I am a big fan of Storage Wars which airs on A&E. If you've never seen the show, a cast a characters bids on storage units that have been abandoned and then it is a bit of a treasure hunt crossed with Antique Roadshow, with some bidders coming out way ahead and some losing quite a bit of money.
Anyways, I read recently that storage units are big business and a real growth industry especially here in Florida where we have no basements.
So I read this article from Salon.com with interest. The author, after moving to a home with a basement, is finally reunited with her storage unit stuff and finds out that most of it was junk.
Over the past few months I've been in a decluttering mode, I spent one whole weekend cleaning out my closet. I found items in my closet from both high school and college (I am many years away from both) and items with the tags still affixed (meaning I bought it, but never wore it). I ended up reducing the clothes, purses and shoes by 50% (and my closet is still pretty full). Then I tackled our office, which I'm still working on, but I've shredded and recycled paperwork that included things like college and professional school acceptance letters, credit card statements going back more than 10 years, etc.
I am overly sentimental and I hate to see anything with a family connection be given away or sold to non-family, which means, for example, that I've got boxes of china in my attic (thank goodness I've got an attic) that I don't really care for and may never use. So, I'm getting better at parting with some things but not others (what I would call family treasures) although I've never rented a storage unit so I'm doing better than some.
How about you, do you struggle with clutter, do you pay to store your stuff, how do you keep family treasures close but not let them overwhelm your home?
4 comments:
I am pretty easy, if I haven't touched it in 6 months (maybe a year in some cases) I toss it. I don't care about the value. I call it my 6 month rule.
Clutter makes my sick, when I had a really bad day my wife knows because I come home and start cleaning up stuff. The pile of mail waiting to hit the shredder, the stack of DVDs not put back in place yet. I freak and start putting it all away.
I keep a few sentimental things but even that is very minimal. I helped my mom clean out our childhood home when she was ready to move after everyone was living on their own. Guess what all the crap I put away as a kid thinking I would want forever was junk. I tossed it all. I kept a handful of things which were important or useful and gave the rest away.
I could never imagine paying to store junk, now between moves or something is one thing. But just keeping it because you can doesn't make life any easier.
Along the same lines as what Jason said, I am a minimalist. I try not to own physical things if I can help it. There are very few items of sentimental value that I keep, along with my photo albums. What I do have a hard time with is clothes and especially shoes ... it's nice having a variety of shoes to choose from if I have to dress up for a special occasion, and I hate having to buy a whole new wardrobe whenever I inevitably change clothing sizes again.
One of the up sides to living in historic home in Florida is limited storage/closet space. We do have an attic and we do have a garage, so we have a little bit more flexibility when it comes to storage but when I buy a new pair of shoes I really have to consider donating an old pair b/c I just don't have the room in my closets for more.
While renting a storage locker can be useful in clearing some space, the rest of it depends on how you manage your items. It's true that there are many cases where people pay hefty fees for their storage lockers that have worthless items. So whether or not you rent a storage locker, you still need to organize your items and decide if it's worth the monthly dues that you have to pay.
General Store-All
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