would become floor decor ASAP. And around this same period we decided to move and began packing up decor to accomodate putting the house on market. But then those plans fell through, and everything stayed in the storage unit.
The rest is like seasonal stuff like Christmas decorations, the kids' bikes, some odds and ends, etc. Honestly almost all of it could be dumped and it wouldn't negatively impact our lives. If push came to shove I'd keep some of the more nostalgic baby stuff for my wife and I's memory and largely be ok with ditching the rest.
I had to put all my belongings in a storage unit to move internationally too. It'll be half a decade before I ever see that stuff again, and honestly, by that point, who knows what I'll even feel...
I had to put all my belongings in a storage unit to move internationally too. It'll be half a decade before I ever see that stuff again, and honestly, by that point, who knows what I'll even feel about it. It's nice to not own a ton of crap.
Camping and hiking equipment I use a couple tubes a year. Bikes I'm storing for when my youngest gets bigger. Momentos for the kids when they become adults. I've had it for a couple years.
Camping and hiking equipment I use a couple tubes a year. Bikes I'm storing for when my youngest gets bigger. Momentos for the kids when they become adults. I've had it for a couple years.
I wasn't really 'keeping' anything in a storage unit with the intention of it being there long-term, but I had basically moved all my belongings at least 6 times in as many years, kinda lost count...
I wasn't really 'keeping' anything in a storage unit with the intention of it being there long-term, but I had basically moved all my belongings at least 6 times in as many years, kinda lost count at this point. By the end it was due to not really having a place I wanted to live at anymore, so that's when I finally moved my stuff into a storage unit and I was living out of my car, a small sedan which has no room to store anything hardly. I ended up having to move my stuff twice from one storage unit to a different one for a few issues. None of it is stored there any longer which before I even put it there I knew it wasn't worth keeping it in there for long, as over a long enough period of time the cost to store would easily exceed the resale value of what was in it, but then there's the additional cost to re-acquire what is in there which is generally still a bit higher than the resale value of the items and even that wouldn't take that long to eventually exceed the value.
The thing is that even though I moved so many times and it was possibly an opportunity to get rid of things, I generally didn't get rid of that much between all those moves and it's probably been reinforced a little each time because when I did move, I'd often lose track of where I was storing something and would get frustrated not being able to find something that I wanted/needed and knew I had at one point but didn't know if I still had it or if I lost it or got rid of it.
My Nonna died, then my dad died, then my mom sold the childhood home. We had a lot of things in storage as a family. Then I moved from a rented house to a campus staff apartment. So we got a...
My Nonna died, then my dad died, then my mom sold the childhood home. We had a lot of things in storage as a family. Then I moved from a rented house to a campus staff apartment. So we got a storage unit for the furniture we wanted to keep but didn't have room for. For about 7 years.
Then after my partner's paralysis we moved to a smaller more accessible work apartment and I briefly (about 1 year) needed a second storage unit. During this whole time we didn't pay rent. Bought a house and most of that furniture is being used - some of the belongings got redistributed to my siblings. Art on the walls, etc. But some is in the shed too. I'd be willing to get rid of/fix and use more of it, but it's work I don't have energy for.
Zero storage units though, we had the movers clear them out when we moved to the house.
ive used a storage unit twice, both times as a staging area for moving. I hate moving, so i like to take my time with it. I pack up stuff i consider nonessential and stick it in storage, which...
ive used a storage unit twice, both times as a staging area for moving. I hate moving, so i like to take my time with it. I pack up stuff i consider nonessential and stick it in storage, which gives me both metaphorical and literal space to sift through the more important stuff.
i think i ended up using it for about a year amd a half the first time. i went from a house to a one bedroom apartment, so there was some serious finagling i had to do. This time im going from the apartment to half of a friend's basement so ÂŻ\(ă)/ÂŻ itll be interesting.
We had a storage locker for about 4 or 5 months after my MIL suddenly died, so I guess we are one of the Ds. She lived alone and was a hoarder. In cleaning out her apartment we made the choice to...
