There are many reasons why people opt for short-term storage solutions. Whether a storage unit is meant for student storage or used during a busy house move, anyone can benefit from a storage unit near Mountain View . Many people may think that a storage unit is only meant to hold items for long-term storage, but short-term storage units can also be very helpful and economical.

Long-Term Visitors

Your child may be coming home from college for the summer, you may have out-of-town family or an elderly parent living with you for a few months, or you might even be hosting an exchange student. There are many types of long-term visitors that would warrant the need for extra space. Whether you store your extra furniture and boxes or your visitors store theirs, a short-term storage unit will definitely come in handy.

Relocation

Many homeowners need a storage unit rental for the few weeks or months they are between houses during a relocation. Others may choose a storage unit so they do not have to feel rushed to move furniture and possessions from the old house to the new house. Using a storage unit can help relieve a lot of pressure to organize and decorate your new home right away.

Downsizing

When the kids go off to college, parents are usually left with a large house and no one to fill it anymore. Parents tend to downsize into a smaller house, but they may still be left with the furniture, decorations, and clothes that filled the bigger house. For many people, these items are filled with years of memories, so they opt for short-term storage while they decide how to proceed.

Renovations

If you have decided to update your kitchen, bedrooms, or your entire house, then you need somewhere to put all of your furniture and decorations. You do not want these items getting dirty, dusty, or damaged during the renovation. Whether the renovation will take several weeks or several months, consider heading to your local storage facility for short-term storage.

Before loading up your storage unit , you need to be sure that your fragile possessions are packed correctly. If you leave your mirrors and artwork in a precarious packing situation, they may become damaged during the move into your self-storage unit in Mountain View. Watch this video and continue reading to learn a few strategies for safely packing your fragile mirrors and artwork.

• Purchase the right type of boxes. There are specially-made boxes sized for mirrors and artwork.
• Make sure the bottom, sides, and top of each box has cushioning.
• Wrap your mirror or artwork in bubble wrap or packing paper. Be sure that the packing material is safe to use with artwork.
• Label the box and mark it as fragile. Do not forget to add it to your storage unit inventory list.
• Look for high-quality storage units that offer climate control. This can help protect stored artwork.

Storing items is a great way to keep them safe without taking up valuable space in your home. You’ve made the decision to rent a high quality storage unit in Palo Alto, but you need to know exactly what you can, and cannot, keep in your new storage unit.

For the most part, almost anything can go in a storage unit rental. This means that your possibilities are endless as long as it can fit in the unit. However, there are only a few kinds of products that can’t be stored no matter their size. If you’re storing something toxic or living, such as chemicals or an animal, then you need to look elsewhere for storage. The same goes for edible items and flammable products. These are all potential hazards, either to the people or items in the storage facility. Your storage facility might have further restrictions on their units, but these are the most common. Always follow the rules of your facility.

Moving items into your first self-storage unit in Palo Alto can be a stressful time. Usually you’re moving or downsizing your home, and you might already feel frazzled. Don’t let yourself get caught in common, yet less-known, mistakes when packing your storage unit for the first time.

Not Enough Room for the Moving Truck

Whether you’re using a professional moving company or your own group of friends, make sure the moving truck will fit through the aisles and roads of the self-storage facility. To make room for as many units as they can, storage facilities may have tight corners and narrow aisles, big enough for a standard truck, but not a professional moving truck. If the truck may not fit well through the facility, ask if there is another entrance closer to your storage unit rental. If the truck won’t fit, ask the moving company what their options are for transporting your furniture and possessions from the truck through the facility to the unit.

Not Providing Direction

You need to give your movers directions, not just to the facility, but for moving your personal objects. Planning ahead is one of the foundations of moving effectively. You need to tell your movers exactly where to put your kitchen supplies or bedroom furniture in the storage unit. This is going to save them a lot of frustration and you a lot of unneeded stress when you’re trying to find something later. Movers, professional or personal, can’t read your mind, so you need to provide clear, organized direction.

Not Having Enough Space in the Unit

There’s almost nothing worse than packing everything up to go in the storage unit and finding out the unit isn’t big enough for what you have. The best ways you can combat this annoyance is to heed the advice of the storage facility and measure your belongings. If everything is in boxes or large furniture, judging how big of a unit you’ll need will be easier, but when in doubt, rent a bigger unit.

You’re newly married and exquisitely happy with each other, but then you notice the extras that come from merging two households. Professional storage services near Mountain View may be just what you need to keep your sanity as you merge your lives and your belongings. Here are some helpful ideas of how you can use a self-storage unit to make your newly married lives easier.

Storing Instead of Selling

If you’re both bringing your own couch, bed, and dining room table to your new space, then you might start arguing over which piece of furniture you should keep and which to sell. When you start fighting over something as small as a couch, consider storing it instead. You can make a deal to switch out the furniture once a year, or just get the piece you’re fighting over out of the house for a few months to get some space. Whatever your reason, using a storage unit rental to help calm the waters may be just what you need.

