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 put our beloved house of a decade on the market, rather than try to rent it while we were away. Being a landlord from that far away was not appealing. And we are not sure where we want to head after England anyway. 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.
As our realtor wandered through the house taking notes, we wondered what she had in store for us (no pun intended). “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. Long before we packed up the big stuff for London, we were going to need Self storage for lots and lots of things the realtor said should not be hanging about. 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. She said the house should be like a blank canvas on which prospective buyers can place their ideas. So, we were told to replace our red and orange modern duvet cover with an all white ensemble in the master bedroom. You can see where this is going. We were going to need a huge garage to hide everything that might not jive with one prospective buyer and turn her off.
We got a space in one of those self storage buildings nearby. We took a lot of stuff over there. 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. That entailed driving a rented moving truck up one weekend before we left. 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. It was a lot of schlepping.