If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you’ll know by now that we’re mildly obsessed with Stuff Management. Moving it around, thinning it out, fitting it together like 3-D Tetris pieces (does 3D Tetris exist, BTW? Because my phone needs it.). We’ve moved CDs onto iPods, DVDs into three-ring binders, made monthly trips to Goodwill and the cashiers at The Container Store know RocketMan on sight. (No, RocketMan, there is not another Elfa sale until April.)
We’ve won some battles. But since RocketBaby came on the scene, we’ve been losing the war. Slowly but surely, as we stashed boxes under our bed, over the doorways, and in our closet, we’ve realized that we’re accumulating Stuff faster than we want to get rid of it. And assuming that, someday, we might move into a home with more than three digits’ worth of square footage, we’re not willing to give everything we don’t use daily to Goodwill.
So, at long last, we decided to rent a storage space. Given that we don’t have much stuff to begin with, and our overflow, at this point, consists of about twelve boxes—five of which are CDs, and two with empty DVD cases, two with baby and maternity clothes, and the rest with keepsakes and books—we started by asking friends about storing in their storage spaces and/or homes. One friend was fine with using some of her space, but I wasn’t crazy about the idea in general (when you don’t own a car, you’re already in hock to your friends, so nudging into their storage seemed overboard). RocketMan began looking into cheap storage spaces, and with the help of Yelp, found California Mini Storage.
City Car Share + Mini Storage = Urbanite's Dream
What’s Mini Storage, you ask? It’s small storage. Duh. Specifically, it’s 64 cubic feet of storage—4x4x4. Just enough, we figured, for our deep-storage odds and ends. The California Mini Storage folks aren’t too far from our apartment, located along the freeway in Potrero Hill; their office was clean, open, and the agent who helped us was enormously nice (I had a moment’s trepidation when she mentioned she’d been listening to the Dexter books while she waited for customers; listening to Dexter while managing a storage space seems like watching “Die Hard 2″ on a plane.); and best of all? $35 a month. Let me repeat: $35 a month to rent space in San Francisco. NOTHING costs $35 a month in San Francisco. Especially not space. But as the agent told us, the owner would rather have long-term renters than an extra $10 a month per unit, so he keeps the prices low.
So at the bargain price of $0.55 per cubic foot, we are now the proud renters of this:
 Down a dark hallway |
 A giant among boxes! |
I said mini, didn’t I? But we managed to fit all of our boxes in it, with half the space leftover for whatever else accumulates in the RocketSpace. Next in the box will likely be the infant carseat, which only has a few months’ life left in it before RocketBaby outgrows it.
32 more cubic feet to go!
Ahh…you’ve gone to the dark side! Kidding, of course. Sounds like you are saving the baby stuff for a possible #2. I did the same, and now that we know we are done with kids it is so freeing to give away/sell the infant stuff.