Do you rent self-storage?

B

Beau Vine

1,000+ Posts
Two more of these places have gone up between my town and Austin.

My wife asked me who all these people are who have more stuff than they can keep in their houses. I told her I'd find out.

Have/do you use self-storage? What do you put in there? Why?
 
To make my house seem more spacious while we were selling it i used one. I can see how it would be addictive. Once we moved into a new house it took me a month or so to get everything out of storage and find a place for it.
 
Same as shinola. We're in the process of readying our house for sale, and rented one to remove the non-essentials.. $95/month for a 5x10 climate cooled storage unit.

Pretty amazing how much **** you can put into a 5x10 unit.
 
Similar reasoning here. We moved out-of-state, and wanted to vacate our old home so it would sell faster. (Good news -- it worked.) In order to afford to keep paying on the old place in the interim, we rented something less than half the size in our new place for cheap. We ditched a lot of stuff, but we still did not have enough room for furniture pieces that would fit in a bigger house. So we are renting a storage unit for a year. When we move into a bigger place here after our lease is up, we plan to get our stuff back out of storage.

OTOH, my mom is a pack rat. I think she has rented storage units for 20+ years now. She really just needs to get rid of a lot of that crap.
 
1) I rented one for 3 months when I moved in with my parents between apartments.

2) My nephew has one now for basically the same reason.

3) Mr. LLB had one for a year or so after he graduated. He had an apt. in Austin but took a job that involved a lot of traveling so he just parked his stuff in storage and crashed at his parents' house when he was in town.

4) My SIL's fiance put his furniture in storage when he moved into her place.

5) Mr. LLB's parents keep one all the time. His mother's a teacher and she stashes her stuff there during the summer plus old materials and papers, etc. His dad sort of inherited a car that he keeps parked in it. We have garage sales a lot and we keep the stuff that doesn't sell and stuff we plan to add in there. We wouldn't rent one on our own for that purpose but since he already has it and it's got room, why not?
 
Another thing to consider is that building a self-storage place is a great way to invest in property futures. You buy some land you think will go up. You slap a self-storage place on it, and sit on it. They have very little overhead run, plus the cost of construction is low.

So anyway, just because they are popping up doesn't mean they are filled to capacity.
 
Every summer austin fills up with storage units and I've used one for four years. Of course my parents live out of state so renting a storage unit is much more cost effective and easier than renting a uhaul and moving all my ****.
 
They are most definitely cash cows.

Funny the rent over the course of a year, much less 20 years, is typically more money than the crap inside is worth.
 
i rent one. it has a bunch of my **** that I do not need most of the time, and I don't want to store here. i can not use the garage/attic, because a lot of it is "collectable" and can't be in the texas heat.
 
My parents-in-law stored all their **** in one while they lived in an RV for about five years.

Years ago my sister dated a guy in a band who rented one, lined the walls in foam, kept all their instruments and sound board in there, and used it for rehearsals.
 
back in 1997 my family started building a house in Arlington...I was 13 at the time...the problem was that our lease on our rental house ended in September, and our house wouldn't be finished until December...We had rented that house for 2 years and made every payment on time and also had to deal with a scumbag of a Realtor who would constantly bring people over with no warning to tour the house...we asked him if we could lease the house through December but he said either we lease for another year or get the F out...so with a large family (i was the oldest of 7 at the time, now 8) we couldn't really get a apartment or anything so we moved all of our stuff into the largest storage unit available and then stayed at various relatives houses moving every week or so...so yeah we've definitely used one before...
 
chuy, I know a couple of bands that have done just that with them. I know people that store their outdoor lawn furniture and items in the winter in them.

I use an extra bedroom for storage and damnit, I am amazed at the mass quantity of **** that I was able to keep/stash/hide back there. (not in a good amazement) So I am not in the process of clearing it out and reclaiming it so that I can use it not as a bedroom but as a storage type shed. It will be my climate controlled Morgain type building.

Tools, you name it. Only they will be on shelves and not in piles. Salvation Army and Goodwill are getting lots of stuff. I am also donating a bunch of dishes and household items to friends of friends who lost all their stuff in one of those apartment fires that are ubiquitous in Austin lately.
 
We rent an 8 x 40 train car that cost us $125/month.

My wife & I are both rat packers, plus we have all this crap we inherited from her parents when her mother died in 2001. Some of this includes things like boxes & boxes of old china, photo albums, momento's from vacations, boxes of slides, many boxes of books & classroom teaching materials (my wife & her mother were teachers), file cabinets, her mother's clothes (
mad.gif
), etc...
 
My wife's aunt rented one for years -- like over 10 years. One day, she told us (as poor young married folks) that we could go raid it and take any furniture or other stuff that we wanted.

After going through the whole thing, which was packed FULL of crap -- we took one little white end table, which we used on our patio. That's it. The rest of the stuff in there was bonafide GARBAGE.

We went over to her house, and I gently explained that she was paying $79 a month to store stuff that, if she got the best possible price on it, was worth maybe a collective $100. She would realize a $79 a month income improvement if she just burned everything in the place. I think she ended up taking my advice, but I can't recall.
 
There is a self storage place north of Lometa along 183. Its really in the middle of nowhere. Its basically on someones ranch, near a house.

It probably makes sense... maybe. Lots of hunting leases in the area. Maybe the guy was going to build a barn for storage anyway, so he decided he's build them as storage units and see if he can rent a few. But still, I always see it and wonder.
 
is that what that ugly building with no windows be built at MoPac and 45th going to be?

Don't go uglying up MoPac.
 
a lot like why people park their cars in the driveway to make room for storage in the garage.
 
We've had one for way too long. It has quite a bit of the MIL's stuff that she can't sell, and some of ours... mostly papers.

Encouraging my wife to get rid of the stuff would be dangerous.
 
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