Monthly Archives: November 2015

Storing Temperature-Sensitive Items

ice-sculpture

Even climate control can’t save your ice sculpture.

There are a number of factors that need to be considered when deciding whether or not to rent a climate-controlled storage unit. If you are storing things like garden tools, bicycles, or holiday decorations, or are doing very short-term storage, temperature variation might not be very important. But if you are storing items with a great sentimental or monetary value, you might want to give serious thought to renting a climate-controlled unit.

Here are some materials that can be affected by extremes of temperature:

Wood (furniture) – can crack and warp from expanding and contracting as temperatures swing from extreme hot to extreme cold. Continue reading

Storage Unit Inventory

inventoryIn the last post we talked about how to organize your storage unit. You may recall the last tip offered was to make a diagram of the storage unit and note the location of items in the unit. This will indeed make your life easier, but now we are going to crank it up a notch: a complete inventory of your storage unit, stored in the cloud! How high-tech, 21st century hip is that!

And, of course, there’s an app for that. This article on Mashable.com discusses not only the benefits of doing an inventory of all your stuff, but also reviews eight home inventory apps that will allow you to upload photos and receipts and any other pertinent information about your items, then store it all safely in the cloud.

The beauty of this is that you can use these apps not only for home inventory, but also for storage inventory.  The importance of all this will become painfully clear if a hurricane blows through, or some other unavoidable disaster causes you to scramble to remember what you had and what it was worth.  If you want the best settlement from your insurance company, you need a thorough and complete inventory.

You don’t have to be an organization nut to see the sense in that!