We had a storage locker for about 4 or 5 months after my MIL suddenly died, so I guess we are one of the Ds. She lived alone and was a hoarder. In cleaning out her apartment we made the choice to just keep a separate pile of anything that we thought could have value, monetary or sentimental, and put that stuff in a small storage locker close by. We could have kept it in the garage but my wife didn't want to have that reminder of her passing at our house, and we didn't have the time to properly identify everything at the apartment. I remember going to close the account after everything was dealt with and the lady seemed surprised we were done with it, noting most of their closures come when people stop paying the bill and they auction the stuff off.
Since then we have been making a real effort at home to have less stuff. The stress of dealing with her passing along with all of her shit left an impact on both of us to not to the same to our kids. It is hard, not only getting over the metal side of things but just practically. There is a lot of stuff that is hard to dispose of the right way, and usually that stuff isn't cheap either.
My parents don't have a storage unit, but have collected a lot of stuff over the years and move it from house to house when they were doing that. I've told them repeatedly I'm throwing it all away...
My parents don't have a storage unit, but have collected a lot of stuff over the years and move it from house to house when they were doing that. I've told them repeatedly I'm throwing it all away when they die.
For myself, I also have a lot of stuff, but most of it either gets picked through, donated or sold and a lot of it is for ongoing projects that do eventually go back to where they're supposed to (such as a transmission). I just spent three weeks reorganizing my own office, which included going through all my storage spaces, throwing away a lot, doing a better job packing stuff I'll use at a later time and now I'm in the process of selling stuff that has value, but I have no more use for.
Nothing bothers me more than having stuff floating around that isn't being used.
For those of you who are not Americans, to give you all some insight into how much we use these self-storage facilities... I live in mid size city on the east coast (Richmond, Virginia), there are...
For those of you who are not Americans, to give you all some insight into how much we use these self-storage facilities... I live in mid size city on the east coast (Richmond, Virginia), there are six of these self-storage facilities within five minutes of my house (five minute drive).
I don't use these facilities because I don't have that much stuff, but clearly people use them because there are so many of them everywhere.
Storage units, to me, are the epitome of American overconsumption as a sickness. We buy too much crap, so we have to rent out additional land with which we can house our crap. We don't have any use for any of this - neither utility nor emotional value - which is why we never really go to visit it.
I'll spare you the five paragraphs of vitriol I wrote and tell you that I'm currently surrounded by the garbage of a roommate's storage crap that we had to take in because he couldn't afford to pay them anymore and my husband couldn't say no and now the roommate is dying and he's not even here but we can't throw his shit away and I'm so tired of living in a garbage patch. đ˘
I think you're right, the root cause is overconsumption, but the immediate cause is really just guilt.
People have too much shit because they over consume, but people have no room to store that shit because they're guilty about getting rid of it. There's this pseudo emotional attachment/sunk cost fallacy that people have worn their shit. They emotionally value these objects because of what they paid for them, or memories they have associated with them, and they can't just throw them away because then that value goes away. They can't even sell them, because the 150 bucks you'll get from a used couch is way less than the 1500 bucks they spent on it, or the fond memories they have of sitting on it, so it just sits somewhere and makes people feel good knowing they "have" it.
I've successfully avoided the immediate cause of this, but not the root cause. I over consume just like everyone else. I have a huge table saw in my garage I never use, a bunch of cables to things I don't own anymore, and all the other junk that everyone else has.
The main difference between me and, say, my wife, or my parents or a lot of my friends is that I prescribe almost no value to objects outside of their actual utility.
I would have gotten rid of my art from middle school I still have in my attic if it wouldn't bother my parents or wife so much. My first coffee table from college is in a landfill somewhere, and I routinely just throw old stuff out. I never ever miss it.
Sometimes, I'll go through the effort of selling things on eBay that do have some true value, but going through that whole pain is probably worth about $150 of my time and frustration, so anything worth less than that goes into the trash. Anything else like bringing it to a college or shelter or whatever is just too much friction for me to ever do, and I just straight up won't do it, because I know myself, so it goes in the trash.
Is it wasteful? Yes, definitely. In my mind it's way less wasteful than taking up space I don't need, or sitting in a storage locker I'm paying for only to be thrown out by my descendents when I eventually die though.
It's all going to a landfill anyway, I see no reason to delay the inevitable.
