Put it in the garage, they say. There’s some room in there, they say. Yeah sure, there’s maybe some space for it, but for how long and how much can the area take as more and more accumulates?
The plan for storage spaces has gone afoul. With storage facilities, we have the high cost of storing the things we can’t fit in your house. With garage storage, it’s all the unwanted items that no longer have a place in our house. With attic storage, it keeps all the stuff that we thought we should hang onto but don’t really need anymore.
All storage spaces are the same when it comes to a place to store a lot of our unused or unwanted things. And all of these places soon become the forgotten land of storage.
With the exception of document archives and some boxed keepsakes, most everything else is just resting in storage before we decide to bury it. That burial would be in terms of throwing out or donating.
I’ve been guilty of this. I want to get something out of the house but am not quite ready to get rid of it so that it’s 100% gone. Then after awhile, when I end up going through stuff in storage, I feel fine about getting rid of it. After all, I haven’t missed it after all the the passed time has gone by.
If I haven’t missed it, I won’t mourn over it when it’s gone, see?
The one thing I’ve noticed about people storing furniture that they’ve inherited from a family member is that they don’t want it in their house, but can’t let it go for sentimental reasons. So it sits in storage, unappreciated, not admired, and forgotten.
What value does that have?
I’ll tell you. The value of inherited furniture sitting in storage has completely lost its value. It has no value to you, and it might be depriving someone else who could value it for themselves if they had it.
I’ve known of people storing miscellaneous stuff in storage facilities for years without ever having looked at it or even know what’s in there. Since the monthly storage costs average $100/month or more, the math on storing those unknown things adds up to $1200/year. And after say, 5 years, you’ve just paid out $6000 to keep items that are probably not even worth a couple hundred.
That’s a lot of money to store unknown, forgotten and self inflicted over-valued stuff!
Storage spaces can be compared to the theme of the movie, Field of Dreams, quoting the famous line, “If you build it, he will come.” Because, similar to storage areas, we can say, “If it’s there, it will be be filled.”
To quote another famous line from the movie Jaws, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” that’s what you’ll need as more and more stuff accumulates.
After reading this, try to take a moment to re-evaluate the value of the things you have in storage. Save yourself more years of clinging onto things that you don’t even know exist anymore.
After giving closure to those items you can start arranging their funeral and finally say your good-byes.
