Furniture and inventory are among the furnishings that you absolutely need, but can often also have in excess. Good furniture does not come cheap and you like to think twice before putting something out for bulky waste or giving it away.
Self storage was invented to offer an alternative to rash and thoughtless decisions. Instead of throwing away good but superfluous furniture in an act of desperation, different storage methods offer the possibility of placing the items in dry, safe, and clean storage facilities for both shorter and longer periods of time.
If your own cellar or attic is already filled to the brim, the following options suggest themselves for storing furniture:
- Rent a container at home
- Rent a container away from home
- Rent a garage
- Rent a self storage unit or box
- Full Service Storage with pickup, return delivery, and transport for rent
In the following, we will take a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of the storage space options for furniture and at correct furniture storage.
Why furniture is stored
There are a variety of reasons why you suddenly find yourself with a surplus of furniture. Moves into smaller apartments, life changes such as inheritances, the birth of a child, separations, or a new relationship all contribute to furniture being left behind.
In addition, there are stays abroad for study or work and a seasonal need for, for example, garden furniture.
Unforeseen incidents such as burst pipes or fire require a quick solution in order to bring the furniture to safety at least temporarily.
The duration of storing furnishings depends on your personal circumstances. If you are renovating your apartment, you probably want to bring your furniture to safety for only a short time from the dust and dirt that the tradespeople cause while working.
If you are planning a year abroad, your inventory needs a new home for a longer time. When inheriting an entire household, the need to store the furniture for a long time may become necessary in order to avoid a sale forced by lack of space.
Regardless of how long you store your furniture, you should always document the condition of your items with photographs, especially if you commission others with transport and storage. The documentation will later help you with possible insurance claims.
What type of furniture do you want to store and for how long?
The word “furniture” is a collective term for furnishings that fulfill different functions. Cabinets and shelves serve to store and keep items. Upholstered furniture and beds are made for sitting or lying down, and tables as well as church pews form the basis for activities that are carried out in everyday life.
The different uses require different materials in order to use the furniture appropriately. Armchairs and sofas have a large proportion of textiles or leather, cabinets are generally made of wood or wood like materials, while shelves and tables are made of metal, wood, or glass.
Different materials require individual prerequisites for storage. Glass must receive a different type of protection than, for example, wood, and textiles require different storage methods than metal.
All furnishings that are to be stored have in common that they do not tolerate moisture and large temperature fluctuations well. Especially with medium term storage of over three months or long term storage of more than one year, the climatic conditions in your storage facility are of greatest importance.
Even after short term but improper storage of three months or less, your furniture could show damage or at least an unpleasant smell if your storage facility does not offer good ventilation.
If your furniture in storage simultaneously serves as a container for other stored items, you must also take these into account. Files, books, and household contents, with or without cardboard boxes, should receive additional protection.
You must already take all these prerequisites into account when you dismantle the furniture. This applies especially if kitchen and other household appliances such as refrigerators, stoves, freezers, televisions, etc. are also part of your stored goods.
Do not forget to also take photographic evidence of the condition of your furniture and its contents and to keep it in a way that it can be found again.
Which type of storage option suits you?
If walking through your living space increasingly resembles an obstacle course and after several stubbed toes and bruised shins you are thinking about an alternative storage solution for your furniture, several options are probably coming up.
Before you make a decision, however, you should consider the following with a self made solution:
Do you have enough space to store your inventory on your property?
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If not, do you have access to a van to transport the pieces of furniture to a self storage?
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Can you take time off work to organize and carry out the transport and the storage?
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Do you need to take other measures into account, such as child care during the move, and arrange them?
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Do you have sufficient packing material, including furniture blankets, bubble wrap, and cartons, to secure your furniture?
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Can you even carry out the move of your furniture yourself, or do you need additional muscle power to haul heavy pieces such as cabinets, sofas, and bed frames?
If even one of the points mentioned causes you a headache, you should perhaps consider a Full Service Storage.
With this self storage option for furniture, the self storage provider takes over transport, carrying, and storage, as well as the return delivery of your stored inventory. As a rule, you can also rent suitable containers for transport there.
Is a cellar or a garage sufficient?
Most affected people will first look for a solution within their own four walls. The cellar, the attic, or the garage usually come to mind.
However, each of these options has its limitations and can even lead to life threatening or strictly prohibited conditions:
Cellar
At the outset, your own cellar seems like an optimal solution. You have everything in your own house and thus under your own supervision, do not have to carry it far, and save transport. Before you can store furniture properly in the cellar, however, some considerable costs will probably be incurred.
Not only must the cellar be insulated against moisture and temperature fluctuations. You must also ventilate, climatize, and or heat the cellar room all year round in order to avoid mold and rot.
In addition, there are pests such as rodents, moths, and other vermin that are just waiting to make themselves comfortable in your things.
Attic
The attic is also not far from your living space, but can quickly become a life threatening trap if you overload it with heavy furniture.