Storing Seasonal Items

For the most part, when you move it’s probably during a particular season. You’ll have the clothes you’re planning on wearing regularly, but you also have those winter or summer clothes that won’t be touched for the next several months until the season changes. Instead of stressing over where to fit these unneeded clothes, store them. After you’ve been in your new home, with your new spouse, for a few months, you will have the time to find the space for your extra clothes. Or, in the case of seasonal clothes, you can switch out seasons every few months to continue saving space.

Storing as a Means of Organizing

Have you ever heard the organizing adage, “if you don’t use it after a year, get rid of it”? Using your self-storage unit can help you make those decisions. When merging two homes, you both can store items you don’t use often and see if you miss them. If you don’t miss them, toss them.

When you’re packing up boxes to put in your storage unit rental in Mountain View, you should know the correct way to make sturdy boxes. You’ve spent the time and money packing your self-storage unit, so you should spend the time taping your boxes correctly.

When you watch this video, you can see that more goes into taping up the box than just slapping a piece of tape on it. You’ll end up using five individual lines of tape to secure your box for the storage unit rental. Each piece of tape supports the bottom of the box, so your personal possessions are protected. Once you’ve created a strong box for your personal items, don’t forget to stack them correctly in your self-storage unit. This will help you keep it organized when you need to return.

How to Tape Moving Boxes

Are you worried about packing up the glassware from your kitchen and placing it into a self-storage unit ? It’s not as difficult as you might think, and as long as you use plenty of packing paper, your glasses will survive their trip to your storage unit rental in Palo Alto. Watch this video to see the best ways to pack glasses up for storage.

Before you start packing glasses, you should obtain dish pack boxes that are designed to handle glassware. You should also purchase packing paper to wrap your glassware up. You can then begin the process of preparing each of your glass items for your self-storage unit. By taking these simple steps, you can keep your glasses safe once they are placed into your self-storage unit to be stored.

How to Pack Glasses for Moving

If you are preparing for a move or heading home from college for the summer, you could benefit from renting a storage unit . It doesn’t matter if you only need a high-quality storage unit in Mountain View for a month or two.

Independence Storage would love to work with you, and we don’t place any restrictions on how long our customers have to rent a self-storage unit from us.

There are many advantages to renting a short-term self-storage unit. It can help you clear out your home when you’re trying to sell it. It can also make it easier for you to move back to your parents’ house after a semester at school. Regardless of the reason, we can help you obtain a storage unit from us, even if you only need it for a short amount of time. Whether you want it for a month, a year, or a decade, Independence Storage can provide you with the storage unit rental that you need today.

Before you pick up everything that’s in your dorm room and attempt to take it home during your summer break from college, you should think about using student storage. It will prevent you from having to transport everything that you have at college back home and make it easier for you to move back to school in the fall. Check out some of the things you should store as well as some of the things you should take home when you decide to rent a self-storage unit in Palo Alto this summer.

Store: Furniture

Chances are, you won’t need that big, bulky dresser that you have in your dorm room once you move back home. Why take it all the way back to your parents’ house when you could put it into student storage for a few months and make your move that much easier? You can store a dresser, a bed, a desk, or any other kind of furniture in a self-storage unit for the summer and move it back to campus when the fall rolls around again.

Take Home: Food

When you rent a student storage unit, you want to do whatever you can to keep pests out of it. That means that you shouldn’t store food in your unit. Keep the potato chip bags and other snacks out of your self-storage unit, and you will reduce the chances of pests getting into your unit and making a mess.

Store: School Supplies

Unless you plan on taking classes over the summer, you won’t need any of your school supplies at home. You should probably take your laptop and electronics home, but you can leave books, pens, notebooks, and other supplies in your storage unit so that they’re ready to go once school starts.

Take Home: Summer Clothing

You can use your storage unit to store anything that you won’t be wearing during the summer. However, you shouldn’t leave your summer clothes behind. Now is the time to wear them, so make sure you bring them home with you.

One of the best ways to keep all of the important paperwork that you need to save for business purposes safe is to lock it up in a storage facility . By doing this, you will ensure that it is secure at all times and that you have access to it whenever you need it. Before you place your documents into a self-storage facility in Mountain View, though, there are some steps you should take to make sure you don’t have to worry about your paperwork while it’s being stored. Check out some of those steps out below.

