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My apartment is a pretty small two bedroom, one bathroom unit and, until now, I had one of the bedrooms set-up as my office which I used to work, make my videos, play around with my retro-computers and stuff and, being a retro-computing, retro-gaming and tech enthusiast in general, you can imagine I own A LOT of stuff, definitely a lot more than it would be sane for an apartment the size of mine.
And now that we had a baby, little Atlas, we need to start thinking where we are going to put him once he outgrows the bassinet in our bedroom, we definitely want Atlas to have more space for him to play and also eventually learn to sleep on his own in a room that is not ours.
Because of that, sacrifices are going to have to be made, which means we are going to turn the small office room into the baby room. The room will still have a small workspace because I need a place to actually do my day job as I work from home and I want to at least have my Unraid server and desktop computer in the house and there's no other place for those things.
This means I won't be able to have all of the stuff I had in the office inside of the apartment, which will make working on hardware projects and making YouTube videos extremely difficult. On top of that, not being able to have my own space in my house is a huge bummer.
So I was trying to look for a solution and my first idea was to rent a small office somewhere not too far from my place where I can also have my setup so I can still work on my projects, make videos and maybe work from (not too far being key so it doesn’t defeat the purpose of working from home). But I quickly realised that living in Sydney, Australia, that’s not an option as rental prices of even crappy tiny offices are too high, and now with the Baby, my wife being on maternity leave and after we renovated the apartment, money is really tight (those are also reasons why I haven’t been active on projects and on Youtube).
Then I remembered I saw a video a long time ago where Clint from LGR was saying that a lot of his work was done from Self-Storage units, which I thought could be the solution for me to have a dedicated workspace again. So I contacted a few places, got some quotes but then I realised that, even though that option is a lot cheaper than renting an office, it is still not very feasible at the moment.
First, prices are not as low as they are in America as we don’t have the same level of competition and we don’t have a lot of mom and pop owned storage facilities. On top of that, a lot of places don’t have powered units, meaning they don’t have a light or a power outlet available. Some places give you the option of having it installed but you have to pay an initial fee of 600 to 800 dollars to hire an electrician and you have to pay another 20 to 40 bucks a month on top of the rent for the electricity usage.
So, at that point it was pretty clear that I am not going to have a dedicated workspace/office for a while, so then I started considering renting a smaller storage unit just to keep my things while I’m in this situation, and that’s when I had the thought: If I do that, I’ll be paying monthly, what could amount to tens of thousands of dollars in a few years, just for the privilege of owning my stuff.
My dad has always been the kinda guy who preached not being a slave to our material possessions, he thinks it’s awesome to own cool stuff, but if that stuff is starting to take over your life or if it doesn’t have a purpose, then you should consider getting rid of it. I honestly never followed that philosophy and I am a bit of a slave to all of my stuff. I find it really hard to part ways with things, especially things that I have plans for, like a lot of my computer parts and retro games, even if it might take years for me to actually do something with them.
But paying monthly just for the privilege of keeping those things is a level of being a slave to my stuff that even I am not comfortable with. The idea of losing money just to have a bunch of things tucked away in some storage facility collecting dust is kinda sad. All that stuff there, for years, no one being able to enjoy them, and the likelihood of me going out of my way to pick up things there to work on individual projects then putting them back when I’m done, especially with ADHD is very low. Those things will be forgotten there until I’m able to move to a bigger place where I can bring all of it with me.
I would be happy to rent a storage unit if I could make it into a workspace that I could actually work on those things and other projects, but if I’m just storing things, at that point I might as well part ways with them so someone else who will actually use them can enjoy them.
When I was visiting one of the storage facilities to see what options they had, I overheard this old lady, maybe in her 70’s mentioning she had two storage units. I understand this is kinda dark, but at such an advanced age, with a lot of luck you have what? Another 20 years? And are those 20 years going to be of extreme health and lucidity?
If it was me, I’d be asking myself what’s the point of keeping all of these things when I’m so close to death, when it’s likely I won’t be able to enjoy them anymore at all and at best it’s more items for my family to sort through after I’m gone and at worst it’s items for the storage facility to auction out when the payments stop coming in.
I know there are perfectly justifiable reasons for renting storage units, like if you are between houses and you need to temporarily put your stuff somewhere while you sort things out, or you have a business and you need a cheap place to store inventory, for example. And those are reasons where I’d probably be happy to rent storage for.
But paying to keep items and “memories” somewhere, away from your home just so you know that you can still access it if you want to, even though you’ll probably never do it, that’s pretty sad.
So where does this leave me now?
Well, right now I’ve put some shelves in my garage and I’ll store more immediate items like computer parts, video game console things and tools there so I can more easily access them if I find a way to still work on my videos and projects and, luckily, my mother in law has a storage cage in her apartment building that we lined with tarp to reduce the amount of dust going in. She let me store some of my stuff there for free as she doesn’t use the whole space, so I'll keep some more secondary stuff and things that I want to keep for when I upgrade to a house (assuming I could even do that in this economy) - basically, all things that I still have active plans for.
“So you’re keeping stuff that you might not touch for a LONG time?”… well, yeah, but the key is, I’m not paying for the privilege of owning those things. And I’ll have to prioritise what I really care about, which means that the overflow, the stuff that won’t fit in both places, well… I have already put some of them on Facebook Marketplace and I’ll have to put more.
