Adding More Rooms to Our Home
Inside self-storage units at three facilities in Santa Rosa, Calif.
Photo Credit: Tim Davis for The New York Times
In my 2008 post When should children leave home? I mentioned that my younger son moved back in with my wife and me after blowing fifty-five grand on rent, utilities, and food in two years. I would like to fill in the details of that move that I omitted in that article.
Since he was looking to start up a family we decided to add another apartment on top of our existing home.
Adding an additional living-room, kitchenette, bedroom, and bathroom required us to rip off the old roof which in turn required us to empty the existing living-room and dining area so we could build on top of the old apartment. I suggested that since our furniture was 7 years old we sell the couches, lamps, coffee-table, dining table, chairs, hutch, etc. and buy new stuff when the construction of the addition was finished rather than pack everything, hire movers, put everything in storage, then take everything out of storage, get the same movers to bring it back and unpack everything. See my article why It Never Pays to Use Self Storage.
My wife however never, ever reads a single article I post. But no matter, my wife was too attached to the "stuff" to take my suggestions. So here is what happened:
We were quoted $80 an hour with a 5 hour minimum, not counting tape, boxes, packing material etc. Despite the quote it actually cost us $700 to move everything into storage. Storage was free for two months and 160 bucks a month afterward. Taking off the old roof, adding new framing, putting in 4 rooms and attaching a new roof with three skylights took about 4 months. By the time the dust settled we spent $1800 on packing materials, moving the furniture out, storage fees, and moving the furniture back in.
Unfortunately every single piece came back with nicks, scratches and some mold damage. One chair was particularly infested with a gray fungus. The moving company had insurance but it never fully covered the damage. We ended up throwing all the old furniture out. The whole storage thing was a complete waste of time and money. But I never uttered the words "I told you so," to my wife. That's why we've been married for nearly 4 decades.
Here is an interesting set of statistics regarding storage:
Even though the average American house has almost doubled in the previous 50 years, to 2,300 square feet, more than 50% of storage renters store stuff that won't fit in their homes.
Paradoxically many people store furniture for bigger or second homes but then decide they don’t want to clutter up their new home with old stuff in storage and end up buying newer, nicer things (while continuing to pay to store the old ones anyway).
It is the stupidest thing that Americans do.
Since that addition in 2008:
We should have made the new attic with 8 foot ceilings throughout instead of pitched at the ends, for more storage space.
We had two more grandchildren, so the addition came in quite handy.
