So my neighbor Tom. Two summers ago. He rents this unit down the road from us, not from me unfortunately, but that’s fine. He’s got three kids, a garage full of bikes and lawn equipment, and his wife has been on him for like two years to clear out the basement. So he finally does it. Spends a whole weekend hauling stuff over. Books, winter clothes, old toys, a wooden rocking chair that belonged to his grandmother. Packs it all in there real tight. Neat. Organized. Labels on everything. He’s proud of himself.
Comes back in September to get the kids’ winter coats because school is starting and mornings are getting cool. Opens the door. And the smell. He said it hit him like a wet blanket. That warm musty smell. He walks in and the rocking chair has these little white spots all over it. Mold. Some of the boxes are soft on the bottom. One of them just gives way when he touches it and a bunch of old photo albums spill out onto the floor and the pages are stuck together. He calls me and he’s just sitting there in the parking lot on the hood of his car and he goes I ruined my grandmother’s rocking chair. Like he’s telling me somebody died.
And I’m thinking dude why didn’t you just ask me. I would have told you.
What Wood Does When You Don’t Ask
First off that rocking chair. Wood. Wood moves. It expands and contracts with heat and humidity. When you stick it in a metal box in July and let it sit there for three months with no air moving around it and no climate control it’s going to do things you don’t want it to do. Maybe it cracks. Maybe it warps. Maybe mold finds the moisture in the wood and decides to move in. That chair sat in his grandmother’s living room for fifty years and it was fine because it was in a house where the temperature stays the same. He put it in a storage unit and the temperature went from eighty during the day to seventy at night to ninety during a heat wave back down to sixty five when a storm rolled through. That chair went through more temperature swings in three months than it had in the last thirty years.
People don’t think about that. They think storage is storage. It’s not. Summer storage is different.
Floors Are Liars
And the boxes on the floor thing. He stacked everything right on the concrete. Concrete sweats. Not like dripping wet but it pulls moisture from the ground underneath. That moisture comes up through the slab and the bottom of your boxes just soak it up slowly over time. You don’t notice it until you try to pick up a box and the bottom falls out and your Christmas ornaments go everywhere. Put something underneath. Pallets. Old boards. Even those rubber floor tiles from harbor freight. Anything. Just get your stuff off the ground.
Plastic Is Not Protection
I also wanted to ask him about the plastic but I didn’t want to make him feel worse. He had that rocking chair wrapped in a tarp. Plastic tarp. And I know why he did it. He wanted to protect it from dust. But in the summer that plastic traps humidity against the wood. It’s like putting a raincoat on and standing in the sun. You’re gonna sweat underneath. Same thing happens to furniture. Breathable covers. Old sheets. Canvas tarps if you want to spend a little more. Anything that lets air move.
One Thing He Got Right
You know what he did right though? He cleaned everything before he put it in. I’ll give him that. He went through the basement and wiped stuff down and let it dry. A lot of people don’t even do that. They’ll throw a grill in there with grease still on it. Or a vacuum with dust in it. And then the heat comes and bugs smell that and they’re like oh cool free food and a place to live. Next thing you know you’ve got ants or roaches or worse. So Tom got that part right at least.
Labels Are For Your Future Self
The labeling though. He wrote boxes. That was it. Boxes. Like what does that even mean. I tell people all the time write labels that your tired self will understand. If you’re storing the blender write blender on the box. If you’re storing Christmas ornaments write Christmas. If you’re storing stuff you might need in the summer put summer on the box and put those boxes near the front. I had a guy last month who needed his camping gear for a trip and he had to unstack like fifteen boxes to get to it because he buried it behind all his tax records from 2018. Why. Why would you do that to yourself.
The Four Hundred Dollar Chair
Anyway Tom ended up throwing away a bunch of stuff. The rocking chair he took to a furniture restorer and they fixed it mostly but it cost him like four hundred bucks. He told me he wished he had just asked somebody before he did it. And I was like Tom you walked past my facility every day for three months. I’m right there.
So yeah. That’s why I’m telling you this stuff. Not because I’m trying to sell you something. I mean obviously if you need a unit we have them and we’ll take care of you. But more because I don’t want to see you sitting on the hood of your car in September feeling like Tom felt. It sucks. And it’s all avoidable.
Just Come Ask
If you’re storing stuff that matters to you just come talk to me first. Show me a picture of what you’re storing or tell me what it is. I’ll tell you if you need climate control or not. I’ll tell you if you need a bigger unit so you can leave some airflow or if you can make a smaller one work. I’ll tell you the stuff nobody thinks about until it’s too late.
And if you end up renting somewhere else that’s fine too. Just don’t make the same mistakes Tom made. Because seriously that rocking chair was beautiful and it broke my heart a little when he showed me the pictures.
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