Use Boxes Designed for Document Storage

Keep Your Document Storage Boxes Off the Ground

When you begin moving your document storage boxes into your storage facility, you should make an effort to keep them off the ground. Ideally, you should install shelving units inside of your storage unit rental, but you can also place palettes down in the unit if shelving isn’t an option. This will prevent the documents from getting damaged if your unit ever takes on water or has a pest problem

Place Extra Important Paperwork Into a Fireproof Safe

In the event of a fire at your self-storage facility, you want to ensure that your most important documents are safe. You can protect them by purchasing a fireproof safe and filling it with those documents that are the most important to you. You should also lock up any documents that need to remain private and check on your self-storage unit periodically to make sure your paperwork is secure.

If you have a large number of handbags and you are running out of storage room for them in your home, you should consider using a self-storage unit to keep them safe. Watch this video to see how to pack your handbags before placing them into a self-storage unit serving Palo Alto.

Prior to packing a handbag and putting it into a self-storage unit, you should make sure that it’s completely empty. Your handbag could be in storage for years, so you don’t want to have a bottle of water or a tube of lipstick ruin it while it’s in storage. You should also wrap it in a dust bag to keep it free from dirt and debris. By renting space at a high quality self-storage facility and packing your handbags properly, you can keep them looking like new for years to come.

The average college dorm room or apartment doesn’t provide much room for storage. As a result, you will probably not be able to keep all of your personal possessions in your room or apartment with you when you attend college. This doesn’t mean that you can’t bring them with you to college, though! Instead of leaving them behind at home, you can store items in a storage unit located nearby. Here is why you should consider renting space at a self-storage facility in Palo Alto.

You won’t have to bring all of your possessions back home at the end of every school year.

At the end of every school year, you are required to move out of your dorm room and take all of your belongings back home. This can be a huge hassle for you, especially if you live far from campus. Rather than moving your items back and forth several times over the course of your college career, why not rent a storage unit that will serve as the perfect place to store your belongings? It will cut down on the moving you need to do at the beginning and end of every school year.

You will give yourself more space to study and relax in your dorm room or apartment.

If you bring too many items to school with you and try to make them fit into your dorm room or apartment, you will be forced to sacrifice some of the precious space you have. College dorm rooms and apartments usually aren’t that big to begin with, so it will have an impact on your ability to use your room or apartment. By investing in a self-storage unit, you will give yourself the space you need.

You will give yourself a space to safely keep your valuable possessions.

Storing valuable possessions in a dorm room or apartment is never a good idea. Thefts take place on college campuses all the time, so if you have items that are especially important to you, you should keep them locked away in a secure storage unit at all times.

When you are selling your home, you want to make potential homebuyers feel like it could be their home when they walk through it. In order to make this possible, you should stage your home by taking any personal possessions you have in your house and putting them into a storage unit. Independence Storage offers affordable storage units near Mountain View that are perfect for helping homeowners stage their homes.

As soon as you make the decision to sell your home, you should walk through it with boxes and put any items that are personal to you and your family inside of them. From photos to knick-knacks that you have accumulated over the years, you want to declutter your home as much as you can. You can then take those boxes and place them into a storage unit until your home has been sold. Staging your home like this will usually help you sell your home quicker, and it will also allow you to get a jump start on packing for your move. When you trust Independence Storage with your possessions, you can rest easy knowing you have a secure storage facility on your side.

Renting a storage unit at a storage facility is an excellent option for those who have run out of storage at home. You can keep your personal possessions safe and secure inside of a self-storage unit in Mountain View and get access to them whenever you want. However, once you decide that you want to invest in a storage unit, you should do what you can to make sure your storage unit works for you. Check out some of the steps you should take when you start using a self-storage unit.

Label everything that you put into your storage unit.

Regardless of how large your self-storage unit is, there’s a good chance that, over time, you will fill it up with various items. These items will be very difficult to find if you haven’t labeled boxes properly. You should write what is inside every single box and attempt to keep boxes that go together in the same part of the storage unit.

Arrange boxes and furniture strategically so that you can access them later.

When you begin moving items into your storage unit, consider which items you will need to access frequently and which you can afford to stick all the way in the back of the unit. The last thing you want to do is place important boxes in the back behind a stack of heavy furniture. It will make it hard for you to access the boxes later. By coming up with a plan about how you want to stack things in your self-storage unit, you will be able to put everything that you need within arm’s reach in the unit.

Visit your storage unit regularly to check up on the contents of it.

While self-storage facilities will do everything in their power to keep your possessions safe, water, pests, and thieves can present problems in storage facilities from time to time. For this reason, you should check on your self-storage unit every month or so to make sure everything is maintained properly inside of it.

Whether you are in need of extra storage space at home or you have items you don’t need but aren’t ready to part with, renting a self-storage unit in Palo Alto is a convenient, inexpensive way to give yourself extra storage space . When looking for a storage unit, you will find that most self-storage facilities offer a range of sizes of storage units.

Check out this video to get a better idea of what types of storage units are available to rent. Ranging from the size of a large closet all the way up to a multiple car garage, storage units come in a variety of sizes to suit anyone’s needs. This makes it easy to find the right storage unit for you!