My wife isn't like this. She'll come up with a million potential use cases for any object we have that deep down, she knows isn't going to ever come up, but in that moment, she's convinced they will. As a result, I definitely have more stuff in my house than I'd like.
I think the main difference between us, and probably most people like her versus like me is that when she buys something, she views it as sort of an investment. Something that has value, will retail value, and will generate value over time.
Most objects I buy I just view as a liability. Same as going out to dinner or the movies or whatever, but worse, because I need to pay to store it. It actively costs me money in some small way for every day that it exists in my ownership. Once I spend the money, the money is gone. I'm not getting it back, it doesn't contribute to my net worth, so as soon as that object stops earning it's keep, it goes into the trash. If it were up to me, no one, not even an intimate object would live in our house for free, except pets (we don't have kids yet).
One of the things I deleted in my tirade was that the objects we buy these days just simply don't have value anymore. Furniture, for instance, is no longer handcrafted by experts; they are manufactured by machines and assembled by - well, these days, often by you. They don't carry value because they are quick to fall apart and have joints that aren't just difficult to repair, they're critical points of failure. You buy it as an investment, but it very quickly turns into a liability.
Don't even get me started on all the useless crap on the market. Every time I go to the mall I find a new store dedicated to selling nothing but useless "collectables".
Is it the case that everything is cheap, or rather than the option to buy things for cheap now exists?
A basic wooden chair in 1940 would cost 12.98 https://www.mclib.info/Research/Morris-County-Library-Reference-Guides/Historic-Prices/Historic-Prices-1940s/Historic-Prices-1940
In 2026 dollars, that would be $309. Thatâs not some fancy Herman miller adjustable ergonomic chair, thatâs for a normal wooden chair.
I guarantee you you can find a high quality wooden chair today that will last you and your children if your budget is $300 for a single, basic wooden chair.
I think most people buy furniture as something to be used. Certainly I doubt many people shop ikea for âinvestmentsâ.
People shop IKEA for investments all the time. IKEA makes products of both high and low quality and even low quality products can be considered an investment. If you need a chair and you buy a chair that is an investment.
Your source leaves much to be desired since it doesnât cite any sources. I looked up the 1940 sears spring/summer catalog and found them selling a comb back Windsor chair âHardwood finished Walnut, Maple, or Mahoganyâ being sold for $2.49. Thatâs $59.58 in todayâs money. You literally canât buy the raw materials for that money!
Edit: in case Iâm asked later; itâs on page 505; I found it on christmas.musetechnical.com where they have it listed as page 564.
You would probably enjoy this article from a few years ago : Everything Must Be Paid for Twice (also, Tildes discussion here)
The concept is one that I've tried to keep in mind both when buying things and when trying to get myself to throw out things. It's way easier to never buy the thing, but once it's in my house it's really hard to get rid of. Like your wife I can come up with endless justifications for why I should keep something, most of which boil down to one of two things : 1) It cost money and throwing it away is like setting money on fire and 2) it has memories/emotions attached to it . In both cases thinking about the second price I would have to pay to get a benefit from it (for either the first time or a repeat time), and being truthful about if I actually want to pay it helps me in getting things to actually leave.
To me, it helps that I think of the money as already thrown away as soon as I bought it.
There a very few objects we buy on a regular basis that retain enough value to be worth reselling. For me, that threshold is about $150. If I'm not likely to get at least around $150 to sell it, it's not worth the effort of me cleaning it up, taking photos of it, posting it online, dealing with the absolute insane people on Facebook marketplace, haggling a price, and so on.
It's garbage with a ticking clock from the moment I purchase it, so I don't feel bad throwing it out. I've already mentally made my peace with that money being gone.
As far as the sentimental thing, I've just never been a sentimental person about objects. Sometimes photos remind you of something, and that's nice, but also, our minds were made to forget things. I don't necessarily want an indelible record of my life. I remember the pieces my brain feels is important to remember, and I remember them in a way that feels right to me, even if it's not really what happened.
Ive forgotten the names of many friends, romantic partners, coworkers and so on, and I'm totally fine with that. The very impactful ones I do still remember, and the memory is what's special to me, not the artifact. So yeah, I just tend to throw a lot of things out. (Unfortunately, I tend to also buy a lot of things. I'm looking at a thermal sensor right now that I bought about a year ago for a project I'm not really interested in anymore. It's bound for the trash can this weekend).
