Why rent self storage?

There are many good reasons to store furniture and other items in a self storage unit – read about a few of them on this page!

Unfortunately, all our lives are finite, and a common need for self storage arises when you unexpectedly inherit property. Here's why: Suppose you have an aunt whom you meet every few months, you like each other, she is getting older, and the other family relationships are, shall we say, complicated. It happens. Your aunt passes away unexpectedly, and in her will, she has named you as the sole heir.

All at once, provided you accept the inheritance, you are the owner of a 60s sofa set, three wardrobes filled with women's clothes from the 70s, an older but lovingly maintained kitchen, and belongings filling around 40 removal boxes. What's more, the tenancy agreement for your aunt's flat expires in 10 days. So what do you do?

For many heirs, this is naturally a painful situation. On the one hand, you have to cope with it emotionally. On the other hand, dealing with official procedures is burdensome enough – notifying authorities of a death is a huge task in itself, let alone organising a funeral, and then you are expected to go through their belongings and decide what to keep as the last memories of a loved one and what to throw away?

Many people simply don't have the heart to do that right away. All those smells. The coat you huddled under as a child during that one outing when it started raining? No, not yet. Understandably, many people don't have the strength for that. And so, often driven by the time pressure to clear the flat, many inheritances temporarily end up in a self storage unit using a removal company to carefully pack and transport the items, until time and emotion allow you to deal with them.

A similar situation occurs when someone dies intestate, which happens surprisingly often even in societies that tend towards structure, like German-speaking ones. The executor then has to step in and often first find out if there is any family at all, and if so, who the next heir is.

So it can happen that a 3th degree nephew and a first cousin who haven't seen each other in 20 years suddenly meet in a notary's office and only then learn of their uncle's death. Until then, the executor must look after the assets. From then on, the heirs must handle it. In this case, all three suddenly have an unplanned need for self storage.

Or you simply do not want to give away this collection of mementos. You want to keep them and know they are there. As if a beloved pet, a cherished aunt, or an endlessly kind grandmother were not lost forever, but had simply moved away, and you can visit a place where you can at least see their things to remember them whenever you wish.

Especially in big cities with older building stock, space is often at a premium, even if you have a cellar. Perhaps you've seen something like this before.

Sometimes, after walking down 40 old, rickety, dimly lit steps, finding the key in the dark corridor amidst rat droppings, poison traps, cobwebs and caterpillars, opening the creaking door and risking your life to press the switch for the 40-year-old 20 W bulb... you find yourself standing before a mould biotope that should actually be a protected nature reserve.

Decades of undisturbed growth, darkness, and constant humidity have created metres-long carpets of mould that are almost beautiful in their disgustingness. Cleaning, drying out, plastering these basements and then creating proper access is often "not in the budget" for property owners. Usually it's not even worth it, because you can't keep the moisture out anyway – it always comes back.

And then you have the security problem – you can't properly secure that 100-year-old wooden door. Especially in major cities, there are basements accessible via entrances known only to insiders, which often serve as a place to sleep for people who have nowhere else to go. And no matter how sad that is – when you put your things somewhere, you don't want anyone else quietly rummaging through them to see if there's anything valuable. So if the basement is unsuitable, the solution for a need for extra space is often a self storage unit nearby.

Period buildings with pre-war pipes, brittle lead or cheap plastic pipes installed in the 70s, broken washing machines on the 4nd floor of an old building, water connections without pressure relief valves, freezing water in the pipes... the list of possible causes is long. And one day you come home, and if you're lucky in all the bad luck, you still have the chance to get a removal company to fetch your belongings and store them temporarily in a self storage unit.

If you're unlucky, your collection of favourite old CDs comes floating towards you, destroyed forever. Water damage is another reason why you might unexpectedly need to rent a storage unit – after all, what's the alternative: leave your things sitting in water and just wait to see what happens?

Isn't love a wonderful thing – two people find each other, get to know each other, want to spend more and more time together, and so eventually moving in together comes up. It has its advantages too: you only pay electricity, running costs and rent once, you share the housework (hopefully), and you only have to cook half as often.

However, the area of the new flat often doesn't equal the exact sum of the two old flats – you're essentially downsizing, and then it's a physical impossibility to fit ALL the furniture and ALL the belongings of both parties into the new flat.

So you sort through everything carefully, and furniture you do not currently need, along with items used only occasionally, are moved to a self storage unit in one go. Rumor has it that the vast majority of belongings stored this way belong to the male partner, who (almost exclusively) has to move his items into a storage unit—though these remain unconfirmed reports.

A self storage provider who wishes to remain anonymous once told us about a customer: The customer was single and went abroad for his company for 2 years. For that period, he self-stored his belongings with the provider. When he returned from abroad, he was married, and the young couple looked for a flat and furnished it completely anew.

