Reasons Why You May Want To Reconsider A Storage Unit
If you are thinking about getting a storage unit
, whether due to moving, cleaning out a garage or attic, or any other reason, you may want to think twice before you agree to a rental agreement. There are certain drawbacks which you should learn about.
First, it is not a great investment financially. The cheapest price for the smallest storage space, a 5 x 5 unit, in a big city like Los Angeles is $67 per month.
The first month costs just a mere $1, but that is not counting the one time only $22 "Administration Fee" that they will also tack onto the first 30 days. Although all those numbers sound doable financially, if you rented this space, you'd be out a whopping $760 in the first 12 months, all to rent a space that's the size of your laundry room.
In other words, stuff that isn't functional enough to put in your house and use every day would become more and more expensive with each passing year. Self storage is like diet food for material goods.
It fools the mind by fooling the eye. If your clutter isn't visible in your house, do you really have a spending problem?
The first self storage facilities were built in Texas in the late 1960's. It took 25 years to build the first one billion square feet of storage.
But it took just eight years (1998-2005) to add the second billion. According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average 1960's home was 1200 square feet.
In 2004 the average home had ballooned to almost twice that size to 2330 square feet. Bigger houses are harder to fill up, which may explain why Americans buy twice the number of consumer goods than the citizens of any other first world nation.
The environmental cost of creating, transporting and finally housing two billion square feet of unused possessions is mind boggling. Self storage companies count on the basic physics of human laziness, that is: objects at rest, remain at rest...in storage.
After all, who wants to spend their precious free time, digging through boxes looking for stuff? For the most part, self storage facilities are architectural monsters.
In addition to being ugly as sin, they bring in few jobs or sales tax benefits to the community, compared to other structures of similarly huge proportions. There are certain groups of people, like those who live on sail boats and soldiers fighting overseas, or the newly moved, who can follow their dreams because they can temporarily stash their possessions in storage.
Storage gives them the wiggle room to experience life without being connected to personal belongings. For more than half the storage renters, however, this is simply not the case.
Once a month, chances are the storage companies in your neighborhood will hold an "estate sale" where the owner of the company sells off the contents of units that were seized for non-payment of rent. What odd, desperate or lazy story is behind this lapse of judgment?
Why the renters failed to move their possessions out of storage before the rent was due is always a mystery. What tales of woe are behind the abandoned photograph albums, bronzed baby shoe ashtrays or the hand-embroidered vintage napkins?
Why weren't these items, so obviously full of sentimental value, kept in the home where they could be used and admired? A clearer narrative about why items were acquired is visible from a lot of the sale merchandise, however.
You can almost hear the nagging spouses behind the half dozen exercise bikes and Thigh-masters for sale each month or the siren's call of Martha Stewart behind the hundreds of half-finished craft items. Whether they are nostalgic artifacts from the past or wishful self-help tools for the future, none of these objects relate to the present day lives of their former owners, which is probably why they were put into storage to begin with.
These monthly sales are sad museums, a collection of failed ventures and unfulfilled dreams of what could be. As with every successful product, self storage provides a powerful storyline for the consumer to buy into: that preserving memories of the past or the potential of the future through material goods is valuable.
If you can avoid the smart thing is definitely to find storage for your items in your home, or better yet, get rid of the things that you can go a year without using. Freeing yourself of clutter is a wonderful feeling!
by: Tommy Greene
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