Rent the perfect self storage unit

When it comes to housing, the phrase “less is more” certainly applies. If you live in a larger home and have a lot of personal belongings, the thought of downsizing to a smaller space can be daunting. However, there are many benefits to downsizing your home that it is something every homeowner should consider. With access to storage unit rentals in Palo Alto , downsizing can be easy. By renting self-storage units, homeowners are able to free up extra space. Once excess belongings are moved into a self-storage facility, homeowners will likely discover that they could easily downsize into a smaller space. Self-storage units are a convenient way to store items that are not frequently used, making it easier to live in a smaller space. To learn more about the benefits of downsizing your living space, continue reading.

There are many reasons to use a self-storage unit in Mountain View . Self-storage units are a great space to store items that you don’t have room for at home, when children are away at college, or in between moves. No matter what your reason for renting a self-storage unit is, you may have one lingering question—do you need self-storage insurance?

Many people who visit a self-storage unit for the first time may be unfamiliar with whether or not they should take out additional insurance for the storage unit. In many cases, your existing homeowners or renter’s insurance already includes any items in a storage unit rental. It is important to check your policy to ensure you are covered. If you aren’t or you don’t have insurance, ask your storage unit facility for more information. To guarantee the safety of your items in storage, find a facility that offers additional security.

Renting a self-storage unit in Palo Alto is a great way to store items you want to hold on to, but just don’t have the room for at home. There are many reasons to consider renting a self-storage unit. Many people make use of storage facilities to store furniture, family possessions, and seasonal items that are only used a small portion of the year. Storage unit rental is an easy way to transition during a move, especially when downsizing homes. Having a storage unit in a secure storage facility means you can be assured that your belongings are safely stored. Even though many people take advantage of all the conveniences self-storage has to offer, not everyone knows the history behind self-storage. To learn more about how self-storage units have become commonplace for many people, continue reading.

Origins of Self-Storage

While it is difficult to provide concrete confirmation to support this theory, there is actually some evidence to suggest that self-storage dates all the way back to ancient China. Artifacts that date back thousands of years indicate that the Chinese used clay pots as storage vessels and that these storage pots were all kept in one location. Of course, it is hard to say how exactly these storage units were used.

Foundation of Modern Self-Storage

Beginning in the late 1800s, different businesses pioneered the concept of moving household items locally and long distances, which also led to the storage of personal items in warehouses and other facilities. However, self-storage units as they have come to be known today originated in Texas in the 1960s. These were the first self-storage units to feature garage-style doors and could be accessed individually by the owner. This is when the idea of self-storage facilities gained popularity.

Self-Storage Today

From the 1960s to today, the number of self-storage facilities steadily increased. Eventually, demand for more facilities led to an influx of self-storage facilities across the United States. Today, storage units offer state-of-the-art technology in security and 24-hour monitoring, as well as features such as temperature control and different sized units to meet any need.

After you’ve found the perfect storage unit rental near Mountain View, you need to start packing the belongings that you want to move to the storage facility . You must take special care when packing glassware to prevent it from breaking while you’re moving it or while it’s in the storage unit. The best type of box to use for storing stemware in a self-storage unit is a cell box.

Watch this video to learn how to make your own cell box to use for your stemware before bringing it to a secure storage facility. A cell box will protect your stemware during your move, and prevent it from becoming damaged in your storage unit.

Are you in need of a storage unit rental or student storage? If so, it’s important that you choose the right storage facility in Mountain View. Your storage facility should offer self-storage units that meet your needs and budget, and it should be conveniently located. Here are some helpful tips for choosing a storage facility in your area.

Determine the Size Needed for Your Storage Unit Rental

The first thing that you need to do is determine what size storage unit you’ll need. Most storage facilities have storage units in a variety of sizes, and you want to make sure that you don’t end up with more or less storage space than you need. You can estimate your self-storage unit size by mapping out which items you plan on storing. You should always choose a storage unit that is slightly larger than you think you’ll need, so that you’ll have room to retrieve items from the unit as needed.

Visit a Few Storage Facilities in Your Area

Don’t just choose the closest or cheapest storage facility in your area. Instead, visit a few different storage facilities in person. You want to confirm that the storage facilities are clean, well managed, secure, and easily accessible. You can even ask the manager or owner to show you a storage unit rental so that you can see what you’ll be working with. Once you’ve visited a few storage facilities, it will be easier to make your decision.

Ask About Security Features and Billing Options

It’s crucial that you rent a storage unit at a secure storage facility. The storage facility that you choose should have locked or keypad access to storage units so that only customers can enter the storage area. You might also consider looking for a storage facility that has security cameras or security guards on duty after hours. Also ask about the storage facility’s billing options. Some facilities offer flexible billing options and don’t require yearly leases.