Before you start moving cabinets, shelves, sofas, and armchairs up, you should be aware that your attic is also the ceiling of your living space. If you load the attic with too much weight, the ceiling above your head could collapse.
If, contrary to expectations, you come out of a ceiling collapse with intact skin, you will quickly find out that your insurance will not cover the damage.
Garage
Although on street parking in Germany is now becoming scarce, more and more garage owners or tenants decide to sacrifice their garage in order to store furniture and other household contents there.
What you are allowed to store in your garage is regulated by the local garage regulation of the city administration at your location. As a rule, this allows the use of a garage for only one thing: your vehicle.
In addition, you have the right to store items that are connected with your vehicle. These include tools, tires, a limited number of fuel canisters, lubricants, and spare parts.
Furniture is excluded from storage in the garage, and you could receive a hefty fine if you secretly use your garage as a furniture warehouse.
How much does it cost to store furniture?
After you have determined that storing furniture at home may not be the best solution after all, you will probably have concerns that the price for renting a storage unit is unaffordable.
As a rule, the rent for self storage is far cheaper than converting the cellar to make it suitable for furniture storage, or rebuilding the house after the ceiling has collapsed due to overloading the attic. In addition, you save yourself a lot of trouble and legal consequences if you leave your garage to the car.
The rent for your self storage unit, however, depends on several factors:
- Your location
- The area of the storage space required
- The length of the rental contract
- Additional services
- Ancillary costs
Location
As with apartment rents and house prices, the self storage rent is influenced by supply and demand. In major cities with limited living space, including Berlin, München, Hamburg, Frankfurt, or Stuttgart, the rent for storage space is generally higher than in smaller cities such as Münster or Wustermark.
However, you can save considerably on rental costs if you choose a self storage provider outside the city centre or metropolitan areas. Self storage buildings in industrial areas, often near motorway exits, are generally cheaper than storage boxes in the inner city and old town.
Storage area
Your rent is based on a price per square metre that is set by your storage space landlord. As a rule, the price per square metre becomes lower the larger the storage area you need.
When determining the storage area, note that you can stack some furniture upwards as well. Therefore, you should consider not only the floor area of your storage box, but also the total volume, measured in cubic metres.
If you do not know exactly how much storage area you need to rent in order to accommodate your inventory, many self storage and Full Service Storage providers offer a storage space calculator that helps you determine the required square metres.
Rental contract term
If you already know how long you want to keep your furniture in self storage, this has an influence on your rent. The longer you rent a self storage unit, the more discounts you can usually take advantage of from your storage landlord.
However, when signing the contract, pay attention to transparent and fair conditions in, among other things, the clauses for notice periods and contract terms.
Additional services
Not all self storage landlords have the suitable prerequisites for storing furniture. To place heavy or bulky items such as sofas or cabinets in their final storage facility, ramps, wide aisles, and lifts as well as parking spaces in the immediate vicinity of the storage rooms are required.
Self storage landlords who are fully geared towards larger inventory and the associated amenities, including hand trucks, pallet trucks, or forklifts, generally charge a somewhat higher price per square metre, but you save yourself a lot of trouble and logistical headaches.
Full Service providers go one step further and, in addition to a secure storage space, also offer transport, pickup, return delivery, and, under certain conditions, also the carrying of the furniture. Here too, the rental price may be somewhat higher, but you save the costs for transport and booking a van or a moving team.
Ancillary costs
As with apartment rents, ancillary costs arise when renting self storage, including:
- Insurance
- Fire protection
- Security costs such as CCTV and video surveillance
- Possibly electricity and heating or air conditioning
- Cleaning and waste disposal
To what extent these costs are included in the rental price or charged additionally depends on your self storage provider. Therefore read your contract very carefully in order not to experience any unpleasant surprises when billing.
How do you best store furniture during storage?
Before your furniture disappears out of reach of shins and aching toes, you must make some preparations. These include secure packing of your furniture and ensuring ongoing protection during storage.
How do you pack furniture before storage?
Proper securing of the furniture you want to store begins with the disassembly. Make sure that you have all the required tools, including a set of often overlooked Allen keys, at hand even before disassembly.
To ensure safe transport and space saving storage, you should dismantle all furniture as far as possible. Remove all shelves from the shelving, doors from the cabinets, and glass plates from tables. Do not forget, after each individual dismantled item, to put the screws, nuts, and shelf supports into an individual bag. Label these and attach them with a string to one of the parts.
Avoid tape with adhesive surfaces, as these leave stains on your furniture, especially during long term storage.
If you have items with many individual parts, you should label them properly to ensure later smooth reassembly.
After disassembly, you should focus on suitable packing. Make sure that you have stocked up on sufficient packing materials of good quality, including bubble wrap, furniture blankets, as well as corner and edge protection. Cartons and corrugated cardboard can also prove useful when storing smaller pieces of furniture such as bedside cabinets and shelves.
