How To Use Self Storage To Create More Space In Your Home

On one level, there are likely to be nearly as many reasons for using self storage units as there are square feet of storage available in the UK ( 50 million square feet if you were wondering), but, as experts in the field, we’re aware of the specific uses to which people put our storage units, and would like to suggest a few which might not have occurred to you. We’re leaving moving house off the list, because we’ve written about it previously and also because it’s probably a fairly obvious suggestion.

Create A Home Office

The convenience and effectiveness of self storage as an option came to the fore for many people during the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns it necessitated. Many people, forced to spend the vast majority of their time at home, suddenly realized how little space they actually had, while a sizeable percentage were compelled to turn some corner of their home into a functioning office space for months on end.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), in February 2022, 84% of those workers who were forced to work at home during the pandemic said that they intended adopting a hybrid working pattern – a mix of at home and office working – in the future. Of these, 42% stated that they intended to do most of their working from home, with the proportion planning on returning to their place of work dropping from 11% to 8%.

Clearly, a shift of this kind is likely to impact massively on the amount of space people need in their homes. During the pandemic itself, people were likely to have made do with some kind of emergency set-up of a folding table in the bedroom or a laptop on the kitchen worktop. In the longer term, however, an improvised solution of this kind is likely to prove deeply unsuitable. 

For starters, the mental health and well-being of someone doing a job of work in their own home is likely to be much improved if the area in which they do their work is a specifically designated ‘work-zone’, rather than a part of the home with working equipment attached. This makes it easier for people to switch off at the end of a working day and achieve the kind of work/life balance that working from home is meant to bolster.

Clearing a work zone of this kind might well necessitate putting some of the items being moved out of the way into storage, particularly if you want to make enough room to fit in an ergonomically designed desk and chair, and to facilitate the best possible levels of natural light and ventilation. In the best-case scenario, you’ll have a spare room available for this purpose, and self storage will come to the rescue when you need to shift all of the furniture in that room out.  Once you’ve moved items such as a bed and wardrobe, you’ll have more than enough room to move in a desk, a chair and maybe even a filing cabinet.

Easier Home Renovations

We’re sorry to start reminding everyone about the pandemic again, but home renovations and improvements were another area of people’s lives which received a turbo-charge in the last few years, as lockdowns and working from home prompted many people to undergo a fundamental rethink of the space in which they live.

According to the comparison website Rated People, a massive 49% of all UK residents made improvements to their home in 2021, of a type and scale sufficient to drive a 32% increase in demand for tradespeople. By the time the figures reach 2022, the demand for home improvement projects had risen by 50% when compared to 2020.

The increase in the demand for tradespeople during this period indicates that the home improvements in question amounted to much more than simply a lick of paint here and there or putting up some new shelves in the kitchen.

For more major home improvement and renovation projects, the area being worked on is clearly going to have to be cleared of furniture and other items, as are other parts of the house likely to be frequented by tradespeople marching supplies and tools in and out. Rather than overcrowding the rest of your house for the duration of the work, the flexibility of self storage means that you could store the items that would otherwise get in the way for as long as the project in question takes.

Business Storage

The UK has always been famed for an economic reliance on the entrepreneurial zeal of its inhabitants. According to the government’s own figures, at the start of 2022 there were 5.5 million private sector businesses in the UK, of which 99.9% were small to medium enterprises (SMEs). In this context a small to medium enterprise is defined as one with 0 to 49 employees.

Many small businesses make use of storage units to store items such as stock, treating it as a less expensive alternative to enlarging existing storage facilities. Perhaps of more interest in terms of the self storage option are what might be termed ‘micro-businesses’. These are those businesses which have zero employees, consisting of one man or woman trying to make it on their own. According to the official figures, businesses of this kind make up 4.1 million of the 5.5 million, or 74%.

Anyone who has ever run their own business alone, usually from their own kitchen or back bedroom, will attest to the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ which rapidly accumulates.  Whether it’s the many pages of paperwork that soon builds up for even the smallest business wanting its documentation to satisfy the likes of HMRC, stock itself waiting to be shifted on to customers or samples of work or products to try to tempt people into buying, it can be easy to allow the physical presence of a business to overwhelm what is meant to be your home. Even a relatively small self storage unit could make all the difference, enabling you to live and work in the same space, safe in the knowledge that the stuff your business is built upon is safe, secure and accessible.

Ideal For Students

You leave University after three years studying hard (we believe you, really we do), building student debt and – most importantly – collecting loads of new and exciting things, from all the books you had to read for your course to clothes, bits of furniture and maybe even the odd traffic cone (do students still do this? It’s been a while since we were that age).

In an ideal world you’ll be moving straight into your city centre loft-style apartment of course, but this is far from an ideal world so the chances are that most students will have to move back into the family home for a while. In which case, you’ve got a choice – you either cram everything you accumulated at university into the bedroom you left behind at the age of 18, trying to fit it alongside the furniture you just about remember, or you opt to put some stuff into storage.

It could be that you store all of your university gear, or alternatively that you shift the older furniture and belongings into storage. Either way, you’ll have a living space that’s comfortable while you start making your way in the grown-up world, and the stuff you put into storage will be easy to access whenever you need it.

A Place For Sports Equipment

You love your jet-ski, or even your humble pair of conventional skis, as well as your kayak, perhaps, or your golf clubs or maybe a big collection of fishing equipment, but how often do you use them?

In the meantime – not to mention the off-season - all this sports gear is taking up room in your home, perhaps filling the garage while your actual car sits on the drive taking the brunt of the weather. The convenience of self storage lies in the fact that you can find the right size of unit in a facility close to your home, put your expensive sports equipment away somewhere secure, and then access it whenever the urge to see if you’ve still got what it takes hits you.

It doesn’t matter if any of the examples above apply directly to you – simply look around your home, ask yourself if you’ve got as much room as you’d like and if the answer’s no, start wondering which items you could safely put into storage for a while. You may well be surprised at the number of things you come up with, as well as how easy it is to store stuff and get it back out again whenever you need it. Self-storage isn’t just for dealing with major life events, it’s also for making everyday life a little bit easier.