Storage units are like security blankets for baby nomads.
So many of us head out on the road with the core bits of our former stationary life crammed into a big “climate controlled” box somewhere, ready and waiting just in case nomadic life doesn’t work out.
For others, it is more about punting – putting off logistics that can be deferred until later in the rush to get out the door and on to the adventures ahead.
But almost inevitably – a few years down the road the money spent on storing so much “stuff” ends up exceeding the cost of replacing the bulk of it all.
The former security blanket turns into an anchor – a huge looming purging chore that needs to be handled to get out from under an annually increasing and increasingly annoying monthly bill.
We’ve seen this pattern with other long term nomads. After about 4-8 years on the road, they decide it is time.
Time to purge, and break free from storage.
When I hit the road over seven years ago, I was downsizing from a sizable two-bedroom San Francisco apartment to live in a tiny 16′ Tab Clamshell trailer.
Though I wasn’t planning to return to traditional life anytime soon, I was also considering mixing in overseas backpacking and other various adventurous pursuits. I was also intending to continue participating in Burning Man every year.
To maintain maximum flexibility, I set off with a storage unit deliberately designed to function as a walk-in-closet. I had bookshelves full of books I wanted to read, a media cabinet easily accessible filled with my DVD collection, a wardrobe and dresser set up to make it easy to swap out seasonal clothes, and a big area set aside for all my desert camping gear and Burning Man outfits.
The core logistical reason was to have a place to supplement the insanely small amount of space I would have.
And since I was going to keep a storage unit anyway, this made it easy to also utilize the rest of the space to store stuff I didn’t have time to go through or wasn’t ready yet to part with.
Since I only gave myself about 2 months from the time I decided to hit the road until I actually would – having a storage unit handy allowed me to (just barely!) make my goal.
That was then. And a storage unit used to honestly make a lot of practical sense.
But seven years have passed, Cherie and I have merged lives, we have a much larger mobile home now without nearly the need for seasonal swapping, and our routing and family priorities have made a west-coast storage unit something that we haven’t even been able to visit for over three years now.
After all – if you haven’t even seen something in three years – do you really still need it?
And even more pertinent, what started as a $75/month expense had slowly crept up to what was now $144/month!
This is the storage unit business model – they get your stuff packed away at a low rate, and then slowly “boil the frog” knowing that your stuff is held hostage. It is too valuable to easily walk away from, and too much of a chore to move to another location!
Fighting the Storage War!
Even though it had once served a practical purpose, I’ve been ready to get rid of my storage unit for years now.
But doing so isn’t a quick chore that can be handled in a day, or even a week.
We initially considered tackling the storage unit as one of our first stops after we bought the bus in 2011, but family needs had us wanting to keep our focus elsewhere. And ever since, we just haven’t been anywhere physically close enough.
We even considered flying out to try and handle it, but the logistics of doing so were just overwhelming and expensive – especially with everything else that was up in our lives.
Now at last was time. But we didn’t have much of it.
We set a very aggressive goal for our time in Sacramento – to completely clear out and eliminate the 10′ x 10′ storage unit… in just 2 weeks!
Why only 2 weeks?
Well, between extending our volunteer time at Cape Blanco Lighthouse and needing to get to Austin by Thanksgiving, it was just about all the time we wanted to provision for the chore.
Cherie also knows that I do best with intense deadlines so I can go into hyper focus mode, and I knew that she wouldn’t be able to survive much longer than that going stir-crazy in the gravel parking lot that is the CalExpo RV Park.
It was time to purge.
Tactical Attack
The easy way out would have been to just hand over the storage unit to an estate sale service, or even to auction off the entire contents ‘Storage Wars‘ style.
But this wasn’t just a bunch of random stuff – everything here had initially been stored for a reason.
I had already been through a huge purge when I set off to go nomadic, and another big one two years before that when I sold my house and moved to a San Francisco apartment.
The stuff that remained was the survivors – everything left meant something to me, or was there for some other reason.
I needed to go through everything personally one last time, and make decisions about what could be moved onboard the bus with us, what could be sold, what should be donated, what could I find new loving homes for, and what few treasures and mementos I wanted to get to my parent’s house (where Cherie already has a few similar boxes) for long term storage.
