My husband and I recently decided to move to England for a couple years. My husband was offered a spot in a fantastic MBA program there, so we thought it would be a nice change of scenery. We had been in our house for ten years and we decided to sell it. Trying to manage a renter, while across an ocean sounded difficult. In addition, we think we might move elsewhere when we come back to the states. We knew we were going to need some sort of self storage, while we were away. Once we had the initial meeting with our realtor, it became apparent that we were going to be good friends with the joy of self storage.
Our realtor wasted no time evaluating things and jotting a list down for us. “Alright, if you are ready for me to be brutally honest, I am ready to give you the low down on the things you should do to get this beautiful house ready,” she said. We told her we were ready. The woman is brilliant, because she spilled forth the thing you should always remember when you put your house on the market. She told us to remember that we are selling this house and that it now belongs to someone else. “This allows you to let go of all the emotional stuff that goes along with this, and focus on the end goal of selling. We knew right then and there that we would need self storage long before our move to England. Our closets needed to only be filled only about a third of capacity, to give the illusion of space, and we had way to many dressers. People who are shopping for a house want to picture their things in the house. She swapped out our comfy couch and chair with a stodgy Victorian era white set that made us feel like giants when we sat on it. That was only the beginning. By the time she was done with the list, we needed another house to put all the things from our house that someone else might not like.
We got a space in one of those self storage buildings nearby. I feel like we were constantly unloading things there, in the weeks we got the house ready. All the stodgy furniture items delivered to the house for staging meant all our cozy real people couches and such were put in self storage. Once the house sold, we then had to decide what things were heading to England with us and what would go into storage. We rented another self storage unit near my parents in another state. We had to fit in a weekend trip there, in the comfort of a large moving truck, to move everything into storage. We emptied the self storage unit we rented when we were selling the house, moved some of the contents to a new storage place, shipped some of it to England, and sold what we thought we would not want later. I felt like it was all very George Carlin with the “you gotta move to a new place to hold your stuff” shtick.