Also note that you should always pack items made of glass such as mirrors, cabinet doors, and table tops separately and individually in bubble wrap and label them clearly so that they are handled with special care during transport and storage.
The corner and edge protection will ensure that sensitive parts made of wood and metal do not receive unsightly scratches, scuffs, or chipped corners, for example during transport or during later rearranging in the storage facility.
Make sure that your furniture is well stabilised during transport and storage and that individual items cannot fall onto others. At the same time, you should also plan that many of the stored pieces of furniture can be set up upright after proper disassembly, saving you important storage space.
How do you protect furniture from moisture and dust?
The first prerequisite for proper storage of pieces of furniture, regardless of material, is a dry, well ventilated, and climate controlled storage unit. Moisture can affect your entire furniture.
Metal can rust with too much moisture, armchair and sofa upholstery will mold, and wood swells with too much humidity. Even glass and mirrors can be irreparably damaged by moisture.
Therefore make sure that you also apply the appropriate packing for each individual piece of furniture.
Cover your upholstered furniture with breathable furniture blankets intended specifically for this. Avoid plastic so that no moisture accumulates that can quickly turn into mold.
Use corrugated cardboard instead of plastic to protect wooden and garden furniture from dust, and do not forget the corner and edge protection.
With mirrors and glass doors, you should make sure that the bubble wrap is not wrapped too tightly around the items and allows some air circulation and ventilation in order to avoid moisture accumulation.
Checklist for proper furniture storage
Anyone who wants to store furniture is probably already in a stressful situation in advance that can quickly develop into chaos. Checklists help to keep a cool head and to carry out the work process in exactly the right order.
Here is our checklist for storing furniture and inventory.
Which steps do you take in which order?
Determine the need for storage
Your journey into the land of storage facilities begins with the realisation that you have too much furniture and have to place it elsewhere. Take a very close look at your furniture surplus to find out which type of storage is relevant for the quantity and size of the items. Find a self storage or Full Service provider that can accept your furniture.
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Book transport
Book transport for your inventory. Moving companies generally do not have an immediate appointment available, and it is worth booking early. If you want to take over the storage yourself, you must look for a van or even a truck. If you are smart, however, you book a Full Service provider right from the start who provides transport, and you can save yourself this step.
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Declutter
Open all cabinets, desks, dresser drawers, etc. to find out what is inside. Be brutal and throw away everything that you certainly can no longer use. Go through your shelves and remove books that you will never read again and DVD and CD collections that have been made superfluous by streaming subscriptions. Empty the shelves and pack everything that you want to keep for eternity into cartons or boxes.
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Disassembly of the pieces of furniture
Dismantle your furniture properly. Do not forget to put the small parts into bags and label them.
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Packing of the furniture
Wrap your inventory piece by piece in suitable packing material. Cover upholstered furniture with furniture blankets and particularly protect your fragile or vulnerable items. Do not forget to label the packed furniture so that you can easily locate it during a return delivery.
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Load the vehicle
On the day of storage, load the vehicle. Make sure that the items are stabilised and do not tip over. If you have booked Full Service Storage, you can probably save yourself this and the following steps.
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Storage at the final storage place
In your storage unit, you should ensure that you set up your furniture in a space saving way. Make sure that sensitive pieces of furniture are not standing on bare concrete floors, and keep aisles clear so that you can access all your inventory at any time. This step is also omitted with Full Service Storage.
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Security of the stored furniture
Before you take a breath, close the door, and return satisfied to your now tidied up home, you should ensure that your belongings are also sufficiently secured. Is your furniture stored behind proper locks and bolts? Is there CCTV and video surveillance? Do you have the right insurance cover for your stored items? This step is generally also not necessary with Full Service rentals.
Which packing materials do you need?
In addition to the checklist for storing the furniture, you should also create a shopping list for packing materials and tools to ensure that you do not suddenly end up without them during disassembly.
You should have the following materials at hand when dismantling the furniture:
- Bubble wrap on large rolls. Please note that bubble wrap is not suitable for wooden furniture or textiles.
- Breathable furniture blankets in the right size for your upholstered furniture. These come in sizes from 150 cm x 200 cm up to 200 cm x 300 cm. Measure your upholstered furniture to determine the required number and size.
- Plenty of corner and edge protection to secure shelving frames and table legs against impacts during storage.
- Corrugated cardboard that can serve as a base during disassembly and at the same time can be used as packing material for individual items.
- Large cartons or moving boxes. These are available up to an extra large size of 637 mm x 290 mm x 323 mm. If you rent Full Service Storage, moving boxes are usually offered to you for rent.
- Adhesive tape to close the cartons and to wrap packing material properly.
- Labels, bags, and strings so that you can also label your furniture and the associated individual parts.
- Tools, including screwdrivers in different versions, Allen keys, and pliers for stubborn shelf supports.
Your entire packing needs can be covered with a visit to your local hardware store. In addition, all packing materials are also available online, and many self storage and Full Service landlords offer professional storage equipment that you can buy on site.