Immediately upon arriving in Sacramento we went straight to the storage unit. With such a short timeframe, there was no room for dilly-dallying – despite some fellow nuRV’er friends Bill & Debby staying in the same RV park.
We had very little time to be social – we had to get right to it.
Our first visit was mainly a triage – to remind ourselves after over three years away of what was actually there, and to determine if 2 weeks was even possible.
We loaded up a cart’s worth of stuff we knew for sure was destined for the donation center, and took some pictures of the larger furniture items so we could get them listed on Craigslist.
I also had decided it was time to part ways with my old parameter setup, so I took pictures to pass on to the local flyer’s mailing list. The collapsable flying machine had proven to be impractical to carry with us on the road, and had grown obsolete and was suffering from neglect.
On the way home from that first afternoon visit, we dropped the first loadoff at the local Goodwill. It felt good to have made a very small dent – and you have to start somewhere.
I spent the next seemingly endless days (just two weeks!) heading over to the storage unit every morning to sort through things.
I’d usually come back for an early dinner, and would often return to work right up until the storage unit closed each night at 10pm. As we have a wee Mini Cooper as our toad, I needed every last cubic inch of space to haul stuff to Goodwill or back to the bus for Cherie to start attempting to sell, so there were only a few days that Cherie was able to join me.
One of those times, we together hosted a live video chat from the nearly full storage unit:
I’d attack a box (or bookshelf) at a time, sorting through things and constantly shuffling stacks, usually photographing things as a way to mentally capture something as I physically released it.
It was a slow but steady process compressing down 40 years of life history. But really – what future employer is ever going to ask the see my elementary school diploma?!?!
Cherie did an incredible job coping with being stuck without transportation in a very non-scenic gravel lot at CalExpo, helping as best she could to manage Craigslist ads and coordinate communication. She researched values on things potentially worth selling later on eBay or Amazon, and as things overflowed into the bus she did an awesome job keeping herself (mostly) sane and our small space as minimally cluttered as possible. She also tackled some big projects of her own.
In the end – I made 12 car load trips to the donation station, and five trips to sell books at a local used book store.
We had several folks reach out wanting to meet up with us while we were in the area, and we unfortunately had to turn down any invitation that didn’t include ‘I’d like to buy your….’.
We were however able to manage some limited social time with old friends who took the time to travel up to Sacramento from San Francisco to take loads of treasured items back with them. Those were very meaningful breaks.
Three days before our 2-week goal, we knew that the end was in sight and we intentionally allowed ourselves to admit temporary defeat to take a sanity break. There was just no way we could keep this pace right up until the end. We were both exhausted, missing each other and Kiki, and Cherie was going stir crazy.
We took an entire day off from purging and spent the day together to recharge – mostly by napping and doing laundry.
We extended our stay in Sacramento by 3 nights to give us more time to handle everything. We knew we were in site of clearing out the storage unit by our 2-week goal, but not of also handling logistics to ship stuff to far-away friends, making final donation runs and packing everything into the bus.
So we were good with the knowledge that we had kept to the intention of a 2-week purge, and were still well on track for a non-rushed repositioning to Austin by Thanksgiving.
Friday afternoon, just 17 days after we landed in Sacramento – we picked up the final load from storage together, masterfully re-packed up the bus and even had time to host an impromptu ‘happy hour’ to meet some of the folks who had reached out to meet-up.
Here is a last-minute live video Q&A session we did from the EMPTY storage unit:
Our Tips for Purging
We have an article on purging in general to get ready to hit the road. After this experience, we’d like to add the following tips:
- Craigslist is great, but when on a limited time scale and working out of a gated storage unit complex – it is sometimes more annoying than useful. We did sell some stuff, but dealing with haggling customers and arranging meet-ups at the unit all the time made the experience less than satisfying.
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Our friend Karin came up to grab some treasures, and a quick lunch! For the same reason, using Freecylce wasn’t ideal. We’d still have to arrange meet-ups and take time away from purging to meet folks at the gate to let them in. Not to mention the effort of setting up a local Freecycle account, and still having to list & describe items. We knew enough to just skip this avenue if we were to keep the pace.