According to him, quite happily. Whether his wife knows about it isn't recorded, and if she doesn't and finds out one day, she'll probably be quite displeased, but the customer still has his stored single-household items – just in case. Because should the marriage not last, well, he can fully furnish a small flat within hours. He essentially has a backup plan.

Unfortunately, relationships also end. Sometimes not so unfortunately – not every lid fits every pot. In any case, once the shared foundation has unfixable cracks, you usually no longer want to share your living space, so at least one party has to move out.

However, short-term budget for the new rent, available space in the new flat, emotionally tolerable timeframe and the volume of belongings in m3 don't always align perfectly, and once again you reach the point where you need more storage space than you have available.

In cases like this, self storage is ideal: you can store belongings flexibly at short notice and retrieve them one by one, or all at once when you've found a better long-term place to live.

And then there are those couples who are, well, a bit special. Those who haven't yet found the right distance between each other – talking about closeness is often misleading.

Such couples often split up with great drama and waves across social networks online and offline, realise they miss each other if they can't tell the other person every hour how much they hate them, the distance increases the relationship gravity, they attract each other like two black holes, collide again, and so on.

Self storage is also perfectly suited for this lifestyle, which is often observed in big cities: the person moving out can wait 2–3 weeks to see if the bond between them was just stretched rather than broken, without entering into a new lease or making a major investment, provided a friend lets them crash on their sofa for a few weeks.

Our world is getting smaller – from a data perspective. The economy is increasingly interconnected: when a pint of beer is emptied in Bavaria, a Japanese person gets a headache the next day. And this global economy needs expertise in specific locations and can't or won't wait until someone local is found with the same qualifications as someone from elsewhere.

Be it an experienced electrician for high-rise wiring on an assignment who has to go from Vienna to Hamburg, a bottling plant specialist called from Lausanne to Munich (though the reverse example would make more sense), or a SAP programmer sent from Karlsruhe to Zurich, the questions are always the same:

How long will I be here? Does it make sense to get a large, expensive flat? Will I even like it here? If the company at the new address does well: will they need me here longer? On top of that, rental prices naturally differ massively: what an East German waiter in Leipzig could afford gets him at most a post office box in St. Moritz, while a rural Austrian inquiring about rents in Frankfurt asks about housing benefit first.

These highly specialised professionals from elsewhere who move abroad for an indefinite period are called expats. And the more international the city, the more of them there are. In these cases too, it often makes sense to rent a storage unit both at home and at the destination – to see how things develop first and settle in gradually.

Marco Polo. Columbus. Sir Francis Drake. The scent of unknown spices. The thrill of exploring the unknown. Seeing new colours, taking new paths, discovering new tastes and cultures. Often bacterial ones too. Few things broaden your horizons as much as a stay abroad: you gain new respect for other cultures, learn your own strengths and weaknesses, and discover more about what you actually want.

Many people, especially young adults, but in recent years increasingly young families too, follow this trend and go abroad for 6 or 12 months.

Yet they still need somewhere to store their belongings, even if they sublet their flat, for example. Here, a storage unit is the ideal solution to keep items clean, dry and, above all, safe from temporary tenants. Once the stay abroad is over, you can return to your own home.

In the interest of personal, mental hygiene, you should declutter your possessions every few months – so say many smart guidebooks. Clothes you no longer wear, books you no longer need, DVD and CD collections you haven't listened to in ages, the guitar you haven't picked up in years: everything should go.

But what if you DON'T want to completely part with your things just yet? What if taking a break makes sense? What if the next Eric Clapton goes through an existential crisis before their big breakthrough and only starts playing again 6 months later?

Self storage is ideal so that the world isn't deprived of talent, and so you don't always have to rip off the emotional plaster all at once. You can test what it feels like to live without a surfboard in the kitchen, without throwing away the only 2,5-metre-long piece of dusty fibreglass proving that Dad was once a wild one.

Every young family's dream... a home of their own. Ideally a new build, a blank canvas where you can help design everything yourself! Choosing the colours yourself! Defining the floor plan yourself! The large windows! How much do those cost? The normal windows! Many couples and families take the step from renting to buying property and commit to fixed dates. On THIS date they have to leave their old flat. On THIS date the terraced house will be ready. Honestly! Promise! Has any construction company ever failed to finish on time?

Well, as it turns out, the vast majority. In these cases, you get everything from partially habitable, to mostly habitable but still without heating and tradespeople in the house daily from 6:00 to 15:00, to "We're staying with Grandma for 2 weeks". Here again, a storage unit is the ideal buffer storage for all the furniture and personal belongings that don't have a place yet.

