Maryland Storage Topics

Getting My Winter Stuff Out of the Garage

Here in Maryland, you're considered crazy if you only own a shovel to take care of your driveway and lawn in the winter. A shovel just won't cut it with the kinds of snows we get all at once! So everyone's got a snow blower, and some shovels, and some bags of salt, and some heavy winter boots and clothes for getting the driveway cleared in. At least, I have all that stuff in my Baltimore garage!

But now that it's spring, I'm ready to get all that stuff out of the garage. I've actually gone round and round with my wife about this in recent years, trying to figure out if there was a way to get our winter lawn care gear out of the way so as to make more room for the gardening things we use more often now in the spring and summer. For years, we would just kind of shuffle all that winter stuff around the garage, not really making room for anything.

Well, this year, I decided that it was going to be different! I actually looked into Baltimore Self Storage units in the area where we could keep our winter gear out of the way and actually make some more room in our garage for the spring and summer. I ended up choosing a location called US Storage Centers Baltimore Self Storage for a few reasons.

One of the reasons, actually, that I like the US Storage Centers Baltimore Self Storage location is that they offer a month to month lease. Since I don't have to sign a long term contract, I can just pay for the lease when I want to use it – during the spring and summer months. See, in the fall and winter, it's not a big deal to have both our summer gear and our winter gear in the garage, because we're never in the garage moving around except to get to the car or the snow blower. In the summer, though, it's really frustrating to have the garage so crowded, since we like to use it for gardening projects and building projects over the summer.

So with the month to month lease at US Storage Centers Baltimore Self Storage location, I am able to just pay for storage when I want to use it. This fall, I'll go get that winter stuff at the first sign of frost and cut off the lease, so I can save a few more bucks during this long New England winter.

Another thing I like about US Storage Centers Baltimore Self Storage is that it's quite affordable in the first place. I didn't want to pay a fortune for self storage if I didn't have to, and with US Storage Centers, I don't have to. Their prices are very reasonable, and they offer a few very small unit sizes that make it easy to save even more money if you can pack your things into a small space – which I can!

Read more: Gardening Equipment Storage - Baltimore Self Storage

Ways Businesses Use Baltimore Self Storage for Document Storage

As an organizer who specializes in whipping businesses into shape, I've deal with lots and lots of business paperwork. I'm adept and quickly realizing what the style of a business is when it comes to important documents, and I'm great at sorting said documents out so that businesses can organize them most effectively.

One thing that I'm also good at is determining when a business just needs to get some off site storage for some or most of its business documents. Many of the Baltimore area businesses I work with need extra storage for their paperwork that they just don't have. In fact, I recommend that many of my clients use US Storage Centers Baltimore Self Storage for their business documents, and I help businesses set up a system of using self storage for document storage so that the system will work well within the business's existing model and current needs.

There are several different ways that I recommend businesses use Baltimore Self Storage for document storage. Here are just a few:

Long Term Storage Only

Some businesses really just need to get certain documents off their hands and into long term storage. Documents like old tax returns, which have to be kept for at least seven years, old employee files, business charter documents, and other things like that fit into this model. These are documents that the business very rarely – if ever- needs to access but that need to be kept safe and secure and accessible, all the same.

For these businesses, investing in a small Baltimore Self Storage unit and paying for it a year or two at a time is often a good option. They don't need a ton of space for these documents, but they do need to get them out of the way.

Short Term Storage

Other times, I recommend that businesses move all their important documents into a Baltimore Self Storage unit whenever I am doing a complete overhaul of the business. If I'm helping to rearrange the offices completely, I'll often recommend that the business get a Baltimore Self Storage unit for a month or two, and that they put things like paperwork into storage. This gives me more space to work with and helps me come up with a better option for business organization since most of the non essentials are out of my way.

Continuous Storage

Some businesses actually end up using Baltimore Self Storage on a continuous basis. These businesses may not even have enough space to store more than a couple of file boxes, but they have much more paperwork coming and going than that. For these businesses, a Baltimore Self Storage unit with several file cabinets can serve as an extension of the office. Paperwork that isn't being used on a weekly basis can be stored out of the way in the storage unit, so that it isn't piling up around the offices or taking up space that the business can't afford.

