Storage, Anyone?

     Nothing to kill a mood like a two-day visit to your stuff.

     We drove the hour and a half around London's congested (and often single lane) ring road yesterday to the other side of town to accept the delivery of our two pods of storage -- and move it ourselves to two other pods -- from the more expensive storage place closer to us.

     Not completely sure this move of our stuff was worth it. But as with everything in this venture, too late now. 

     Guy showed up two hours late with the first pod. And then proceeded to spend the next half hour eating a banana (I swear ... it was his "break time" the minute he got there) in an effort to not have to drive back around the chock-a-block ring road to get the second pod. Guy in the head office who I had talked to half a dozen times about the move this week suddenly not answering his phone.

     So, yep, right, after spending several hours there yesterday, we gotta go back and do it all again today. Soon actually, so I don't have a lot of time here.       

     But, back to the core questions. Why do we have so much stuff? Do we really have so much stuff? Or are we trying to unrealistically pare down to what, for what? And of course, the ever-present ultimate: What are we going to do with all this stuff?

    Have you noticed that there are storage places EVERYWHERE? I don't know how many facilities we passed on our way to ours, dozens upon dozens. And where we used to live in the States was littered with storage places too. It's a phenomenon, folks. 

    I used to laugh at people who had stuff in storage. I used to marvel when I would see a screened-in porch piled high with boxes in the States. Can't they just throw that stuff away, I would think. Or put it away? What a waste of space, I would judge, stupidly. 

    Now, I have more stuff in storage than I live with. And I guess I could become one of those people who store stuff for decades. So who's laughing now?

    The storage facility we ended up using -- in an industrial estate with lots of other storage places -- has 1,600 containers in it, the guy told us. It's just a big shed basically with containers. My husband and I worked out how much they were making per week -- staggering. 

    As we were closing our one repacked pod at the end of the afternoon, I said to the guy who worked there, "it's all just junk, I suppose. I should just throw it all away."

    "Yeah, we see people spending a lot of money storing stuff when they could just buy all new a hundred times over with the money they spend," he said.

      I nodded. And gulped. 

     "But it's because a lot of the stuff is sentimental," he went on.  

     "All this stuff is sentimental, I guess," he said with a dismissive wave back to the containers and a little chuckle. "Not that the people ever see the stuff."

     "Keeps us in business anyway," he said, slamming the pod door shut.