Unfortunately, there are also cases where people living in a happy relationship, where thankfully nobody has passed away, who don't need to move abroad and are actually quite content, are forced to move out. Be it due to a fire that didn't affect their own 4 walls directly, but compromised the structural integrity of the building.

Be it due to ruthless property speculators driving tenants out of older buildings, or rents being raised so high that you simply can't keep up and have to move out.

In these situations too, when there's a temporary need for space, self storage is ideal as an intermediate solution to store furniture temporarily.

A self storage operator once told us about a customer, a young guy around 20. He had just moved into his first flat, had a secure apprenticeship, a bit of cash saved up, and his friends had arranged to come over for drinks that evening. There was no sofa in the living room yet, so he rushed off to the furniture store at 9 to find one.

He finds one, it fits perfectly, and the delivery service is completely free – yes, we can deliver it right away. Turns out a delivery service isn't a removal company: they only deliver to the kerbside, not to the 4th floor of an old building.

To get the -75% real leather one-off item upstairs, he needs a furniture lift. Unfortunately, those only come with a specialist operator who won't just wait around for a call. So the young man had to have the sofa transported to a self storage unit – for more money than the sofa actually cost. But it gets even better:

When a team with a furniture lift was finally available 2 weeks later and hoisted the beast through the window into the flat, the sofa was so wide that the only possible way to set it up completely blocked the door. But the young man, remaining consistent at least, had the sofa taken back to self storage and looked for a new flat.

You are moving from one flat to another, but for some reason you cannot use the whole flat just yet: the owner wants to use one room as storage for another month because they have run out of space, a room still needs painting, the bathroom is being re-tiled, or the parquet in the living room hasn't been sanded down yet because the specialist fell ill at short notice. In these cases, self storage offers a temporary buffer where you can store excess furniture.

Especially when the pressure is high, the desire for a nicer home grows quickly. In big cities, there are unfortunately more noisy neighbours simply because there are more neighbours and people live closer together.

At 21, you're happy to have found a cheap flat right in the nightlife district; by 30, you're already planning weekend trips to avoid street festivals; by 35, you can't take it any longer and your patience is exhausted. Noise causes stress, and too much stress reduces concentration, sleep quality, ability to work, and ultimately life expectancy.

So it is no surprise that a significant proportion of furniture storage happens because someone is moving due to noise, or simply wants a nicer place to live. After years in a concrete jungle looking straight into the opposite living room, you finally get a bit more light, higher up, or even in an attic flat. After years next to a student hall, you finally get a small garden with just 3 adjacent neighbour where there used to be 400.

Often, the new layout, available space, and required space do not match here either, and you want to rent a cheap storage unit as an interim solution. Self storage provides a solution for this too.

Particularly those who come from the countryside themselves and have a larger family know the phenomenon: once someone takes the step to the big city and isn't swallowed up by it right away, but on the contrary seems to be doing quite well, suddenly other family members announce themselves who also want to go to university, complete further training, or look for a job.

Often to the dismay of their partners, the sofa is suddenly blocked for weeks, and you get to know your relatives up close and personal through the shared bathroom, fridge, and other live-action habits in a way you never really wanted.

Many of these late arrivals first store a large part of their belongings in a self storage unit before finding a suitable flat—especially if the decision to go to college was spontaneous, school starts in a few days, and the housing market turns out to be tougher than expected.

Another kind of addition can also create a space issue where there was none before. The small home office is suddenly a nursery, the ambitiously equipped "home gym" is now in the hallway—it is surprising how such a small person can need so much space so quickly. The furniture that has to make way temporarily, but of course also the fitness equipment whose transport often represents its first contact with sweat, are in safe hands in a self storage unit.

A lovely reason for a temporary need for space is the renovation of your own 4 walls. If the cellar isn't enough, your living room furniture, sofa, chest of drawers, etc. simply have to go into a rented self storage unit until the walls shine in new paint, the new floor is professionally laid, or a partition wall is put up.

Another popular reason for urgent storage needs is holidays. It has been known to happen that people return home with more luggage than they left with. On the other hand, there are also seasonal items you simply don't need all year round. The skis that are used for one week a year.

The surfboard, bodyboard, kiteboard, kite, sail, snowboard, snowboard or ski boots, winter sports clothes, summer sports clothes – well, maybe not those so much. But you want to know all these items are safe until you need them again, and renting a self storage unit is perfect for that.

A final and extremely sad reason for an urgent need for space is natural disasters. Floodwaters have reached the basement or living room. A storm has sent a roof tile, or worse, a tree against a window. Lightning has crippled all the building services, or leaking roofs allow water from a days-long storm to penetrate.

Fortunately, in these cases there is the option to quickly and easily switch to a self storage unit, keeping your valuable personal belongings safe from damage.