I have a workshop. I'm not even going to describe the level of unrelated crap in it.
Apart from tools and timber it's been on a downward trend for the last half decade or so, thankfully. I recommend getting rid of stuff.
Is a religion Australians increasingly share unfortunately
Curious as to what you folks keep in a storage unit, if anything. And how long itâs been there, and what conditions would have you take it out.
Iâm moving internationally in a couple months, for a few years, keeping my current house and renting it out. Pretty much a perfect reason to get a storage unit. But i know how much of a trap a unit is, and weâve got rid of most of our stuff, though we fairly minimalist already.
When my wife and I moved to Germany, we packed all of our things into dozens of boxes and stored them with our parents. We labeled the boxes with descriptions (books, kitchenware, board games) as well as relative importance (ship now!, ship later, ship eventually). Then we flew over with four suitcases, a couple carry-ons, and one cat.
The parents never did ship over any of the boxes. We never felt the need to ask. Once we were there, we found that we didn't need most of the stuff we had packed away; instead we just acquired the things we needed as we needed them. Then, when we would visit our families back in the states, we picked up the few things that we missed.
So I would say a storage unit is probably mostly pointless. You likely have a few things worth stashing away somewhere, but that somewhere probably shouldn't be a storage unit. For the most part you're better off radically downsizing and giving away things to friends, where at least you know your items will have a good home.
(That said, moving back to the States was a real nightmare.)
Pretty sure I'm not a useful data point, but my twin neuroses of being cheap as heck and unable to part with anything means that I live an unintentionally pseudo-minimalist lifestyle. I still have a bunch of stuff -- most of which I don't use, and would happily forget about -- but because the rate of accumulation is so low, it could barely fill a broom closet.
My wife is far more frugal than I am, but I am far more indecisive than she is. I never shop online, because there is too much choice, and also I want to open the packaging on the way back from the store so I'm not going to sit around waiting for something to ship to me. All that results in "i never buy anything" unless it's just pastries while out and about.
And early on with kids we signed up with the toy library in our city (and tool library, and book library, ....) and everything comes in through those organizations. And they accept donations, so that's where a lot of stuff goes, too.
Mmhm, that makes sense. And signing up to more local "things" libraries is a great idea; I keep putting it off for my local institutions, but they seem extremely useful!
I was in a very similar situation. Humidity damage in storage can be bad, so I went with an conditioned unit. Sold most of the big furniture. Gave away things that I knew my friends could put to good use, particularly if they might degrade anyway sitting around indefinitely. After a year or two away and paying the monthly charges, I finally accepted that it would make more sense with even my absolute minimum timeframe (>5yr) to just move the small valuables/sentimental stuff either to my parents' place or bring them with me, dump the rest, release the unit, and buy new stuff whenever I move back
We share a storage unit with my in-laws. We have the left side, they have the right with a gap in the middle so we can reach everything. Honestly it's mostly stuff from two things:
Our twins outgrew baby/toddler stuff, but we weren't 100% sure if we'd have more or not. Then once we were certain we wouldn't want any more (I don't want to mean the crazy person who has twins, makes it to age 4 and decides "hell yeah, let's do this all over again"), we kept some of it with the intent of donating to friends/family in need or keeping stuff for the kids to have later (for nostalgia or passing on to their own kids some day, etc.)
When my kids were toddlers, they loved to pull things off the wall. Art, pictures, etc. Any wall decor they could reach would become floor decor ASAP. And around this same period we decided to move and began packing up decor to accomodate putting the house on market. But then those plans fell through, and everything stayed in the storage unit.
The rest is like seasonal stuff like Christmas decorations, the kids' bikes, some odds and ends, etc. Honestly almost all of it could be dumped and it wouldn't negatively impact our lives. If push came to shove I'd keep some of the more nostalgic baby stuff for my wife and I's memory and largely be ok with ditching the rest.
I had to put all my belongings in a storage unit to move internationally too. It'll be half a decade before I ever see that stuff again, and honestly, by that point, who knows what I'll even feel about it. It's nice to not own a ton of crap.