- The most surprising resource was using my personal Facebook page. I started out just photo documenting stuff I was purging to share it – but in the process I was able to discover a bunch of old friends down in the Bay Area (and some further afield) who would be happy recipients of the items. We found a lot of good homes this way, and were able to combine pick-ups with social time. Score.
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A ton of magazines, heading off to the Internet Archive! One thing I was dreading disposing of was my massive old computer magazine collection – some dating back to the early 80’s, and a whole lot of archives from when I was the Technical Editor of Imagine Publishing’s ‘boot’ Magazine. But via Twitter, I made contact with the Internet Archive project, and through them was able to find some awesome volunteers with a truck willing to take in the entire collection as a donation. Score!
- Take lots of photos – not just of the items you’re purging to create memories, but of your progress. Looking back at how the storage unit looked before we started helped remind us each day that we were indeed making substantial progress.
- Take enough time to check and see what some of your old stuff is worth – most books and DVD’s are worth surprisingly little, but rare titles that you might never expect can surprise you. And I never even imagined that there was a stock market that tracks the daily fluctuations of the prices of Legos!
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Day 17 – The bear and I.. almost there! Flip through things before you toss or donate them. I found $160 CASH hidden inside one old book! Score – there’s one month of storage unit fees instantly re-cooped.
- And most importantly – if you are spending 12 hours a day alone in a storage unit, it helps to have a stuffed bear to talk to. I don’t think I could have made it without him..
And… We Won!
The storage unit is completely empty – everything ended up sold, donated, gifted, shipped or stuffed into the bus.
Here is a brief photo time lapse showing the progress over 17 days of purging…
We feel accomplished to have done so much in so little time, and kept to our priority of doing it in a responsible way.
Whew.
Thank you and your audience for posting about storage. We’re RV newbs (and young-ish retirees) and still have a house. One of us (hint) wants to sell the big house now and the other still needs to store old PONG & gaming systems, and other tech treasures. 🙂
We’ll be hitting the road the end of October and will see if the “stuff” to which we’ve become enslaved is missed. I’m looking forward to a major spring cleaning, and home sale to downsize significantly. That seems to be the hardest transition right now…separating from the stuff, and anxiety in leaving the house unattended. Funny, we work so hard to get the stuff then stop working and can’t wait to unload it? We enjoy your blogs and articles, and gives us hope that we be FREE and unfettered one day. Happy life and trails!
Impressive work on downsizing the storage unit! Finding time to do all the sorting & distribution while documenting the whole process wasn’t easy! Bravo! 🙂
Lived in my Portland, OR home for 5 years & had to do a major purge before moving down to SoCal for my elderly father. Living with a hoarder made the job all the more stressful & exhausting. He was so neat & clean, the hoard was mostly hidden until I started packing to move.
I’m currently downsizing/eliminating my 10×10 storage unit ($130 Lost Angeles area). I’m not exactly a nomad, but the lifestyle sure looks attractive! I’ve moved many, many times which has kept my possession load relatively low.
I’m curious; how many people step into you home, glance up and around and say “Its bigger on the inside!”?
Almost everyone 🙂
Great job…when we first started fulltiming we ad a storage unit in NYC with our stuff…we kept it a year before we went back to go through everything we had…really ended up with very little stuf tat we taveled with…
As a Professional Organizer…I would have my clients make a memory book with photos of all the things they thought they needed telling them that it is really the memory that there things remind them of, not necessarily the item…it made it easier to get rid of their stuff…
Exactly.. so much of the stuff is a holder of memories. Making a photo journal is a fantastic way to move those memories to places easier to keep.
Great article! We had discussed getting a storage unit when we go fulltime, but thanks in part to your experience we won’t being doing that. We plan to eliminate everything when we sell our house. Fortunately, we really don’t have deep sentimental attachment to anything.
As Burners, though, that does present an issue. We do have plenty of costumes, plus a shade structure that takes up quite a bit of room. We may have to find someone to hold that for us. I’ve also heard that some people rent out shared storage space for Burners in the Reno area.
