America, you've got stuff.
Amish armoires and barbecue grills. Granddad's beer-stein collection and grandma's mahogany dining room table. Christmas decorations and oak-veneer Malm chests you bought at Ikea for your teens.
Chances are you've piled it all into a self-storage unit.
So have a few of your fellow Americans, judging by the 2.2 billion square feet of self-storage facilities peppering the country.
What's with that? Why are we paying to store stuff we don't - or almost never - use?
Is it because you're between homes? A sentimental softy? Or do you just not have time to sort through 10 years of Architectural Digests and your husband's college CD collection?
Grant K. Gibson understands your conundrum. The San Francisco-based interior designer just helped a client winnow down the contents of a $1,000-a-month storage unit.
"We sorted through everything, and we brought it all into the basement of their home and stored it in large Tupperware-type things and labeled them," he says. "And then, we got rid of all the junk."
Gibson, like most designers, has his own self-storage. He's got a small ($90-a-month) unit filled with some furniture and leftover fabrics (never know when a project's going to need repair) and a blow-up bed. It helps him keep his own home orderly. This is a guy, we should note, who moved from a 200-square-foot New York apartment to a 250-square-foot place in San Francisco to a 1,000-square-foot apartment - and is dreaming of a house.
"If I see something that I think - this is just so beautiful, maybe I can use that someday when I buy a house - I store it," he says. "I think that's sort of what I see clients doing as well." Designers often store finds they know clients will someday use, and even pieces they rotate in and out of their own homes. It's a well-known hazard of those who love to decorate.
New York über-designer Miles Redd used to have self-storage space. One day, though, "I looked at what I paid in storage, and I got rid of it. I do not want to be attached to this kind of stuff," he says of items that ranged from furniture purchased for decorating projects to books.
It has, he says, taken his mother 10 years to sift through all the stuff in his grandmother's home ("a Depression-era baby - she saved string"). "I don't want that kind of legacy."
But there's more than sentimentality involved in opting for a self-storage unit - it's also a lifestyle choice. "People moving, transitioning households, is about 50 percent of the industry," says Timothy Dietz, spokesman for the Self-Storage Association, based in Alexandria, Va. He cited retirees, soldiers, college students, and small-business folks among the most common users.
"You also have a lot of other folks who have chosen to make self-storage a permanent part of their lifestyle because they want to make their garage into a family room or they want to make their basement into a theater room," he says.
Still, says Gibson, "For the most part, I really see grandma-type stuff in there, or this is a family piece that my great-aunt or grandma had, and because it's a family piece, I can't get rid of it," he says.
"The other thing is, I think people maybe get lazy, and they put it in the storage unit because they don't have to think about it," he says. "Out of sight, out of mind."
Gibson's suggestion: Get help - from a designer, an organizer, or a friend - to come in and say, "Let's clean this up."
"Storage is the stopgap for us to get our mind around what we really need," says Redd. "Edit your life."
Or at least edit your storage unit.
Your Life in Storage
Here's how to make self-storage work for you:
Do store pieces you use periodically (holiday decorations, etc.).
Don't store important family heirlooms and documents.
Do store sensitive items (art, wine) in a climate-controlled unit.
Do organize possessions. Make a photo inventory and list everything. Otherwise, stuff "is going to get lost in there, and you're never going to remember you have it."