Read more: Records Storage - Baltimore Self Storage

Baltimore – Preparing Our Home for Sale

When you talk to a good realtor before listing your home, one of the things you'll always hear is that you need to make the place look as large and uncluttered as possible, and that you need to make it look neutral. Your home needs to go from being an expression of your personal interests and preferences to a canvas on which others can paint their own interests and preferences. When it came time to sell our home, I really thought about ways to neutralize the décor so that it would be more saleable.

One of the first ideas I had was that we needed to take out many of the conversation pieces we'd gathered over the years. I'm a fan of bright colors, and many of my pieces of furniture were actually decoupaged in bright wallpaper colors. While it's a style I love, it's not something that makes a home more saleable. So, I decided to get rid of many of these pieces and to replace them with more neutral pieces.

It was all part of the process, much like painting the bathroom beige and laying down new ivory carpet in the living room. Of course, I didn't want to actually get rid of my conversation pieces, since I would want them in our new home. Instead, I wanted to put them into storage so that I could pull them out later when I needed them.

So, I went on the hunt for Baltimore Self Storage. That's when I came across the US Storage Centers Baltimore Self Storage location. The location was perfect, and the US Storage Centers had excellent reviews from others who had also used it. I decided to head in to talk to the manager about what I'd need as far as storage went.

The manager was incredibly helpful. He actually had me detail the types and sizes of pieces of furniture that I was going to store in my unit, so he was able to help me pick out the perfect storage unit size for my needs. It needed to be large enough to make sure I could easily get the furniture in and out and that the furniture could have breathing room to prevent mold and mildew from forming. On the other hand, I didn't want to be paying for a ton of space I didn't actually need.

It was great to get such personalized help from the manager of the US Storage Centers Baltimore Self Storage location. In fact, the conversation was not only productive enough to help me decide which storage unit to rent, but it was also helpful in that the manager of the Baltimore Self Storage location was able to give me some really great tips on how best to protect furniture while it's in storage.

The biggest thing is to protect furniture from damage during the moving in and out process and to protect it from water-related damage.

Read more: Storing Furniture at Baltimore Self Storage

Getting Organized for Our Baby

I'm not an organized person by nature. I'm the kind of person who prefers a little chaos – thrives on it, even. Plus, I just don't have time to stay organized. The problem with this philosophy, of course, is that it means I often waste time trying to find things or trying to shove yet one more container in my Tupperware drawer in the kitchen. I knew when I had a baby that I would probably want to stay a little more organized, if only to save my sanity somewhat.

One of the things I needed to do in order to be more organized before we had a baby was to move some of the extra stuff we had in our house somewhere else. Lots of things, like our seasonal decorations, tax records and other paperwork, and even gardening tools, we used enough to justify keeping them but not so much that they needed to be kept in the house. Getting things like that out of the house would give me more room to be organized, which was obviously something I desperately needed. So, I decided to get a Baltimore Self Storage unit to hold all that usable but not essential stuff until we needed it.

I looked around for a while at different Baltimore Self Storage units. You don't realize how many different storage options there are until you need a storage unit! There are tons of different Baltimore Self Storage companies, but I ended up choosing US Storage Centers for a few reasons.

For one thing, US Storage Centers Baltimore Self Storage was close to my home. It wasn't the closest, but it had a good balance of convenience and other features I was looking for – like security and good prices. It would only take me a couple of extra minutes to get to the US Storage Centers Baltimore Self Storage location over the next closest self storage company, and that was definitely worth the while because of the other features of the location.

The Baltimore Self Storage unit by US Storage Centers was great because it had excellent security. Each unit had an individual alarm. This makes me feel so much better about leaving potentially valuable information, like our former tax returns, in storage there. Plus, I don't have to worry about anyone but me getting into the unit without authorization. Since I get to pick out the lock for our unit, I'm also the only one who needs to have a key or combination. Even the manager of the location doesn't have those things!

Read more: Storing Baby Stuff in Baltimore