Our debate right now is whether we should take some of the money from selling our home and purchase a small bit of low-maintenance desert acreage in Tucson, where we will return often. It would give us a place to park for awhile, and there’s just some sort of security with owning real estate for us. On the other hand, our money may be better served in another type of investment. We certainly don’t want to worry about taking care of property while traveling. Thoughts?
We’ve only been tempted to buy property once in our travels, and that was when my father first fell ill in Florida and all the RV Parks in the area were full up for the winter season. We toyed with the idea of buying property nearby that we could park the bus on, so we could help out with his care taking better. Thankfully we found other solutions.
Some nomads find it worthwhile to have property somewhere. But honestly, recommend getting out there and discovering how you travel and where you end up frequenting (unless you know without a doubt that you’ll be returning, then it might make sense). In our 7 years on the road, we really wouldn’t be able to narrow down where we’d want property, because there are few places we return to routinely and long enough to merit the expense. But with all our parents in Florida, we may very well one day find it worthwhile to pick a central spot to base ourselves at.
You can always buy property later.
That’s kind of where our argument is going as well…hold off on buying again for awhile.
Around here (D/FW & Denton, Tx), rates for storage units vary wildly. There are 2 determining factors — how accessible the storage site is to a university or to high density housing. I think both ultimately relate to avoidance of decision making and to a certain extent wishful thinking about reuse/recycling versus throwing away things.
And, of course, yhere will never be another Amiga (that’s not to ignore my KIM, or SX-64, or PalmPilot).
– e3
i can oh so relate to this post. My wife and i manage a storage facility in edmonton, alberta, canada. What you went through i see every day. We recently had an auction (just like storage wars on tv) only this IS reality, not staged. We had one unit over 450 sq ft go for nine hundred dollars. The individaul who lost the unit had it for approx 14 years and i estimate he had paid over 60,00 thousand dollars in rent!!. I think what i see is people having that emotiona contact to their stuff, they have difficulty letting go. They store it, then after awhile, it becomes another bill and its outta sight, outta mind. Rather sad to see in some cases. I agree with your statement if you havent seen or used it in three years, do you really need it, but i cut that down finer to six months. Anyways, with our digital world, i agree with you. If you can’t take it with you, take a picture, like that fifth place trophy of yours, and then carry is around on a disc…less space, less weight, and kudos to you for tackling this, and on time. Always easier to tell someone something than to actually have to do it yourself.Enjoying your blog and by the way, my wife and i hope to been on the road early 2015, and yes, i have a storage unit,only i don’t have to pay for it right now due to an employee perk, but believe me, we have no plans on keeping it or alot of our stuff when we hit the road. 🙂 Cheers
Thanks for the awesome comment from someone who has seen the storage world from the inside.
I’m curious if you could share any about how storage units are priced.
In the end I was paying $144/mo for the 10′ x 10′ unit that I had, which when I moved in was $75/mo. On the storage unit website though they list the 10′ x 10′ rate as $115/mo, with a $98/mo “online special” price.
If the standard price is now $115/mo, why were they charing me $144/mo?
Seems shady to me – is this just how the storage industry operates?
– Chris
Holly Molly what a job!!! Congrats on making it through! We are headed to Dallas in December to get rid of our last few boxes…should be fun(or not). 🙂
Seems we are traveling across the country at a similar pace, just at slightly different latitudes. 🙂 Best wishes on the last of your purge!
The energy that you share is liberating as well as inspiring. Shopping just isn’t the same anymore and I’m starting to dread Christmas. Converting to nomadism is turning Jess and I into foodies since that’s all you really ever own.
Oh yes.. retraining loved ones about gift giving once you’re mobile is part of the journey. You might appreciate this article:
https://www.technomadia.com/2012/11/gift-giving-guide-for-full-time-rvers/
Congrats! Now, the key is not to accumulate more. That’s one of my life challenges. I’d say I’ve spent the last six years purging in all kinds of ways and am almost at the end. Almost.
Thankfully, living in a rolling 275 sq ft home helps a lot with avoiding accumulating more stuff.
Just discovered you guys and loving all the information. As Burners, we too have a lot of stuff that takes up room and is only needed on the playa. How have you managed with all that equipment?