Camping and hiking equipment I use a couple tubes a year. Bikes I'm storing for when my youngest gets bigger. Momentos for the kids when they become adults. I've had it for a couple years.
I wasn't really 'keeping' anything in a storage unit with the intention of it being there long-term, but I had basically moved all my belongings at least 6 times in as many years, kinda lost count at this point. By the end it was due to not really having a place I wanted to live at anymore, so that's when I finally moved my stuff into a storage unit and I was living out of my car, a small sedan which has no room to store anything hardly. I ended up having to move my stuff twice from one storage unit to a different one for a few issues. None of it is stored there any longer which before I even put it there I knew it wasn't worth keeping it in there for long, as over a long enough period of time the cost to store would easily exceed the resale value of what was in it, but then there's the additional cost to re-acquire what is in there which is generally still a bit higher than the resale value of the items and even that wouldn't take that long to eventually exceed the value.
The thing is that even though I moved so many times and it was possibly an opportunity to get rid of things, I generally didn't get rid of that much between all those moves and it's probably been reinforced a little each time because when I did move, I'd often lose track of where I was storing something and would get frustrated not being able to find something that I wanted/needed and knew I had at one point but didn't know if I still had it or if I lost it or got rid of it.
My Nonna died, then my dad died, then my mom sold the childhood home. We had a lot of things in storage as a family. Then I moved from a rented house to a campus staff apartment. So we got a storage unit for the furniture we wanted to keep but didn't have room for. For about 7 years.
Then after my partner's paralysis we moved to a smaller more accessible work apartment and I briefly (about 1 year) needed a second storage unit. During this whole time we didn't pay rent. Bought a house and most of that furniture is being used - some of the belongings got redistributed to my siblings. Art on the walls, etc. But some is in the shed too. I'd be willing to get rid of/fix and use more of it, but it's work I don't have energy for.
Zero storage units though, we had the movers clear them out when we moved to the house.
ive used a storage unit twice, both times as a staging area for moving. I hate moving, so i like to take my time with it. I pack up stuff i consider nonessential and stick it in storage, which gives me both metaphorical and literal space to sift through the more important stuff.
i think i ended up using it for about a year amd a half the first time. i went from a house to a one bedroom apartment, so there was some serious finagling i had to do. This time im going from the apartment to half of a friend's basement so ÂŻ\(ă)/ÂŻ itll be interesting.
We had a storage locker for about 4 or 5 months after my MIL suddenly died, so I guess we are one of the Ds. She lived alone and was a hoarder. In cleaning out her apartment we made the choice to just keep a separate pile of anything that we thought could have value, monetary or sentimental, and put that stuff in a small storage locker close by. We could have kept it in the garage but my wife didn't want to have that reminder of her passing at our house, and we didn't have the time to properly identify everything at the apartment. I remember going to close the account after everything was dealt with and the lady seemed surprised we were done with it, noting most of their closures come when people stop paying the bill and they auction the stuff off.
Since then we have been making a real effort at home to have less stuff. The stress of dealing with her passing along with all of her shit left an impact on both of us to not to the same to our kids. It is hard, not only getting over the metal side of things but just practically. There is a lot of stuff that is hard to dispose of the right way, and usually that stuff isn't cheap either.
My parents don't have a storage unit, but have collected a lot of stuff over the years and move it from house to house when they were doing that. I've told them repeatedly I'm throwing it all away when they die.
For myself, I also have a lot of stuff, but most of it either gets picked through, donated or sold and a lot of it is for ongoing projects that do eventually go back to where they're supposed to (such as a transmission). I just spent three weeks reorganizing my own office, which included going through all my storage spaces, throwing away a lot, doing a better job packing stuff I'll use at a later time and now I'm in the process of selling stuff that has value, but I have no more use for.
Nothing bothers me more than having stuff floating around that isn't being used.
For those of you who are not Americans, to give you all some insight into how much we use these self-storage facilities... I live in mid size city on the east coast (Richmond, Virginia), there are six of these self-storage facilities within five minutes of my house (five minute drive).
I don't use these facilities because I don't have that much stuff, but clearly people use them because there are so many of them everywhere.
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