Lucky for You!
It’s a new month, and within that new month is a new season: spring! It’s also the fun holiday of St. Patrick’s Day. For those of us with a wee drop of Irish blood in us, it’s a day to celebrate our heritage and proudly wear the green (or orange). Most people, whether they are Irish or not, have fun with the holiday. Wearing green, pinching those who forgot, making paper shamrocks, and eating green Jell-O (and of course, Lucky Charms!) are some favorite childhood memories for many of us.
As we get older, we look forward to March as a time to begin new projects – or finish old ones! If you’re lucky enough to have a green thumb, you might start poring over seed catalogs and dream of a beautiful green lawn, gorgeous flowers, and healthy vegetables flourishing in the garden. If you have a black thumb like me, those seed catalogs tend to pile up in the corner and we just settle for not killing any new growth! Perhaps your interests lie more to do with getting outside and enjoying nature – such as hiking, four-wheeling, looking for wildflowers or trying something daring like rappelling down the side of a cliff. Maybe you take camera in hand (along with lenses, tripod, and other photographic equipment) out to capture the start of new growth and new life. Tiny little plants, buds just starting to open, new lambs and fawns and other animal life, and the beauty of a serene sunrise, a spectacular sunset, or wildflowers that grow without any rhyme or reason – these are all amazing sights of Mother Nature to capture!
You may be wondering: what does any of this have to do with storage units?? All of these opportunities to celebrate, plant, move, and snap require equipment. Gardening gloves, fertilizer, planters, and those seed catalogs need a place to live. Hiking shoes, trail sticks, maps, and ropes need a place to live. Photography has an amazing array of accessories that seem to grow and multiply right before our eyes! If you have a garden or tool shed, that’s great! Is it organized? Is it beautiful like the garden “shed” that Joanna Gaines just built? That was the fanciest, most amazing garden shed ever! I mean, what garden shed has a chimney??
What about that hiking and climbing equipment? My husband loves climbing and has special shoes, ropes, pitons, carabiners, and stuff I don’t even know! That, too, needs a place to be stored. Those special ropes don’t want to be mixed up with ordinary household rope! (I learned that one the hard way!) How often will you go climbing if it takes two hours to locate all the gear you need?
And
for you shutterbugs out there: has your
hobby developed into an obsession? Is your darkroom a converted bedroom? Are lenses and tripods being tripped over or even (eek!) being stepped on? Do you have stacks of photographs piling up on every surface?
We’re looking at some serious storage issues here. We don’t want to give up on what we love but we also want to have room to move around in our own homes! What’s the answer? A storage unit!!
A storage unit gives you the extra space you need for all the equipment your hobbies entail. Got 20 tennis racquets but can’t bear to part with them? Throw eighteen of them in a unit until you need them! All that climbing gear that lives on the floor – give it a home in a storage unit! Is that fly-tying gear becoming a pain in the bass? Shove it in a storage unit! You can pick up what you need on the way to the lake (or secret fishing hole!).
Do you have a teetering stack of baseball caps that your wife is threatening to throw out? Unless you’re a professional baseball player, you probably don’t really need all those caps, but perhaps (like most men) you just can’t bear to part with them. In fact, the older and cruddier the hat, the more you love it – right? Throw a few hundred of them in a box and head over to the storage unit! It’s out of your wife’s hair and you get to keep your beloved scalp covers.
If you had more room, would you dare to try a new hobby? Would you try scuba diving or snorkeling if you had a place to store the tanks, fins, wet suits, and breathing masks? Or maybe you already tried scuba diving and it wasn’t your cup of tea. All that gear lurking in the back of your hall closet just makes you feel guilty for not using it every time you need your umbrella. Dive right in and put all that equipment in a storage unit and free up your closet and your conscience!
If your significant other doesn’t see the wisdom of paying for storing stuff, perhaps you could impress them with a beautifully cleaned-out (and clean!) closet. Maybe you could put a vase of flowers where those old ball caps used to be. Perhaps you could turn the former darkroom into a man cave for that special guy. (Or a lady’s lair for the woman in your life!). Get creative – just one or two ideas like these can really pave the way for their appreciation of the extra space in your home – and you still get to keep all your stuff!
When considering a storage unit, be sure to look for units that are airtight, rodent-proof, and secure. Container storage units are a great way to keep your things (valuable or less so) from getting dusty, dirty, or discarded. A storage unit is not a lifetime commitment, either. If you only need to store those items until your spring garage sale, great! If you need to keep family gifts for a while longer, that’s great too! You can always get to your stuff when you need to with 24-hour access and your own security code. Happy hobbies!