We managed it by buying a bus as our home on wheels.. it’s all we need to thrive on the playa 🙂 A day at Burning Man is just another day on the road to us.
Congratulations! Been there, done that! After three years of ignoring the storage unit, it took us two months with weekend garage-type sales, donations, and piles of freebies in front of the rig to close it out.
It’s such a chore.. but so nice when its all done.
Bring the Amiga stuff with you to Florida, I’ll take it 🙂
Though I purged a lot of old Amiga things (like my Emplant Mac emulation board), I still have the A1000 and some classic software. I also have the ‘Deathbed Vigil’ videotape made by employees to document the final days of Commodore before the bankruptcy.
I was a huge Amiga fan right until the end, and beyond.
It is always great to geek out about Amiga with others who knew just how special those machines were!
– Chris
Haha except I am the enemy! I am an Atari guy. I have in my storage unit a 520 ST, 2 Mega STe’s, 2 TT’s a boosted Falcon, and the only thing I brought with me is a firebee which is a coldfire based atari clone computer that is quite small. In my final days though I did come across a boxed Amiga 500 for free and a stack of 4 Amiga 2500’s, one of which is confirmed working. I stored the whole lot upside down since I heard the capacitors leak and destroy the boards. I also have a 350 pound IBM iSeries server. Being a computer geek is not always nomad friendly!
Woo Hoo!! Congratulations! You are inspiring.
Thank you.. Chris really did rock it!
Wow. Thats awesome that you went down to nothing. We just went through our stuff in storage yesterday. We switched out kids clothes for the winter months, more jeans and long sleeves and sweaters and they swapped out some of their beloved stuffed animals. We picked up a heater for the bus and I grabbed some tools I had been missing. We also took the time to empty out our bays and reorganize. Most of the stuff we have in storage is clothing, furniture and kitchen/bath/house stuff that we have found over the years and didnt want to get rid of (we may be back in a house before the kids get through high The school). Because none of our stuff needed to be “refrigerated” we just bought a trailer and it makes it real easy to move, store and access (There is a side door and back ramp to get in and out) I think a trailer is a great option for anyone out there that needs to move their stuff and wants to save a few dollars a month. The hardest thing about downsizing is letting go of all those memories. And you’ll rarely get the money you think your stuff is worth. Once you let go though it is so freeing!
-Sean
I remember you sharing about your storage trailer before, and that does sounds like a great idea to have a mobile storage unit. You can always have it towed to where you are!
Looking forward to seeing how that works out for you guys as time goes on. So much of our stuff saved were things that the elements would have sped up the deterioration process (like magazines, photos, media, etc.) – and I’d be so worried about someone just driving off with everything.
Cherie- We have a lock that goes in the ball hitch of the trailer so no one could just hook up to it unless they spent a few hours with a rotozip or dremel trying to take it off. You can also place a bike lock on the tire.
So utterly impressed with your 2 week purge. You guys totally rocked it! One day, when we purge our unit, we’ll come back to this post for inspiration.
Nina
And we know the perfect place to recharge afterwards… 😉
NO!!!! Not the Amiga… 🙂 Good job guys!
You’ll be happy to know.. the Amiga is stuffed in the bus. 🙂
Congratulations on getting out of storage! We’ve gone from two units to one, but the one is full of stuff I just can’t part with. I’ve paid more in storage than it would cost to replace, but the sentimental value of some of it keeps me paying for it. The biggest bummer is that it’s in South Carolina, and we are orbiting the West Coast. Eventually we’ll be old and rickety and will have to settle somewhere, so at that point I guess we’ll go get it, or have it shipped.
For me – the trick to getting rid of things with sentimental value was to take good pictures of them, committing them forever to digital memory. And I also kept a decent sampling of things too, particularly of smaller things that are easy to store without needing a storage unit.
And of course – the best thing I found to do with things with sentimental attachment is to find friends or family who can love them and take custody – carrying on their stories.
Stuff sitting in storage ends up slowly rotting away. In some case, literally! I had an old giant batik pillow that I had loved for 30 years, but when I picked it up in the storage unit the fabric had become like tissue paper!
– Chris