3 Ways Self Storage Can Help You Downsize

Are you downsizing or rightsizing?

Perhaps you’re moving to a smaller place temporarily or you’re now an empty nester and want less house to care for. We even see people downsizing because they plan to travel for larger stints and would prefer to put their savings into travel instead of a mortgage. Whatever your reason for downsizing (or right-sizing), self-storage can help make the transition smooth and less stressful.

3 Ways Self Storage Helps You Downsize or Rightsize:

1. Making Moving Easier

When you live in less space, you have to be choosey with what you move with. This means you will likely be selling or donating a lot of items before you even move. But you’ll probably have a pile of things that you don’t want to part with, yet you also don’t want to move with. Enter self-storage! Think of it this way, you organize your things once, you move them to your self-storage unit once, and you still know that they are safe and you have access to them whenever you want. It’s the best of both worlds and it’s perfect for items that you might not need to access often.

The added bonus is that you don’t need to keep moving these items. Chances are, if you are downsizing, you will probably move again, as it’s normal for people to further ‘rightsize’ or decide to make a bigger lifestyle change. So, you’re saving yourself a lot of work by being organized with the first downsize.

2. Get Some Breathing Room

Self storage literally gives you the space you need, but one of the really nice benefits is that it gives you the time you need to make decisions on items. Think about everything you’re accumulated to date. There are likely a lot of emotions and history tied up in your things. For some people, it may be easy to part ways with their stuff quickly.  But for others, it’s not and time or help (or both) may be needed. Depending on the reason for downsizing their home, a person or family may not be emotionally ready to make decisions about what to do with all their personal belongings in time for their move.

If you need time, self-storage can give you the breathing room you need so that you can go through all your belongings properly at your own pace. It will also prevent you from making rash decisions and mistakenly throwing out or donating something that has real value to you or someone else in your family.  As you go through your belongings and require less self storage space, you can easily change your unit size to better match your needs. If you plan on storing books and photographs, read our blog post, What You Need to Know About Storing Photos & Books in a Storage Unit, to help keep these items safe and damage free.

3. Space for Seasonal Storage

Downsizing likely means you’re losing some precious extra storage space inside and outside your home, which is often used for seasonal storage. Seasonal items tend to be bulky so they take up space, plus they can be too expensive to re-buy each season, so it makes sense to keep them.  Having a self-storage unit solves this problem by giving you plenty of space to keep seasonal items, like summer chairs, gardening supplies, winter shovels, fall décor, Christmas décor, and everything in-between. If you’re sporty or outdoorsy, your storage unit is perfect to store your various sports gear or outdoor gear for whatever season.

Tips for Downsizing:

Now that we’ve covered how self-storage can help you make downsizing less stressful and easier, let’s get into some tips to help you navigate this process. With some planning, this can be painless!

Rent Your Self Storage Unit First

• If you rent your storage unit first, you’ll be able to start moving things into storage and get them out of your way.
• If you’re selling your home, you will probably have to “declutter” to stage your house anyways, so you can cover both aspects at the same time. This will also help you save on movers – if you already have items in your storage unit, that’s less for movers to move (and could lower your overall moving cost).

Pace Yourself

• Packing and moving is time consuming and it can feel draining.
• Try and take a few hours each day to chip away at your big project!
• Remember the 1% rule – just doing 1% more each day adds up pretty quickly.
• It can also feel good to go through each room and pick out the items you want to move into storage first, which helps you get organized.

Take Pictures

• When you’re touring the place you’ll be moving into, or thinking of moving into, take some pictures. This will help you remember exactly the size and space you will know have, and therefore what personal belongings can reasonably fit into your new home.
• You should always take pictures of your items in storage. We share this tip with all our customers because it really is a great reminder of what’s in your storage locker at any given time, and can help you find what you need quickly.

If you are downsizing consider self-storage, and if someone you know is downsizing, let them know how self-storage can help!  

Here at Storage Solutions, we have flexible contracts and affordable rates at both our Milton self storage facility and Woodstock self storage facility. We make renting easy too! You can rent a storage unit online from our website, or you can rent by text, phone or email.  You can also take an online tour of all the sizes of indoor and outdoor self-storage units we have for rent on YouTube.

Have any questions about renting self-storage? Contact us! And make sure you follow us on Instagram, Facebook & Twitter for self-storage tips & tricks and tips & advice on moving, staging your home, selling your home, decluttering, organizing your home and more!

Your friend in self-storage,

Storage Solutions